photo by Zainub Razvi (Zainub on Flickr CC)

I’d choose paper bags for my groceries, but since plastic bags are offered for free in shops and said to be not that bad for the environment, it’s hard to resist them. What is more eco-friendly: plastic or paper shopping bags?

A: Neither.

We have been conditioned to believe that paper bags are eco-friendly.

Paper is made from trees, which are logged by clear-cutting methods. When the collected trees are dry, they are cooked into a pulp for many hours in a chemical mixture.

The pulp is then washed and bleached; both stages require thousands of gallons of clean water. Coloring is added to more water, and is then combined in a ratio of 1 part pulp to 400 parts water, to make paper.

–Colin Dunn of Treehugger

Apart from chemicals, electricity and huge amounts of water used in the process of producing paper bags, there is also significant fossil fuel based energy consumption in the transport of both the raw wood and final product.

The best thing that can happen to a paper bag after it’s been used is decomposition. Yet, biodegradable bags can be too thin and weak to carry your groceries and are often not even offered by supermarkets. If a paper bag does not contain an admixture of plastic, which supposedly makes it stronger, it can be recylcled. This proces usually demands using chemicals, such as bleach, to separate the fibres; and, again, great amounts of water to wash away ink and other impurities.

The production of plastic bags, which releases toxic compounds, requires less energy and water than the production of bags made of paper. But their consumption is still significant, and their seeming advantage is marred by the bags’ long-term impact on the environment.

According to this BBC News article:

Made of polyethylene – more commonly known as polythene – they [plastic bags] are hazardous to manufacture and are said to take up to 1,000 years to decompose.

Tons of plastic travel all over the world, polluting soil and water.

Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food. Turtles think the bags are jellyfish, their primary food source. Once swallowed, plastic bags choke animals or block their intestines, leading to an agonizing death.

Read more in the Myth: Plastic Bags are Free article on reusit.com.

When plastic bags break down [...] plastic debris acts like a sponge for toxic chemicals soaking up a million fold greater concentration of such deadly compounds as PCBs and DDE (a breakdown product of the notorious insecticide DDT)

–reusit

Photo by Travis S. (Flickr CC)

According to the U.S. EPA, manufacturing new plastic from recycled plastic requires two-thirds of the energy used in virgin plastic production.

As for the decomposing of so-called biodegradable plastic bags, it appears it’s not that simple. Some of them are partly made from biodegradable materials such as cornstarch, but also contain petroleum.

Bioplastics, although 100% biodegradable, are often made from GMOs and their producers use large amounts of pesticides and fertilizers to grow them. Furthermore, bioplastics can’t be decomposed at home – they require a certain humidity and high heat to break down.

To read more about the advantages and disadvantages of bioplastics, go here.

Do you think shopping bags are free? Don’t get fooled by the clever marketing – nothing is free in this system! You will find the cost of the plastic bag you just put your groceries in on your bill – hidden in the price of your food.

The best solution is to have your own re-usable bag always with you, ideally made from natural fibers like bamboo, hemp or organic cotton. You might even make one yourself.

If you have any questions about environmental issues or anything else relating to the site and topics we cover on Greenfudge, just Ask Joanna.

Image source: Wikimedia Commons

“Industrial farms are super-incubators for viruses,” -Bob Martin, former executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Animal Farm Production (from wired.com May 1, 2009)

The modern, industrialized American pig lives for about six months from birth to slaughter, during which it spends its entire life eating in a cramped steel and concrete enclosure, paradoxically sterile and yet separated by a steel floor of steel grating, only a few centimeters above a cesspool of the pigs’ own excrement. The scent is so bad that some residents who live downwind from pig farms have tried to get laws passed to protect themselves from the stench. A typical hog in one of these factory farms packs on 50 lbs (23 kilos) a month without even exercising. This lean, tense ball of muscle, is so sensitive to wind blown pathogens, that anyone who comes within 50 meters of the pig must first shower in disinfectant put on what basically looks like a chemical suit.

The Showtime television series This American Life, in a segment for an episode entitled ‘Pandora’s Box’ which originally aired on April 26^th, 2007, explores the strange and ghastly evolution of pig farming in America, from its origins as a pastoral, more or less traditional occupation into what would seem to many – whether you eat pork or not – to be an gruesome, scientifically facilitated, commercialized horror.

