In Mr. Query’s article in The Environmental Magazine, he poses the question of the impact of excess plastic bag usage in average American households. Every year one hundred billion plastic grocery bags are used briefly then thrown away by Americans every year while paper, the popular alternative, uses more energy to produce the bags and depletes forests. The over one hundred billion plastic grocery and shopping bags that Americans use every year consume about twelve million barrels of already heavily used oil. The negative impacts of plastic bags do not end when they are thrown away because it takes more than 500 years for the plastic to decompose, and approximately ninety-five percent of grocery checkout bags are thrown away instead of recycled. …show more content…
Paper bag manufacturing puts 70 percent more pollution in the air than plastic, and although paper bags are recycled more often than plastic, it takes ninety percent less energy to recycle a pound of plastic bag material than a pound of paper. Some strategies have been tried to make plastic bags more environmentally friendly such as a chemical added to the bags to make them degrade in sunlight. However, the process can’t work if the plastic bag is buried in a dump. Another possible solution was tried in Ireland in 2003 by introducing the "Plastax," a fee of a few cents on each grocery bag. Reusablebags.com President Vince Cobb thinks the tax is successful and Ireland’s plastic bag usage has dropped from 1.2 billion to 0.2 billion equaling a ninety percent cut. Alternatives other than paper or plastic include making shopping bags out of corn. Plastic grocery bags are being made by Trellis Earth located in Portland, Oregon. They use corn and transform it into polylactic acid (PLA) grocery bags that biodegrade in around 120 days. "People are looking for a green alternative," says Chad Biasi the cofounder Trellis Earth. However, the U.S. corn crop may not be big enough to meet the