One of the problems that we face today is the dreadful conditions that are happening to our environment. A major one of which the use of plastic bags and paper bag. People use this two bags to make their life easier and smoothly as they have to be rush in their daily activities. The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast between plastic bags and paper bags in term of uses, pollution and degradability.

First of all is about the uses of these two bags. Plastic bags can be used for varied purposes such as to wrap food, store extra stuff while traveling, and to hoard wet or dirty clothes. They are also ideal as trash bags during journeys. Strength, durability, and variety are some of the advantages of plastic bags. In the other hand, paper bag are harder to store because of mildew and rot. They tear easily and therefore do not carry as much weight. They easily transfer roaches and other vermin from nasty grocery stores to your clean home.

The second issue is about pollution caused by these two bags. Heating wood chips under pressure makes paper bags. These chips are heated at high temperatures in a chemical solution. This solution uses toxic chemicals that can result in acid rain and water pollution. This is because millions of gallons of these chemicals are thrown in our waterways. Plastic also caused pollution from the process of degradable which produce tiny toxic particles that contaminate the soil and waterways and enter the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them.

Finally, another important issue is degradability. Recent studies have shown that paper degrades faster than plastic. This is because plastic does not decompose easily and most end up on landfill sites where they take around 300 years to degradable. This is the reason why throwing them away should be avoided. Paper bag take only few time to degradable rather than plastic bag.

In a nutshell, it will be good if we can think first before use paper bags and plastic bags in order to avoid pollution, ozone deterioration and other health and environmental hazards. By think rationally and wisely, a cleaner and healthy future for you and your family is on its way and also for the rest of the world and the coming generation.

Khuzairie and Solehuddin