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Prism Pak's Commitment to Sustainability
Prism Pak is committed, not only to selling quality products at the lowest prices, but also ensuring the bags that we manufacture & sell have the lowest negative environmental impact that they can without comprising product integrity. We've put together the following chart about our products so that you can make informed decisions about the materials that you buy and know that we stand behind our environmental commitment.
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Feature
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Plastic
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Paper
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Energy to Produce
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40% less than paper - 594BTU or .17408 kwh
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+40% more than plastic - 2511 BTU or .7359 kwh
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Water to Produce
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4% of the water needed to produce paper bags. 58 gallons/1500 bags
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+96% more water to produce than plastic. 1004 gallons/1000 bags
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Weight/landfill space
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2000 bags=30lbs
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2000 bags=280lbs
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GreenHouse Gas Emissions
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50% less than composted paper. 4,645 tons/ 150 million bags
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+50% more than plastic. 7,621 tons/100 million bags
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Energy to recycle
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91% less energy per lb than paper
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+91% more than plastic
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Air pollutants
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70% less than paper
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+70% more than plastic
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Water Pollution
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50x less than paper
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50x more than plastic
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To Make 1 ton of Plastic, it takes:
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Plastic from Natural Resources
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Plastic from Recycled Material
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Oil/Natural Gas
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7,850 lbs
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0
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Plastic
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0
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2,000 lbs
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Energy Required (HDPE)
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21,471 kwh
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1,074 kwh
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Other things to consider when making bag material choice:
1) The American Forest and Paper Association says the US uses over 10
billion paper shopping bags annually. This is a significant source of
tree consumption.
2) The Federal reserve had mandated a banking system change for banks to switch to the plastic tamper-evident deposit bags as opposed to the cloth bags and vinyl bags for intra bank processing, because they found that the energy involved in laundering, manufacturing, and shipping the old cloth and vinyl bags was not nearly as cost effective or environmentally-friendly as moving to the single use plastic tamper-evident bags.
3) All the Prism Pak bags are recyclable.
4) Using plastic bags instead of paper bags not only saves you on freight charges & storage space, but it also reduces the amount of air pollutants created when shipping & further, reduces the energy, too.
5) We work closely with our film suppliers to choose films that have recycled content. We also have chosen suppliers that are using renewable energy, like wind, to produce those films.
5) All of our production scrap either gets reground into more plastic film, or is shipped to a company that manufactures plastic lumber for park benches and such.
6) Lastly, the polyethylene films we (and all bag companies in North America) use are made from bi-products of Natural Gas cracking for home heating.
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