Common Perception
No single packaging item has been more vilified in recent years. Bans, taxes, and corporate pledges to eliminate them have proliferated across the world. Retailers have replaced them with paper bags at considerable cost, presenting the switch as an environmental win. Consumers have dutifully brought cotton totes, feeling they were doing their bit.
And yet, life cycle analysis —the only scientifically rigorous method for measuring true environmental impact— concludes the maligned and modest plastic shopping bag is actually the greenest packaging option available.
By a significant margin.
Understanding why this is true — and why it matters so directly to protective packaging — is important for businesses when making packaging decisions.
What the science actually says
An independent review of 24 studies conducted by government agencies and research institutions in six countries over two decades reached the conclusion that plastic has the least environmental impact both at single use level and multi-purpose.
Each LCA study ever conducted on grocery bags confirmed— specifically standard polyethylene bags — have the lowest environmental impact across virtually every measured category.
This body of evidence, alongside thousands of other peer-reviewed studies on plastics, was synthesised by Dr. Chris DeArmitt— an independent materials scientist with a PhD in chemistry, Fellowship of theRoyal Society of Chemistry, and Fellowship of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining. He spent years unfunded reviewing published studies from Denmark, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and South Africa.
His role is to make the existing science accessible, not to conduct new research. And his independence from any industry funding means the synthesis carries no commercial agenda.
The studies are worth examining individually, because the consistency across independent research teams is itself significant.
A 2014 Clemson University study concluded that any decision to replace polyethylene bags with paper or compostable alternatives would be counterproductive, resulting in significantly higher environmental impacts across multiple categories including global warming potential and water use. A Franklin Associates study found that paper bags — even those made from recycled content — require substantially more energy, generate more CO₂, consume more water, and produce more waste than plastic equivalents. The Danish Environmental Protection Agency concluded that plastic bags provided the lowest overall environmental impacts of all bag types assessed. The UK Environment Agency found that a paper bag would need to be reused at least four times to match the global warming performance of a single-use plastic bag — and noted that paper's low durability makes this unlikely in practice. Studies from South Africa and Australia reached identical conclusions.
On weight alone, the comparison is telling. A standard plastic carrier bag weighs less than 6 grams. A paper equivalent weighs around 60 grams — ten times more. Since weight drives material demand, energy consumption, and transport emissions at every stage of a product's life, this single factor goes a long way to explaining why plastic wins so consistently.
Plastics at End of Life
Before examining the numbers, it is worth addressing a common question to the LCA evidence: "but what about recycling?"
The short answer is that the studies already account for it — and plastic still wins, even if it’s not recycled.
Several of the LCA studies explicitly compared standard polyethylene bags against paper bags made from recycled content. The Clemson University study, for example, directly compared PE bags to a 30% recycled content paper bag and found plastic still significantly lower impact across multiple environmental categories. The Franklin Associates study reached the same conclusion. Recycled paper content does not change the outcome, because the weight disadvantage of paper — ten times heavier than plastic — creates an environmental burden at every stage of the lifecycle that recycled content alone cannot overcome.
The baseline LCA results assume the plastic bag goes to general waste — not recycled, not littered. In most waste management systems this means incineration, and here plastic has a further advantage that LCA comparisons rarely highlight: polyethylene has a high calorific value and generates a meaningful yield of energy when incinerated through energy from waste (EfW) systems. Rather than being an environmental liability at end of life, it becomes an energy asset — displacing fossil fuel generation in the grid. Paper, by contrast, generates significantly less energy when incinerated and is more likely to produce residual waste.
The studies assume no soft plastic recycling because at the time most were conducted, soft plastic collection infrastructure was just developing. That picture is changing. Soft plastic collections are now increasingly available across UK supermarkets and local authority schemes. As it’s quite new, there is some consumer confusion about which materials qualify, and contamination from food residue means a proportion of collected material is incinerated rather than recycled. Awareness will naturally improve. But the critical point is material that enters a collection scheme is not littered. The only genuine environmental criticism of plastic — visual pollution and the risk of entering waterways — is addressed when plastic film is disposed responsibly. This includes not littering (a behavioral fault, not material fault) so entering any managed waste stream, which leads to recycling or EfW.
The LCA results, already compelling at baseline, only improve as the system matures. Better consumer education reduces contamination. Expanding infrastructure increases recycling yields. The scientific case for plastic film packaging is not a fixed position. It's only a floor and the direction of travel is firmly upward.
And our own films are already ahead of that trajectory. With 50% recycled content, 100% recyclability, and a dedicated Return 2 Recycle scheme that ensures used film is properly processed rather than sent to general waste, FGP's air cushion films represent the best-case outcome that the LCA studies' baseline assumptions are moving towards.
The numbers that should change the conversation
The Denkstatt study, commissioned independently and published in 2011, quantified the aggregate effect of replacing plastic packaging with alternatives across the European market. Its conclusions are the clearest statement of the LCA case available:
Replacing plastic packaging with alternative materials increases packaging weight by a factor of 3.6, increases life cycle energy demand by a factor of 2.2, and increases greenhouse gas emissions by a factor of 2.7 — equivalent, the authors note, to the annual CO₂ emissions of an entire country.
