Is Plastic Or Paper Environment –Friendly?

With increasing awareness regarding environmental degradation, today’s modern citizens are more informed and concerned about their actions on the environment. Accordingly, people are increasing aligning themselves towards eco-friendly products. But a topic of confusion prevalent in today’s society is what the product is environmentally friendly and to what extent. Given a choice between the popular LPDE orange country or California ca and paper, paper seems to be the obvious choice which comes to mind. But is it so?

To understand this, first let us take a look into the process involved, before the paper products ultimately reach the customers. To begin with appropriate trees are found, they are marked and clear-cut leading to the destruction of massive habitats and also the entire ecological system of the region. Then they are transported out of these remote areas and in the process consuming tons of non renewable fossils fuels. The collected trees are left to dry for at least three years so that the wood gets transformed into pulp. The next process requires gallons of clean water for washing and cleaning purposes, reducing the pulp to 1/3rd of its original weight. To complete, pulp and water are combined in the ratio of 1:400 to get the final finished paper .The damage may seem to be huge, but unfortunately there is more to add. The next step is reusing /recycling the used ones which is done in two ways 1) composts 2) recycle. The papers having less ink on them are buried in the soil which slowly transforms adding manure to the soil. However, when it comes to recycling things no longer remain simple. The recycling process involves re-pulping through a chemical reaction involving compounds like sodium silicate, hydrogen peroxide etc. which bleach them and separate them into fibers. The pulp fibers are then washed to remove any contamination, pressed and finally rolled into paper.

Now coming to plastics, the main source is oil, a resource which is depleting at a fast rate and soon predicted to disappear from our planet. These plastics are by products of the oil-refining process, which is done using electricity as the prime energy source, sourced from coal based thermal power plants. After heating to a temperature of 370 C, various component polymers can be separated out. Among these, one of the polymer called polyethylene, in its light density foam is used for making plastics. These plastics after their first cycle of use, is down cycled meaning they are melted and formed into plastics. The down cycling process consumes about 2/3rd times the energy previously used but the quality obtained is much lower. These lower quality plastics are also used for other purposes like making roads, fence materials etc.

There is another option in terms of biodegradable plastics made from food source like corn etc. But in a world which still cannot produce enough food for its inhabitants, the option is not viable and thus suffers from various conflicts.

Thus, we can see other better alternatives are still to be found and thus for the time being a judicious –use of the available resource is required.