Paper or Plastic … or Neither Will vegetable-based,
biodegradable bags replace plastic and paper at the supermarket?
I've heard that both paper and plastic shopping bags are pretty
dreadful for the environment—the former because they require so
many trees, the latter because they suffocate animals and last
for centuries. I remember a lot of talk in the late 1990s about
biodegradable bags composed of vegetable matter—whatever
happened to those? You can find them at a few tony stores, but
they're still nowhere cheap enough for the local Piggly Wiggly.
Standard polyethylene bags cost retailers around 2 cents each,
while paper bags might be a penny or two more expensive. But so-
called bioplastic bags, made from natural starches or oils, cost
in the neighborhood of 7 or 8 cents—a lot for stores that hand
out millions of bags per year. American shoppers are issued more
than 100 billion polyethylene bags annually, so a nickel-per-
sack premium would add up to an extra $5 billion in business
costs. But bioplastic bags