MANILA, Philippines – Is the widening initiative to ban
plastic in many facets of life a really smart “green” move, or will it
create more problems for the environment?
A plastics industry group on Thursday raised this
question, asserting that the ban on plastic “has increased the use of
paper, raising bigger environmental issues including the cutting of
trees, and the use of more water and electricity for its production
compared to plastic.”
It said a ton of paper equals 17 cut trees, 116 times more water usage and five times more power consumption.
Crispian Lao, spokesperson for the plastic industry, said:
“One ton of paper requires the cutting of 17 trees; none is cut for
plastic. One supermarket paper bag uses one gallon of clean water, which
is all that is needed to make 116 plastic bags. Paper uses as much as
five times more energy than a comparable plastic production.”
Lao’s group is asking for a scientific and enlightened
approach to plastic, which he said has been demonized to the point that
people now wrongly believe that paper is more environmentally friendly.
“It is not. This is the reason developed countries are
taking a balanced approached. People are given a choice between plastic
and paper because both are needed, and have their pros and cons,” he
said.
He added: “If the problem is flooding, a plastic ban is
definitely not the solution. The floods during typhoons Ondoy, Pedring,
Sendong etc were caused not by plastic but by global warming which has
generated more violent typhoons and unusually heavy rainfall.”
Even assuming that plastic products were to be blamed for
lesser floods, he said the solution is still not a ban on plastic but in
changing people’s ways of disposing waste.
By banning plastic, Lao said local governments are in
effect making global warming worse because more paper means fewer trees
and therefore more carbon dioxide in the air; less water for people to
use; and more power to be generated which produces more greenhouse
gases.
“All this misimpression started with simple floods, and it
was very convenient to blame plastic because it was the most visible.
But first of all, we have poor drainage systems. And the plastic is
there because we refuse to segregate. We must segregate and recycle. The
solution is that simple,” he said.
Plastic, he said, is more environmentally friendly than
paper but the two must co-exist because each one is needed in the
current world.
In terms of use, however, he said plastic offers unmatched
convenience because it can carry more weight, and both dry and wet
contents. Paper, once wet, can carry even less and become unrecyclable.
Paper cups, for instance, are lined with either wax or
plastic to keep liquids in. Diapers; bottles used instead of glass for
tea, softdrinks; sacks; eyeglasses; ballpens and just about anything
used everyday has plastic, he said.
“All we need to do is to be responsible users and
disposers of plastic. To ban it is to deny ourselves unneccessarily a
ready convenience in favor of paper that causes new problems for us,” he
said.
