Are cotton or paper bags really better than plastic? If you use cotton bags when you go shopping you probably think you're doing the world a favour. Cotton bags need to be used everyday for more than a year to have less global warming potential than a plastic bag used three times. In 2007, San Francisco banned non-compostable plastic bags but the policy led to an increase in the use of single-use recyclable paper bags. Only 38 per cent of paper bags were recycled, the rest went to landfill where they take up fives times more space than plastic bags.

Source: Stuff November 30, 2017 15:56 UTC