Paper or Plastic … or Neither

Will vegetable-based, biodegradable bags replace plastic and paper at the supermarket?

By Brendan I. Koerner
Posted Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2007, at 7:37 AM ET

I've heard that both paper and plastic shopping bags are pretty dreadful for the environment—the former because they require so many trees, the latter because they suffocate animals and last for centuries. I remember a lot of talk in the late 1990s about biodegradable bags composed of vegetable matter—whatever happened to those?

You can find them at a few tony stores, but they're still nowhere cheap enough for the local Piggly Wiggly. Standard polyethylene bags cost retailers around 2 cents each, while paper bags might be a penny or two more expensive. But so-called bioplastic bags, made from natural starches or oils, cost in the neighborhood of 7 or 8 cents—a lot for stores that hand out millions of bags per year. American shoppers are issued more than 100 billion polyethylene bags annually, so a nickel-per-sack premium would add up to an extra $5 billion in business costs.