By: Chloe Huckins

David Tyler is a UO chemistry professor who has read extensively on Life Cycle Assessments, which determine how much energy goes into a product throughout its lifetime. Tyler also teaches a class called Chemistry of Sustainability that uses basic chemical concepts to address challenges in protecting the environment.

David Tyler

Why is the Bag Ban not the best option?

A lot of people find this one hard to believe, but the total amount of water used during the life cycle of a plastic bag is much less than say for a paper bag.

So is it that people don’t like the visual component of plastic bag litter?

I try to be fair. If you’re more interested in litter, like fish choking on plastic bags, stuff like that, then by all means ban plastic bags if you feel that’s the thing to do. If you’re more interested in global warming then you probably don’t want to ban plastic bags.

You’ve also compared plastic cups to ceramic mugs, how does that break down?

When they do the life cycle assessment they have to make assumptions. So the assumption was that you would wash it once every four uses. That’s a pretty good average because my graduate students never wash their cups but my mother washes hers every time. And then how long do you use it; their assumption is two to three years. So then I go home and I count up the number of ceramic mugs I have in my house, and it’s something like 37. Every Father’s Day my kids will give me one like World’s Best Dad or I Love New York. You know, you got a bunch of these and they all have to count. So if you were issued one at birth and it didn’t break, you’d come out far ahead by using a reusable mug.  But, probably that’s not really the case. I got one just last week as a Christmas present from a conservation group.

What about alternative forms of energy, like wind?

It takes two to three years to break even. The problem is—I always call it the quality of life issue. We’re young—well you’re young, I’m still kind of young at heart. But my mother who’s 86, she thinks those windmills are terrible. She lives in Indiana, comes from Nebraska, both very windy places. So she goes for a drive in the country and you literally can see a thousand windmills no matter where you look, and she thinks it spoils the countryside. And you and I look at it and go wow, think of all that energy that we’re harvesting.