Preferring paper over plastic bags

To the editor: I am sure that Mary Makofske means well, and I certainly cannot quibble with her suggestion that canvas bags are an environmentally friendly choice for carrying groceries, but some of the comments she makes concerning the manufacture of paper are incorrect. First, in modern times very little virgin papermaking in the United States “uses valuable timber.” Trees are simply too valuable to use just for paper. Owners of woodlands get more return from their crop by selling it for utility poles, dimensional lumber and plywood than they can from selling it to paper mills. As a consequence, the fiber that goes into most paper products comes from residuals, that is the parts of the tree which cannot be used for more profitable purposes. Second, the manufacture of unbleached paper such as used in grocery bags does not involve the use of any chlorine-containing chemicals, so there can be no contamination from “chlorinated dioxin.” Nowadays, even the manufacture of bleached products does not produce dioxins. Third, the only situation in which making paper could “pollute the air with lead and mercury” is if the paper mill is burning coal to generate power and heat. Since a papermill making unbleached paper from wood should be able to generate all of its energy needs by burning the portion of the tree dissolved by the pulp-making chemicals, there should be no need to burn a fossil fuel. And yes, the burning of these wood components does generate carbon dioxide, but this is short-cycle carbon dioxide, that is carbon dioxide from recently-formed carbonaceous compounds, not from fossil carbon such as found in coal, oil and gas. That may sound like a subtle distinction, but it means that the carbon dioxide generated by the paper mill is balanced by the carbon dioxide used to grow the wood which was burned, with a resulting zero “carbon-footprint.” I prefer paper grocery bags over plastic bags not only because they are made from a renewable crop (grown here) instead of from oil (much of which is imported), but because they are functionally better: fewer of them are required (one paper bag holds as much as two or three plastic bags), and they will stand up in a car instead of slithering around spilling their contents. James Luce Warwick