More problems arise from plastic ban, says group

INQUIRER FILE PHOTO

The ban on plastic has increased the use of paper, raising bigger environmental issues including the cutting of trees, and the use of more water and electricity for its production compared to plastic, according to the plastic industry.

“One ton of paper requires the cutting of 17 trees; none is cut for plastic. One supermarket paper bag uses one gallon of clean water, which is all that is needed to make 116 plastic bags. Paper uses as much as five times more energy than a comparable plastic production,” Crispian Lao, spokesperson for the plastic industry, said in the press statement.

Lao’s group is asking for a scientific and enlightened approach to plastic, which he said has been demonized to the point that people now wrongly believe that paper is more environmentally friendly.

“It is not. This is the reason developed countries are taking a balanced approached. People are given a choice between plastic and paper because both are needed, and have their pros and cons,” he said.

He added: “If the problem is flooding, a plastic ban is definitely not the solution. The floods during Tropical Storm “Ondoy,” “Pedring,” “Sendong” etc were caused not by plastic but by global warming which has generated more violent typhoons and unusually heavy rainfall.”

Even assuming that plastic products were to be blamed for lesser floods, he said the solution is still not a ban on plastic but in changing people’s ways of disposing waste.

By banning plastic, Lao said local governments are in effect making global warming worse because more paper means less trees and therefore more carbon dioxide in the air; less water for people to use; and more power to be generated which produces more greenhouse gases.