 Question, you're in the supermarket and you're given a choice between a paper and a plastic shopping bag Which one do you pick if you want to do the right thing by the environment? Think about it Most people pick the paper bag. It's biodegradable. It's recyclable. It's brown And when people think of a plastic bag they have something like this that comes to mind Unfortunately, what's not happening is images like this coming to mind and that is the ecological Destruction that happens in the extraction and production of paper fiber in order to make a paper bag You see when we make a decision about what's environmentally friendly and what's not we need to rely on what me and my colleague referred to as your environmental folklore Now this is basically that little voice in the back of your head that says or Something similar that effect. I don't know what yours sounds like probably don't want to know But essentially it's made up out of the things we've done the people we've spoken to the newspaper articles We've read it's made up of facts and fiction and greenwashing and PR and everything That's not science probably and is probably a lot about your values and the things that you've experienced Which is important, but it doesn't help us save the world You see we live in a highly complex world Humans make complex systems like this and I can tell you now I'm sure a few of you have fallen victim to tube maps in foreign countries like I have and Nature was she is the mother of complex beautiful systems So we have this technical and this natural systems that are so complex We somehow have to put all of these pieces together to get a picture as to exactly what's going on so that we can make choices That actually help us live sustainably so that future generations can enjoy the quality of life that we have today That's where a little process called life cycle assessment comes in which is what I work in and essentially this is a scientific methodology for evaluating the whole of life Environmental impacts of a product system or service across its entire life You have a life story every single product that exists has a life story Essentially everything that is created goes through five main life cycle stages from the extraction of raw materials Which I can tell you now everything comes from nature Everything at one point can be traced back to a natural form And then we have to take these things that we've dug out of the ground or sheared off a sheep's back and Manufacture them into a material and then manufacture those materials into the products that you and I use But first before we get it we have to trap package it and transport it all over the world Then of course you and I come in and then there's end-of-life and at every single one of these five main life cycle stages There is an interaction and interrelationship with the natural environment And it's with this relationship and interaction that we can start to understand and assess Where environmental impacts are actually occurring and then we can design solutions to resolve those Fix them and innovate so that we can start to achieve sustainability Unfortunately though us humans are we're quite focused on just one of those life cycle stages That is end-of-life make sense. We all buy stuff that's covered in plastic packaging We have to go and throw it in the bin or recycling We know what it's like to see a plastic bag stuck to a tree at a river We get hurt by these things because there are experiences. They're part of our environmental folklore Unfortunately though We're not starting to look at the whole system and it's when we look at the whole system that we start to see what's really going on I Can tell you now that a paper bag has an entire History of environmental impacts that it has to go through before it gets to the shop shopping center Before it gets to your home and before it either gets recycled or doesn't get recycled And the reality is this paper could only be recycled five times before the fibers disintegrating to nothing Okay, but before that we have to go and we have to cut down trees. We have to transport them We have to manufacture them We have to then get them to little fibers heat roller them glue these bags together ship them over here And then we use them and then we throw them out and When we look at both of these systems the plastic bag is actually better for the environment. I don't work for a plastics company Just so you know and I'm not telling you this so that you go and buy a plastic bag That's actually not what I'm saying Please don't don't stop this thing right there because that would be the bad bad solution to this talk The reason a paper bag is not as good as a plastic bag in this option is because it weighs more It weighs four to ten times more than a plastic bag So when you take the two life cycles and you compare them We start to see that you need four to ten times trees cutting down on all of those processes in order to get the Functionality of carrying a paper bag home with your shopping in it. That's ridiculous So what we need to start doing is we need to actually start looking at the entire system And we need to realize that disposability is not an option. That's a whole lot of Ted talk entirely You know, you should be using a reusable bag people just so you know and before Before we go into that Ted talk I'd like to say that these green myths that we perpetuate in society such as you know Somehow by picking a paper bag we've absolved our environmental burden on the planet Well, I can tell you now this is allowing us to avoid the real issues and that is it's not what bags We pickets what's inside the bags and we need to start thinking about the environmental impacts across the entire life of absolutely Every single thing that we create designers engineers business people you guys need to start making Decisions that alleviate the prestige on the natural environment. So next time You get this little guy in your head Don't listen to him saying pick the paper you should stop and question what you think you know Thank you