wrote in message ...
Mary Fisher wrote:

If paper bags are composted it's largely done by life forms, they don't
cost
energy. The resulting composted material contributes - in our case - to
our
food. If we grow our own vegetables (and eggs) we are saving energy in
terms
of food miles, shoe leather, carrier bags of any kind ...

But the 'energy' cost of any sort of bag has very little to do with
how it's disposed of. OK, so you're getting a little more back from
paper bags than you would from plastic ones but I reckon it's pretty
marginal. If the bag takes more energy to *produce* than a plastic
one and/or we use more paper bags than we would have used plastic ones
there's still a net loss.

However I'm not at all sure of the relative energy costs of producing
paper and plastic bags. My gut feeling is that paper uses a fair
amount of energy (evaporating water and such) and paper bags might
well be more energy costly to produce. However plastic bags probably
use more unreplaceable resources (oil in particular).

Indeed. and that's important to me.

--
Chris Green