The Porcine Growth of Pig Farming

In the mid 20^th century, one out of every five Americans lived on a farm. Today it’s only about one in every 100. Back then pigs grazed, rolled in the mud, socialized and copulated like regular animals. Factory farming and genetic engineering changed all that. Now the sows never touch a boar and are instead manually inseminated by farm workers armed with pricey designer boar sperm. Their offspring are leaner and more muscular than their natural forebears. But pigs that are bred lean don’t have enough fat to survive living outside during cold winter, so they must be kept inside in heated buildings. Housing them indoors means that the pigs don’t pick up natural immunity to diseases. On top of this they are more or less genetically identical to one another, so – lack of diversity being a genetic weakness – a virus or harmful bacteria strain could infect and wipe out an entire herd. Genetically engineered pigs are also more nervous, which isn’t helped by the horrible conditions they live in, nor the muscle building supplements they’re fed. These paranoid, ultra stressed-out pigs often have muscle cramps or even heart attacks and die on their final – and longest – walk of their lives: the trek from their tiny pens, in which they don’t even have enough room to turn around in, to the truck that transports them to the slaughterhouse.

The This American Life segment was inspired by an article entitled ‘Swine of the times: The making of the modern pig’ by Nathanael Johnson, which appeared in the May 2006 issue of Harper’s Magazine. I’ve taken the liberty of including some quotes from the original article, which can be read in full and downloaded in PDF here.

• A 1997 paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago coolly observed, “The standards set by the largest hog producers now suggest that some 50 producers could account for all the hogs needed in the U.S.”

• But almost all modern farms use low-level antibiotics in feed: besides blocking diseases, antibiotics boost animal growth rates.

• “Tylan [a veterinary anti-biotic] helps minimize attrition losses and maximize economic returns,” one ad reads. “On average, 30–35% of pigs born never reach full-value market weight because they die, are culled or are lightweights at marketing.”

• Instead, workers dispatch sick hogs with a bolt gun, or simply swing the runts by their hind legs against the concrete floor. Healing is inefficient.

• The giant producers reported three times the number of mycoplasma pneumonia cases, more than six times the cases of swine influenza, and twenty-nine times the cases of a new flu strain than did the smaller farms.

The Swine Flu Connection

Used under license from Shutterstock.com

- Scientists have traced the genetic lineage of the new H1N1 swine flu to a strain that emerged in 1998 in U.S. factory farms, where it spread and mutated at an alarming rate. -wired.com May 1, 2009

Geneticists have determined that the H1N1 virus, which is being contracted by humans around the world, in fact comes from pigs. Or did you just think it was a coincidence that it was called “swine flu”? Now, at the risk of sounding reductionist, if pig farms are “super-incubators for viruses” maybe they should be shut down as a form of preventative medicine. Sounds better to me than taking bucket loads of Tamiflu. Naturally the pork industry claims there is no link. I’ll go with the scientists on this one, not because it lines up with my moral compass, but because it’s their job to tell us these things. It’s the pork industry’s job to sell more pork.

I’m not someone who likes trite, unsubstantiated statements like “this is what you get when you play God” or “don’t mess with Mother Nature.” All of us mess with Mother Nature. Some of us are just willing to do more risky, cruel and irresponsible things if it means making a little – or a lot – more money. And it’s this kind of unrestrained behavior that pushes the competition within an industry to do the same – or perish, despite safety warnings from scientists or obscenely obvious moral questions. Anything can be rationalized, even the most shockingly stupid, greedy and cruelest of things. And what’s so wrong about the modern industrialized pig farm is that there is just so much wrong with it that it practically doesn’t need to be argued about. People just need to know about it. Then whatever rationalizations are made afterward are up to the individual. In this current climate of awakening environmental consciousness and possible pandemics, personal choices will hopefully be influenced by concerns about public health and animal welfare and not just money and a taste for bacon.

This American Life: This Little Piggy Made Me Vomit

The soundman is so grossed out by a litter of piglets being birthed onto a steel grate that he loses his lunch and subsequently gives up meat eating. Who wouldn’t, you might ask? Well, not the rest of the show’s production team.

