Plastic bag's world
What about the ubiquitous grocery store plastic bag? Where do we start? Plastic bags are popular with consumers and retailers as they are a convenient, lightweight, strong, cheap, and hygienic way to transport food and other products. However the bags contribute to greenhouse gases, clog up landfills, litter streets and streams, and kill wildlife. Globally we use a trillion bags a year. That is approx 10 million every 5 minutes
One of the biggest problem with plastic bags is that they do not readily break down in the environment, with estimates that it takes from twenty to thousands of years for them to decompose. One of the disquieting facts stemming from this is that plastic bags can become serial killers. Once an animal that had ingested a plastic bag dies, it decays at a much faster rate than the bag. Once the animal has decomposed, the bag is released back into the environment more or less intact, ready to be eaten by another misguided organism. The incredibly slow rate of decay of plastic bags also means that each bag we use compounds the problem, because the bags simply accumulate.
Plastic bags are often mistakenly ingested by animals, clogging their intestines which results in death by starvation. Other animals or birds become entangled in plastic bags and drown or can’t fly as a result.
There is some dispute as to whether plastic bags can actually be made from 100 percent recycled content. But whether they can or not, the real question is whether we need to continue producing more plastic bags in the first place. Whether made from recycled material or not, plastic bags create havoc when let loose in the environment. What’s more, no matter what products we recycle our bags into, the fact is that plastic can only be recycled a finite number of times before it loses tensile strength and must finally be retired. While the same is true for paper, whose fibers get shorter the more they are recycled, paper will biodegrade at the end of its life. Plastic will not. Those huge molecules will still be around long after we’re gone.
So is it worth it to bring our plastic bags back to the store for recycling? Yes. But not until we’ve gotten as much use out of them as we can. Let’s first reduce the number of new bags we consume in the first place, reuse them as much as possible, and only then bring them back for recycling. Recycling is not a solution to the plastic bag problem. It simply keeps them out of landfills and the environment for a little longer.
