Composition

• courtesy Guardian UK
  
  While misuse of plastic bags may be responsible for environmental contamination, they are much more eco-friendly than many assume, especially when looked at from their creation to their eventual end. Plastic from plastic bags is polyethylene, which is made from polymers refined from natural gas and sometimes oil. The polyethylene forms long chains of atoms, mostly carbon and hydrogen, that make it keep its shape and give it the strength to hold other objects while remaining very light. Including all different types of plastic bags, the United States manufactures almost 90 million of them a year.
  
  

Manufacturing

• Manufacturing plastic bags is a much more simple process than it may first appear. As a whole, producing plastic bags creates 50 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than producing paper bags, which require a more complicated, detailed process. Making plastic bags also uses 70 percent less energy and leaves 80 percent fewer byproducts than paper versions. Compared to the alternatives, plastic bag manufacturing is a highly efficient process that produces little waste and requires much less energy. Depending on the process used, plastic bag factories also tend to produce fewer water pollutants than alternatives.
  
  

Water Use

• Paper alternatives also need to be rinsed and cleaned in several different storage tanks in their pulp form, which uses a large amount of water. By comparison, plastic bags use about 4 percent of the water required to make pulp into paper. When thrown away in landfills or other waste disposal options, plastic bags also tend to take up far less room, since their lightweight construction allows them to be compacted into a much smaller space.
  
  

Recycling

• While plastic bags do sometimes end up in natural environments through littering and careless actions, most can be recycled as easily as the paper versions. Plastics are synthetics and cannot become part of the ecosystem again, but they can be used again in other materials, most notably composites like composite wood. These composites are made up of recycled plastics and other substances which can be reused as light and durable construction materials.
  
  

Considerations

• While plastic bags can be recycled, only around 15 percent of them actually are, while the others are thrown into normal waste disposal containers and end up in landfills. To mitigate this problem, some eco-conscious people choose to buy "permanent" plastic bags that they take with them to do their shopping.