Grocery bag, paper
 | A standard bag, weights about 1.5 oz. Note that a standard paper bag holds about as much as 2 standard plastic bags. | |||||||
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Definitions
PI - Pollution Index. Indication of the amount and severity of the pollution generated during the life cycle of an item. The higher number, the more pollution.
DI - Depletion Index. Indication of the amount of resources used during production and disposal of an item. The higher number, the more resources are used (and the less sustainable the product is).
EI - Entropy Index. - Indication of the amount of energy wasted during the life cycle of an item. The higher number, the more energy is wasted.
CEII - Composite Environmental Impact Index. Indication of the item's impact on the environment, taking into account the resources used and the pollution generated during production, use, and disposal of the item. The higher number, the higher impact.
Comments
4 comments postedHave you considered calculating the CEII for paper bags made from 100% recycled paper?
Is there a way to take into account impact on wildlife when waste is improperly disposed of? Either by littering, or, for example, in the Northeast US, "Waste Disposal" companies have historically been frequently owned by organized crime, and that often means "dumping in the ocean when noone's looking".
Animals will eat plastic bags if there's been food in them, and the plastic can twist in their intestines and kill them, if they're dumped in the ocean sea animals can get tangled up in them, whereas a paper bag will just rot to nothing in water, and stomach acids will break down paper that's been swallowed. Conversely, at the bottom of a modern landfill, NOTHING will biodegrade (last I read) so paper is not a win if you're going to throw it in the trash, and you better NOT litter, that's a crime in Texas.
Personally I opt for reuse and try not to use either. But it's good to know plastic is not as horrible as it's made out to be.
You are right about that. Even though only about 85% of nation's trash ends up in landfill, we are currently assuming 100%, which is wrong. There are two possibilities: we could create a new pollutant categories as "biodegradable litter" and "non-biodegradable litter" and allocate 15% of the trash to these categories. Alternatively, we could just change slightly the "relative toxicity" of various pollutants to reflect the fact that some of them are biodegradable, and some are not.
Yes. However, currently, an increase of the recycled content in the paper causes decrease in mechanical strength of the paper, making it less suitable for bags. So the paper bags are made with various percentages of recycled content, but almost never 100% post-consumer. Therefore we used the world wide average of the recycled content for our calculations.
In any case, 100% post consumer recycled paper cuts the impact index by approximately half (see this story: http://envimpact.org/node/74 ), so it would not change the conclusion anyway.