Evaluating the use of gift bags through life cycle assessment

With the increasingly serious pollution of plastic bags in Dalian, environmental protection has become the main point of the future development of plastic bags profession. Without dealing with this doubt, it is sooner or later for the plastic bags profession to come to an end, but in the short term because it is impossible, because there is no substitute for plastic bags in the market. Perhaps some people will say that there are not paper bags, there are paper bags, but paper bags are really more environmentally friendly than plastic bags? Here is no doubt to discuss whether paper bags are really more environmentally friendly than plastic bags.

Comparing plastic bags with paper bags, one convincing way is through life cycle assessment (LCA). Briefly speaking, this evaluation method not only considers the damage to the environment caused by the post-treatment of a commodity, but also considers the environmental load from the whole life cycle of raw material collection, production, transportation, utilization and disposal, which is more convincing.

The life cycle of these two commodities is: rubber bags start from the exploitation of crude oil, paper bags start from cutting wood, through the production and application of commodities, and then recycle part of the used products until the process of pollution-free combustion. The results show that the energy consumption of paper bags is 1.5-2 times that of PE rubber bags under the same capacity (the distance between energy consumption and PE rubber bags decreases with the increase of regeneration rate). The amount of solid waste and emissions from plastic bags is also lower than that of paper bags. Paper bags will discharge more sewage in recycling treatment, which is the main reason for the increase of paper environmental load.