Having successfully interdicted single-use plastic bags in at least eight states, they’re now aiming for their only reasonable replacements: paper bags.
“Paper can’t be a solution to plastic waste,” says the headline of a recent story posted on Canada’s CTV News site.
Well that's a damn lie. Paper used to be the solution before plastic. There's a million and a half acres of forest burning down right now in Alberta, a half million acres of forest a year burns in MT alone...
That is all resource going up in smoke.
Various “experts,” “researchers” and activists screech and nag about “deforestation and forest degradation,” “increased pressure on the world’s forests” (caused by the plastic bag bans they have demanded), and “a really critical moment” in which “we need to take steps to keep forests standing.”
Another several damnable lies - First of all, paper products are not made from 'old growth forests'.
Mostly, old growth forests are bullcrap. Yes, they do exist, but they are more rare than you think.
I have been where logging has never been. Where there are no roads and the forest is as untouched as before the steam engine, when horse logging barely made a dent. And by far and away, the forest burns. Trees that make it to old age are more a fluke than the norm, remaining more because they are protected by draft and other obstacles to fire than because of anything man has done.
One insisted that consumers have to “rethink and reorient themselves towards a reusable mind frame.”
This much IS true - I have been lamenting the disappearance of the humble tote sack forever. And the decimated canning jar - But the burlap sack was ubiquitous because it was used for packaging, and reused over and over again because it was useful and free (because it was mere packaging). To buy it with purpose is expensive.
The same with the canning jar. When companies went to plastic cans, those 'free' jars that took a canning lid and ring went away... I remember saving mayo and pickle jars because they worked for canning. Anything that we canned in a stock pot was canned using these jars, saving the actual Mason and Kerr jars for the pressure cooker jobs.
The same with the lowly bushel basket - It was the crate they came in. And it was reused because it was ubiquitous and all around... When the bushel went away, it was still alright, because the stackable wooden crates that replaced them did many jobs past their first use... But now that's all cardboard and pretty much single use.
The point being to make them ubiquitous again, the way forward is to put them back in general use, not selling them as a secondary item.
One activist quoted in the report runs an Australian nonprofit that “works to protect the world’s forests by helping” retailers “ensure their packaging doesn’t rely on paper and is environmentally friendly.”
According to her estimates, more than 3 billion trees, “many of which are old-growth and endangered,” are cut down “every year to make paper-based products like bags, straws, and food containers.”
Again, total bullcrap. Paper trees tend to be spruce and softwood pines, and detritus from lumber logging jobs. Most paper trees are plantation trees, and nothing to do with old growth - Old growth is too hard to get to, and too hard to process for paper. For lumber, you might have a point, but to say it is paper is just nonsense.
