Paper or Plastic?

Save trees.
Use plastic. 
Cool cool cool.
So, the trees are good now — right?

We heard it throughout the 1980s and 90s that this was the way to save the rainforest. If you’re old enough, you might remember bagger competitions: teenagers racing to pack the most cans, the heaviest milk jug, the most delicate loaf of bread into a single brown paper sack without it tearing. Those bags had structural integrity. They stood up on their own in the trunk. They got reused to cover schoolbooks, wrap packages, line garbage bins, start fireplace fires. They were the multitaskers of the grocery world, and it only took one paper bag to carry what 8 (because some items need double bagging) plastic bags carry now.

Then came the choice: “Paper or plastic?” If you loved trees and the air they supply, it was your duty to pick plastic. And those handles? Why —  how convenient to drape 3 bags on one arm and 4 on the other instead of carrying one paper sack in each!

So began one of the longest-running cons in consumer history.

Here’s what they told us: Plastic bags protect nature. That was the pitch. The plastics industry (aka the oil industry) spent the 80s funding environmental messaging that framed plastic as the eco-friendly option. Paper meant deforestation. Plastic meant hugging trees. Wasn’t that thoughtful of Mobil Chemical, worrying about forests like that?

What they didn’t mention: Trees are renewable. Managed timberlands regrow. Paper decomposes. Oil, on the other hand, is finite. Not to mention, plastic doesn’t biodegrade. Instead, it breaks into smaller and smaller pieces until it’s in the fish, in the water, in your bloodstream, and, if the studies are right, in your brain. But sure… let’s save the trees. Whatever.

The audacity is admirable. Corporations took a petroleum byproduct they had too much of – polyethylene – and sold it to us as an environmental crusade. By the 1990s, plastic bags captured 80% of the US grocery market. The paper bag, with its quiet dignity and its second life as a trick-or-treat bag or Halloween mask, was suddenly superfluous.

Here’s the twist we live inside now: Plastic bags are everywhere and the consequences of that switch are impossible to ignore. They are the newest species of bird, flying gracefully through the air. They are one of the most prevalent inhabitants of the ocean, bobbing happily on the tides. Whales wash up on beaches with stomachs packed with them. Not to mention, their offspring (microplastics) show up in human placentas, sperm, and blood. Plastic is prolific like that!

So, the next solution was clearly (drumroll please): Reusable bags – made of thicker plastic! Problem solved.

Those reusable bags they sell you at the register? Polypropylene. Still oil. Still non-renewable. And because they cost a dollar and sit right there by the checkout, well-meaning people buy them by the dozen. Now they have forty of those bags crammed into a kitchen drawer. Yet, another good manufactured for the purpose of increasing consumption, lining corporate pockets, and ensuring the demand for oil continues to rise. Somehow, we never consume enough to make Big Oil happy.

Here’s what gets me. Cloth bags exist. Canvas. Cotton. Hemp. Things you can repair, wash, and eventually compost. The solutions are right there and could be sitting next to the checkout. But those weren’t the ones pushed, because a single canvas tote that lasts a decade is terrible for business . . . when your business model depends on selling new bags every week.

The plastics industry (Hi, American Petroleum Institute!) didn’t just sell us a product. They sold us a frame. Save the rainforest. It felt good. It felt responsible. Then it locked us into a cycle of petroleum dependence that’s been running for forty years, driving up prices, and creating an environmental mess we can’t easily solve. They convinced us to all get out there and buy “reusable” plastic totes like it’s the rebellion.

The truth? The question was never “paper or plastic.” The question was: Who benefits when someone sells you a binary choice and calls it environmentalism?

Next: What happened to the paper bag industry and who funded those studies that said plastic was better. SPOILER ALERT: You already know the answer.