SEATWORK NO. 2
SS13: ENVIRONMENT AND SOCIETY

Name: Madamba, Kamil Gemar S. Date: 09/13/12 SCORE
COURSE/YEAR & SECTION: - BY01 PROFESSOR: DR. REYNALDO A. PADILLA
Plastic or paper bag
The never ending debate

There’s a never ending debate on whether or not everyone ought to really stop utilizing plastic bags and instead, only make use of the numerous paper bags types that are produced these days by all the paper bags manufacturers.

These reusable paper bags, as we all understand, are friendly to the environment. Unlike plastic bags that takes so many of years for plastic bags to obtain decomposed, it will only take a couple of days for these environment-friendly paper bags to obtain decayed. And simply because it takes so many years for plastic bags to decompose itself, it will trigger a lot of environmental issues like clogging the drainage system methods and polluting bodies of water like lakes and oceans. Plastic bags may also harm all of the living things that reside on the various bodies of water. Which makes these environment-friendly paper bags a much better choice because, because it decomposes effortlessly, it does not trigger as a lot issues towards the environment as much as plastic bags do.

When looking at paper vs. plastic and the impact on the environment, it is important to take all aspects into account. This does not simply mean looking at how the bags are disposed of or how long they take to decompose. Instead, the entire lifecycle of the bag needs to be considered and this includes looking at how the bags are made, the raw materials and the energy used to make the bags as well as how they are later disposed of. In addition to this, the amount of energy used to transport the bags from the place of origin, plus the environmental cost of storage, also needs to be factored into the equation.