It’s all in the bag: Are degradable rubbish bags sustainable?

While at the supermarket recently, Kimberly came across degradable rubbish bags. ‘Hurray!’ she said, as she hurried home to install her new bag beauties. When she got home she decided to research a little bit more about just how sustainable the bags really are, and she found the following web page which outlines the pros and cons of degradable rubbish bags. http://www.stepin.org/casestudy.php?id=rubbish&page=5

It seems that while the degradable bags ease pressure on landfill sites, leave no harmless chemicals in the ground, and help waste to decompose quicker, they are still made from polythene, which is made from oil. So, to make these bags, finite resources need to be tapped, thus making the product not that sustainable. We are once again urged to rethink the amount of ‘waste’ we create, and look to ways of recycling and reducing our rubbish!

Glad’s degradable bags