Paper, Plastic and People

When it comes to packaging, it is always this mind-boggling question “Paper or Plastic?” A hazy debate till date; consuming the common consumer, I started with asking friends and people. “Paper or Plastic”, why(s) and why not(s).

Upshots
90% ended up choosing paper.
Paper is readily biodegradable compared to plastic.
Plastic is harmful in some or other way to humans and environment.
95% of them never carried their own shopping bags in recent years.
70% reused their plastic bags though in rare instances.
98% of them look up to shops/retails to provide them with a positive alternative for existing bags.
Immediate alternative to plastic packaging/bags is only paper in their minds.
People are skeptical about durability of paper bags.
People like to reuse those plastic bags of cult and respected/popular brands.

In reality...

Paper can’t be a sustainable material, just because of its natural raw material and bio-degradability. We do a lot of deforestation to source its raw material; it is an unfair human play towards nature to use trees and plants as a source for an ephemeral substance like paper.
Then we bleach the extracted pulps and fibers from cut trees using chlorine gas; in turn those industrial effluents (we have 12,000 paper mills across the world, approx) will introduce chlorine dioxins in to our food chain.

In fact, we will need more energy for transshipment of paper bags compared to plastic ones. With all these pamper to encourage paper usage might exert a back pressure in the system increasing the demand for paper, which will call for more energy, more fuel and more cut trees.

The bio-degradability part; we ink them, print them with heavy metals and composite them with plastics, metals and what not, do we expect these other add-on elements to break down in to our environment along with paper when it is thrown away.

Then we have this recycled eco-friendly paper trying to save energy and natural resources, It is been said that, recycling 1 ton of paper saves 17 trees approximately and every virgin wood pulp can be made and re-made to live as paper for 5 to 7 life cycles.
Though, only one-fourth of post consumer paper recycling happens across. The whole process ends up consuming more fuel and energy compared to plastic recycling. It also calls for strong chemical surfactants for de-inking and chlorine agents to bleach, releasing more harmful effluents in to environment. Efficient methods of paper recycling are either evolving or yet to evolve. Paper packaging alone accounts for 15% to 20% of yearly land fill.

Well, Plastics! facts and figures apart, the word plastic means ‘able to be molded’, true! They are molded in to every moment of our life. We see them littered everywhere around us, no doubts these inorganic creations and synthetic chemicals can be an effective technical nutrient to feed the industry with waste as food. We have enough of them as waste.

Plastics don’t get created by compromising sensitive natural inhabitants like trees and plants, at least till the time we switch over to bioplastics. We only need crude oil, which may be available for at least another half century or end of life plastics to give birth to new ones. Rather they have long and longer life cycles enough to persist in this environment even after human life cycles. They are already in our food chain; our hormones have become smart enough to converse with the inorganic chemical molecules. Not to mention birds, animals and water life, they don’t have any rights to spoil earth as we humans do.

Come on consumers! Pause and give a thought; we no more have the luxury of throwing away things. It is plastic or paper; we can’t just throw away anymore, there is no more an ‘away’. The problem is not only with paper or plastic, it is with the people.

There is this infamous concept of ‘3Rs -Reuse, Reduce, Recycle’. Actually, this concept doesn’t fit many sustainability frameworks. Let us forget the choice between ‘paper and plastic’ for a moment. Avoid this choice altogether. Use paper bags or plastic bags; but reuse them, allow their enduring life. One has to figure out instances of use (paper/plastic/others), alternative plastic bags or cloth bags can be of better choices. Diligent reuse will automatically reduce consumption. These concepts of reuse and reduce are not really new to us, observe your grand parents attitude towards consumption.

Think before asking for another plastic bag!

Daily Defies

Designers!, often referred as sensitive species, are we sensitive to the issues around. We have numerous chemicals, heavy metals and materials around us. We are still brewing new sets of synthetic creations from our laboratories with no counterparts in nature. Where are we leading towards?

With so much green washing around, now that most us care for the environment. We try and buy things made of recyclable/recycled materials, but these things which add up to your sensitivity quotient to environment might not be designed with further use in mind, I mean recycling these products towards their end of life.Recycling and reshaping them would have cost us more energy and additives than it’s entire life cycle. It might release more harmful byproducts than it’s previous life cycle.

Forget the recycled products. Let us deal with certain aspects from our daily life.

Soaps and detergents, this one is the best example of man’s passion for simplifying things, Universal design. Single soap for the entire country, even though water qualities and needs differ from place to place. Imagine the strength of a detergent to strip off hard stains, to work efficiently in hard or saline or soft water, classic case of “designed for the worst case scenario”. What would happen when they are treated as sewage effluents, when they come in contact with aquatic lives in the rivers nearby?

Then our beloved PET bottles, the source of water for many of us in recent times is capable enough to leach out antimony into the contents stored in them. Are we aware of this, do we have a positive alternative to this?

Take out your wallet and see, how many plastic cards we carry around, we use at least one of them everyday, and we wear around some of them all day (ID cards). Does any of them have it’s material mentioned with, so sad, there are 90% chances that they were made of PVC.

And definitely your leather wallet, there are chances that they were tanned using hexavalent chromium, a carcinogen.

The computer which I use, made of brominated flame retardant chemicals, have heavy metals like cadmium, mercury and lead.Those compact discs made of Polycarbonate has bisphenol-A, which can mimic body hormones.

And the dust particle from the 3 in 1 printer/photocopier/scanner has nickel and cobalt. Imagine the kind of indoor air quality that will persist in this environment.No wonder 90% of world’s population has developed some kind of allergic sensation.

More over, we always go wrong when it comes to the debate of “Plastic or Paper”.

And our food and cooking; we might be ingesting genetically modified food products unintentionally and fluropolymers from our non-stick cook wares every day.

I need another hundred pages to explain why these things that I mentioned are not completely safe. I will try and address them in the forthcoming articles. And frankly! I am not trying to scare people away; many of these things have effective and positive alternatives too, but who cares?

Sustainability Highlights

“We cannot afford more of the same timid politics when the future of our planet is at stake. Global warming is not a someday problem, it is now. We are already breaking records with the intensity of our storms, the number of forest fires, the periods of drought. By 2050 famine could force more than 250 million from their homes . . . . The polar ice caps are now melting faster than science had ever predicted. . . . This is not the future I want for my daughters. It's not the future any of us want for our children. And if we act now and we act boldly, it doesn't have to be.” [Barack Obama, Portsmouth, NH, 10/8/07]

His pledge for healthy environment proposes a system implementation to reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050 and to encourage carbon trading. He also proposes clean energy economy, energy efficiency etc.

There is a proposal of new forum of largest green house gases emitters, G8+ BRIC countries (except Russia) but includes Mexico and South Africa and this forum to complement in developing post Kyoto framework along with UN.

His fact sheet also talks about new Lead free toys act; fight against mercury pollution, nuclear material and more importantly against genetically modified food crops.