By Graham Land

Additional resources:
Grist.org article linking swine flu to pork industry
Full Wired article: Swine Flu Ancestor Born on U.S. Factory Farms
This American Life: episode synopsis for ‘Pandora’s Box’

Used under license from Shutterstock.com

Our relationship with food is somewhat strange, when you think about it. We expect food to make us stronger, faster, and healthier – while we sit in front of the television eating. Our food also keeps promising us all that and more – fish sticks may be bad for you, but not the kind that comes with Omega 3 fatty acid, which is good for you!

It’s a real miracle that these adverts actually increase sales, considering many kids these days don’t know that milk comes from cows. Whoever coined the phrase “ignorance is bliss” surely didn’t think that it would be applied to food. The science of food is now too advanced for the average person. Even a pharmacist probably wouldn’t understand what’s in your food by reading the labels on the back.

What happened to the good old days when a lettuce was simply a lettuce and all you had to do was wash the dirt and bugs off it? Now, you have a choice between different kinds of lettuce, organic lettuce and may be soon in future, GM (genetically modified) lettuce. Currently, it’s not necessary to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs), so you don’t see it in the shelves. Does it mean you are not eating it? If you are living in the UK or a country that is part of the European Union, probably not because neither allows GM crop cultivation. If you are living in the US, you’ve probably been eating GM food since the late 90s.

Used under license from Shutterstock.com

The first genetically modified food was a ‘yeast’, introduced to the UK market in the early 90s. Around the same time, a tomato called FlavrSavr was introduced by a California company in the US market. The tomato was modified to last longer after picking and was sold even on the European markets for a few years before GM crops suddenly came under fire. By then though, millions of hectares of land were already being planted with GM crops like corn, soya and rice all over the world. While the UK and Europe have stalled further cultivation, it’s going strong in the US and some other developing countries as well.

So, what makes people so afraid of the GM food that we fondly call Frankenfood? After all, mixed marriages work fine don’t they? So what if your cabbage has been modified to kill caterpillars and your fish has enhanced DNA that makes it immune to some diseases that you never really knew about? How does that bother you? Well, it’s just that no one can really prove that eating that fish with modified DNA isn’t going to turn future generations into gilled monsters! Even if that wasn’t happening, what about living with the guilt of having wiped out a whole generation of caterpillars!

Seriously though, the repercussions of tempering with nature in such a fashion has been dealt extensively in the media and some scientific white papers as well. If one occasionally browses through Discovery Channel or National Geography, it is possible to stumble upon some facts about the environment and how the existence of each creepy crawly is important to the entire ecological system.

However, a delicate check of public opinion figures against the sales figure of GM food show a proportional growth in both. As one Wired article points out, “In August 2006, the Center for Food Safety released a factsheet that stated, “the depth of market rejection of GE foods is arguably unparalleled by any other consumer product.” It’s hard to square these statements with Monsanto’s (GM food seller) $689,000,000 in net income during 2006.”

Used under license from Shutterstock.com

That doesn’t necessarily mean that we do not practice what we preach! The truth is that a bulk of the genetically modified food is in the form of soya and corn, which forms a part of the innocent vegetable oil we use daily. Even sneakier is the use of GM animal feed, which are fed mostly to the farm animals that make up for protein diet. So that chicken you roasted on Sunday may have had its fill of GM crop before it came to your table!

But, if they are so bad and scary why are they still being grown and sold? Because, apart from being commercially viable (many GM crops are resistant to pests) scientists are adamant that GM crops can save the world, wipe out hunger, malnutrition, vitamin deficiency, poverty (and your credit card debts!?). Or may be not.

Essentially, the question is whether we should play with our food at the DNA level or stick to the simple joy of growing it naturally and not needing to know its pedigree before eating it. Are our demands in this age too high for our food to cope with? May be we should ease up on the food and look into all those demands to see why the natural born rice can’t save the third world country as well. But the fact is, like in the case of the wonder sheep Dolly, we can’t probably stop science from butting into the field of food. But that doesn’t mean you can just sit down and take it (or eat it, in this case). You can make your voice heard by supporting the many organizations that lobby against GMOs. If you live in a country where they allow GMOs, write to your representative, telling them that you do not wish to eat genetically modified food. There are many ways of growing and cultivating food, playing mad scientist is not one of them.

By Maria Belgado

Additional resources:
Global Research Canada
EurActive’s Genetically Modified Organism Page
True Food Network
Global Issues Genetically Engineered Food Page