Are Eco-friendly Products Really Eco-friendly? Part1: Non-woven Bags
Lots of animal activists and even the general public are upset because more and more animals such as turtles and whales wash ashore with plastic in their bellies. This is one of the reasons why they are turning to the eco-friendly products in the first place. The premise is interesting, you get to save the environment and reduce the amount of plastics used every day.
Plus, there are lots of eco-friendly options out there like using non-woven bags instead of the plastic ones, using paper straws instead of plastic, bagasse and wheat containers, PLA containers and paper cups lined with PLA instead of PE.
What are Non-Woven Bags?
Recently more and more people started to use non-woven bags instead of plastic. What should you know about this material? It’s still plastic, but recyclable. It’s very easy to use and light, and at the same time, it’s very strong too. That means it’s a good replacement for regular plastic.
The reason why this is eco-friendly is that you can clean it with ease. It’s even machine washable, not to mention you can reuse the bag as many times as you want. That gives you more value, convenience, and control over the entire process.
Is this the ultimate plastic replacement?
Even if people start using non-woven bags and ditch plastic, that doesn’t mean this will be an eco-friendly solution. In fact, most of these bags will end up in landfills. That might seem ok mainly because the material is said to degrade in time, so in theory there shouldn’t be any kind of problem.
However, that’s only a theory. The fiber type used for the non-woven bag will determine if this is biodegradable or not. Some of these bags are biodegradable, but most of them aren’t. The reason is simple, they use polypropylene. This is not a recyclable product. So while you can reuse it and wash it from time to time, once you throw it to the landfill, this will end up damaging the environment. That’s a huge issue, because you will still damage the environment.
Once you throw these non-woven bags to the landfill, you are still damaging the environment instead of protecting it. Even if you believe that you’re getting an eco-friendly product, you are lying to yourself, and you’re not protecting the environment in any way if you use the non-woven bags.
Landfills are already expanding more and more, we run out of space, and we are continuing to reclaim land from the wilderness. This brings animals close to extinction, and it’s a huge problem that has to be solved as quickly as possible. Even if we believe this is a cure, sometimes this cure can be worse than the disease itself. This is why we have to be very careful with eco-friendly products.
Just because some of them deliver great results, that doesn’t mean all of them do that. Studying the fibers and understanding what exactly we are using will help us prevent any further damage to our planet. We need to find true eco-friendly replacements if we want to make a difference, otherwise all these actions will be in vain!