MANILA, Philippines - 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, according to plastic products manufacturers.
“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,” Crispian Lao, spokesperson for the plastic industry, said in a statement.
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 environment-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.
Lao said a plastic ban is not the solution to flooding. “The floods during typhoons Ondoy, Pedring (and) Sendong were caused not by plastic but by global warming, which has generated more violent typhoons and unusually heavy rainfall,” he said.
Lao said the solution is still not to ban plastic but to change the consumers’ way of disposing of 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.
He said plastic can carry more weight, and both dry and wet contents. Paper, once wet, can carry even less and becomes unrecyclable, 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.