Paper or Plastic? How about kicking the disposable bag habit? Each high-quality reusable bag has the potential to eliminate thousands of plastic and paper bags during its lifetime. The excerpts below are taken from “the GOING Greener guidebook” September 2009, whole living – body & soul.

Worldwide we consume more than one trillion plastic bags each year, or about one million bags per minute. Americans alone use an estimated one-hundred billion plastic shopping bags annually... the equivalent of twelve million barrels of oil... ninety-nine percent of which goes straight to the landfill.

One average... we use a plastic bag for twelve minutes; it will persist in the landfill for over one-thousand years, according to some estimates.

More than one million sea birds and one hundred thousand marine mammals die every year from ingesting or getting caught in marine debris, much of which comprises plastic bags. The examination of a dead Minke whale that had washed up on the coast of France was found to have more than one thousand seven hundred pounds of plastic bags and packaging in its stomach.

We recycle only ten to fifteen percent of our paper bags. Paper is the number one material found in America's municipal solid waste. Plastics are forth. Paper piled in landfills often has no access to the light or oxygen it needs to break down. When bags do bio-degrade, they produce methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Paper bags require trees... and lots of them. In 1999, about fourteen million were felled to make the tem billion grocery bags that Americans used that year.

Grocery bags come from a type of plastic known as polyethylene, derived from nonrenewable petroleum and natural gas, plus questionable chemical additives. And, as with the manufacture of paper bags, plastic-bag makers sometimes use toxic chlorinated colorants to dye their disposable totes.

In 2002, Ireland was the first country to establish a usage tax of fifteen cents per plastic bag. The law led to a ninety percent drop in consumption, or a billion fewer plastic bags annually, and more than four million gallons of oil saved. The tax also raised almost ten million for the countries "green" fund.

Manufactures of paper bags sometimes use aluminum sulfate, a suspected reproductive toxin. Moreover... to give paper bags a consistent color, the factory relies on dyes which contain a mishmash of chemicals that can include chlorine, associated with the release of dangerous toxins known as dioxins.

One mature tree absorbs about thirteen pounds of carbon dioxide per year. Every ton of wood grown in a forest removes 1.47 tons of carbon dioxide, replacing it with 1.07 tons of oxygen.