Paper beats plastic? How to rethink environmental folklore

So imagine, you're in the supermarket, you're buying some groceries, and you get given the option for a plastic or a paper shopping bag. Which one do you choose if you want to do the right thing by the environment?

Most people do pick the paper. Okay, let's think of why. It's brown to start with. Therefore, it must be good for the environment. It's biodegradable. It's reusable. In some cases, it's recyclable. So when people are looking at the plastic bag, it's likely they're thinking of something like this, which we all know is absolutely terrible, and we should be avoiding at all expenses these kinds of environmental damages. But people are often not thinking of something like this, which is the other end of the spectrum. When we produce materials, we need to extract them from the environment, and we need a whole bunch
of environmental impacts.

You see, what happens is, when we need to make complex choices, us humans like really simple solutions, and so we often ask for simple solutions. And I work in design. I advise designers and innovators around sustainability, and everyone always says to me, "Oh Leyla, I just want the eco-materials."

And I say, "Well, that's very complex, and we'll have to spend four hours talking about what exactly an eco-material means, because everything at some point comes from nature, and it's how you use the material that dictates the environmental impact. So what happens is, we have to rely on some sort of intuitive framework when we make decisions. So I like to call that intuitive framework our environmental folklore. It's either the little voice
at the back of your head, or it's that gut feeling you get when you've done the right thing, so when you've picked the paper bag or when you've bought a fuel-efficient car. And environmental folklore is a really important thing because we're trying to do the right thing. But how do we know if we're actually reducing the net environmental impacts that our actions as individuals and as professionals and as a society are actually having on the natural environment?

So the thing about environmental folklore is it tends to be based on our experiences, the things we've heard from other people. It doesn't tend to be based
on any scientific framework. And this is really hard, because we live in incredibly complex systems. We have the human systems of how we communicate and interrelate and have our whole constructed society, We have the industrial systems,
which is essentially the entire economy, and then all of that has to operate within the biggest system, and, I would argue, the most important, the ecosystem. And you see, the choices that we make as an individual, but the choices that we make in every single job that we have, no matter how high or low
you are in the pecking order, has an impact on all of these systems. And the thing is that we have to find ways if we're actually going to address sustainability of interlocking those complex systems and making better choices that result in net environmental gains. What we need to do is we need to learn to do more with less. We have an increasing population, and everybody likes their mobile phones, especially in this situation here. So we need to find innovative ways of solving
some of these problems that we face.

And that's where this process called
life cycle thinking comes in.