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  • plastic bags seemed to be one of the most hated things on the planet.

  • But did you know that when it comes to things like climate change, paper and cotton bags are actually much worse for the planet than plastic?

  • When people look at environmental impact, they tend to focus right at the end of the life cycle analysis, they see the plastic pollution that's a massive open.

  • But far fewer people see is right getting the production side.

  • In fact, the plastic bag was originally invented to help save the planet.

  • To my dad, the idea that people would simply throw these away would be bizarre.

  • That's rile tool.

  • In his father stand, Gustav Tulin is credited with inventing the plastic bag we know today back in Sweden in 1959.

  • Back then, people use paper bags a lot, and for those they needed to cut down a lot of trees, which wasn't exactly great for the planet.

  • Stan had an idea he worked out.

  • If he could create a strong bag that was light and would last for ages than people could use it over and over again.

  • And that would mean fewer trees being chopped down which would be better for the environment.

  • Very much a improvement on what the world before he always carried one, his pocket folded up.

  • You know what we're holding encouraged to do today, which is to take your own bags to to the shop he was doing back in the seventies and eighties just naturally because, well, why wouldn't problem is these bags were so convenient that we humans, we got lazy.

  • We just throw them away after we were done with them, plastic bags weren't single used, but they became single use.

  • And as one of the reasons we have this plastic pollution problem today, a lot of countries now charge you for a plastic bag, the idea being that you were, what one if you have to pay for it and in some countries, ban these bags altogether.

  • So a lot of us are ditching plastic, and we're using paper and cotton bags mawr instead.

  • But those bags aren't exactly saints.

  • A paper carrier bag.

  • They use more energy than usual to water to produce on the heavier as well.

  • So depending on where they're made, there's an extra environmental impact of transporting them to the shops.

  • Cotton banks are even worse.

  • Qatar News is a lot of water, and it is quite an intensive crop to produce.

  • So this is the same concerns we've got with some of the fast fashion issues.

  • On the flip side, plastic backs are very efficient to make.

  • We need very little oil, super little energy.

  • And then we have a plastic bag to be as environmentally friendly as a single use plastic bag that's getting recycled.

  • A paper bag has to be used at least three times, While cotton bags need to be used at least 131 times that the same environmental impact as a single use plastic bag, which gets recycled.

  • It makes it hard to know.

  • Well, what bag should I be using If I don't want to kill the planet Beyonce.

  • It's just used a bag you already own and keep using it again and again and again.

plastic bags seemed to be one of the most hated things on the planet.

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