These figures apply to packaging materials broadly, not just carrier bags. They represent the average across multiple packaging applications — food packaging, carrier bags, other flexible and rigid packaging — all compared on an equivalent functional basis. They are not the product of a single study or a single methodology. They are the consolidated findings of independent peer-reviewed research, replicated across countries and decades.
The less talked about impact of trees as resource
The tree felling dimension is worth mentioning too, as industrialised mono-forests and deforestation have their own environmental implications. Estimates based on European packaging consumption suggest that replacing plastic packaging with paper alternatives at scale would require cutting down approximately 2.2 million additional trees per year across the EU alone. Paper is frequently presented as a natural, renewable alternative to plastic — and so it is, in the sense that trees grow back. But the energy, water, chemicals, impact on biodiversity and the land use required to grow, harvest, process, and transport that volume of additional timber is an environmental cost that rarely features in the paper-good, plastic-bad narrative. In short, plastics used responsibly do so much more with far less.
What we can learn
For any business currently operating a paper-only packaging policy in the belief that it reduces environmental impact, these numbers deserve serious consideration.
LCA studies have been pointing to these conclusions for over two decades. Governments and corporations moved in the opposite direction regardless.
A quick Google search shows various policy examples in California, Canada, Sweden, or San Fransisco which had negative unintended consequences becuase they didn't consult the science.
How this applies further to Forever Green's films
The FGP film used in our air cushion systems are made from high-density polyethylene (HDPE) which is the same family of material as the plastic carrier bags featured in the LCA studies, but with a material efficiency advantage that raises the ceiling further still.
The grocery bag studies are predominantly based on LDPE — low-density polyethylene. HDPE has a more tightly packed molecular structure, giving it greater tensile strength and stiffness per unit of thickness. In practical terms, this means the same protective function can be achieved with less material. An 18–20 micron HDPE film can perform the protective role that might require 25–30 microns of LDPE. Less material per unit of function means less energy in production, less weight in transport, and less waste at end of life. The LCA advantage of the grocery bag studies is driven primarily by low mass per functional unit. And our HDPE air cushion film has better mass efficiency than the bags those studies examined. The baseline is already compelling, and HDPE raises it.
There is a further advantage that rarely features in packaging environmental comparisons that we will return to later in this series. That is how packaging systems — not just materials —multiply the environmental advantage.
But before looking at systems later, let's stay on the materials and look at where the argument takes an important step further.
The LCA studies comparing plastic bags to paper bags do so on a like-for-like material basis: one bag compared to another bag of equivalent volume. That is a fair comparison for carrier bags. For protective void fill packaging, however, the comparison breaks down in a way that makes the environmental case for air cushion packaging even more striking.
A sheet of paper void fill is solid material. An inflated air cushion is 99% air and 1% film. You are not comparing plastic film to paper on a material-for-material basis. You are comparing paper — a material that already performs significantly worse than plastic on every LCA measure — to something that is almost entirely nothing.
The 3.6×, 2.2×, and 2.7× figures represent the environmental cost of choosing paper over plastic on a like-for-like material comparison. Air cushion packaging doesn't just win that comparison — it operates in a different category altogether. The material footprint of an inflated air cushion is so small relative to paper void fill, and other materials, that the gap between them is difficult to quantify in conventional LCA terms.
What actually works also has an environmental impact
Another crucial factor is which material does the best job? You may have experienced paper bags failing when damp. Whereas, how often do we find reuses of plastic bags such as bin liners….These real-life scenarios are not baked in to the LCA and strengthen an already resounding case for plastic in most cases.
We will explore this in full in the next piece in this series.
But the starting point is understanding that the plastic shopping bag — the most maligned packaging item of the past decade — is, by every credible scientific measure, the greenest option available. What’s vilified is more than vindicated. And our air cushion films are made of the same material.
Then you factor in our 50% recycled content, our help recommending the least amount of material for the protection needed, full recyclability via our Return 2 Recycle scheme, and you’re dealing with the greenest protective packaging supplier you can find.
As ever, we’re keen to talk and always learning on these subjects so we’d be pleased to hear your comments or questions. Yours, Forever Green 😊
Scientific references: LCA studies referenced: Kimmel, Clemson University (2014); Franklin Associates (1990, 2018); Danish EPA(2018); Edwards & Fry, UK Environment Agency (2011); Reason Foundation(2014); Sevitz et al., South Africa (2003); Hyder Consulting, Australia (2009);denkstatt GmbH, Europe (2011). All studies are peer-reviewed or independently commissioned and publicly available. Synthesised by Dr. Chris DeArmitt PhD,FRSC, FIMMM, independent materials scientist, no industry funding. Policy examples: Canada Federal Court ruling, November 2023; California bag ban unintended consequences, multiple sources; Sweden bag tax repeal, 2024; SanFrancisco temporary ban reversal, 2020.