Plastic Bags are Harmful!

In 2012, Americans alone produced over 250 million tons of garbage. One large component of this waste consisted of oil based plastic bags, which are utilized excessively by grocers, restaurants, and stores nationwide. In order to reduce this source of waste, many countries are banning plastic bags or taxing customers for their use. Bensel; & Turk (2014) suggest reusing materials multiple times or for another purpose can also save on solid wastes, this would include reusing plastic bags that we get from the super market for household garbage (Section 9.4).

A few environmental problems around the world that are caused by such extensive plastic bag use are “they take around 300 years to photo degrade and breakdown into tiny toxic particles that contaminate soils and water bodies and enter even the food chains” (Verma, 2009, p.589).  Since grocery plastic bags are use to shop and carry worldwide, there is no shortage of these bags being not recycled.  Many are found in ocean coast choking up the seaweed and polluting marine life.  Verma (2009) further explains that India is known for the highest use of plastic bags and not only is fish affected but also cows in this region die of chewing the bags.  Other animals get caught up and suffocate and die in bags that are not properly disposed of, reused or recycled. In China, “1.3 billion people use an estimated 3 billion plastic bags every day.  This not only poses a serious environmental problem, but is also getting very expensive; China has to refine estimated 37million barrels of oil a year for plastic bags alone” (The Chemical Engineer, 2008).  This not only is just too many bags use around the world, it cost more in using fossil fuel to keep making more bags every day; especially if they are not reused and/or recycled.

If I were in charge, the plan I might propose to reduce or eliminate their use is start making people being more responsible and use store supplied cloth bags or supply their own non paper or non plastic reusable bags when shopping.  Let’s face it; the plastic bags at the supermarket are never strong enough to carry enough in them, so most people have to either double the plastic bag or use more than one, placing less in each one.  Stores have moved away from using paper to save trees, so even if you were to reuse or recycle the paper bags, you no longer have that choice.  Yes, people will complain that they have to pay for cloth bags, but that is the price to pay when some buyers refuse to reuse or recycle their plastic bags.

The economic impacts of implementing my plan versus the financial impacts of making no change in our current use are oil companies can stop using valuable fossil fuel for an everyday shopping bags, grocers can stop spending money on plastic bags, recycling plants can spend less when using energy to recycle plastic.  Maybe the stores may even pass the savings off to the customer if they do not have to pay for something that is not being used.  If nothing is done to use less plastic bags, or eliminate their use, the pollution, the use of oil, the energy to process the bags, and toxic waste in landfills will continue to build up.

References

Pollution survey spells green dawn for China. (2008). TCE: The Chemical Engineer, (800), 8.

Turk, J., & Bensel, T. (2014). Contemporary environmental issues (2nd ed.). San Diego, CA: Bridgepoint Education, Inc

Verma, B. B. (2009). Continuous jute fibre reinforced laminated paper composite and reinforcement-fibre free paper laminate. Bulletin Of Materials Science, 32(6), 589-595. doi:10.1007/s12034-009-0090-0