It’s easy to think about the negative effects of plastic bags on the environment when you consider that 100 billion plastic bags are used in the United States each year and take up to 1,000 years to break down. Fifty years ago there were no bags on this planet. Now consider, based on their rate of decomposition, that every bag ever made except recycled or incinerated is filling our landfills, polluting our waterways, or hanging in our kitchen cabinets as clutter.
Often the conveniences of everyday life, the things that we now consider a necessity, were developed and introduced into our lives just because they were the cheapest option. Long-term costs, such as the impact on our environment and cleaning it up, were not considered. This appears to be the case for plastic bags.
• Dependence on foreign oil – Plastic bags are made from polyethylene, a by-product of petroleum. Approximately 60 to 100 million barrels of oil go into its production each year. China recently banned the use of plastic bags, and its estimated oil savings were about 37 million barrels per year.
• They take a long, long time to break down – Plastic bags haven’t been around for long, less than fifty years. So no one knows for sure how long it takes to break down. However, one thing is for sure; all the plastic bags that haven’t been recycled or incinerated are still on this planet in landfills, floating in the ocean, littering our parks, highways, and lakes, or just piled up in the corners of our closets, garages, or kitchens. Grocery bags are made from polyethylene and are photodegradable and non-biodegradable. Being photodegradable media, these bags need sunlight to break down. Therefore, burying them in a landfill does little more than hide the problem and create mountains of garbage buried out of sight. When and if they do degrade, they simply break down into smaller, more toxic microscopic particles called petroleum polymers that seep into waterways and eventually enter our food chain.
• Plastic bags account for 10% of the waste washed up on our shores – They have been seen floating in the oceans and reaching shores as far north as the Arctic Circle and as far south as the Falkland Islands. What a horrible monstrosity for our planet as a whole.
• Kill hundreds of thousands of animals per year – Believing that the bags are food, marine fauna choke on the bags and die or enter their digestive systems to death. After death their bodies decompose, but not the bags.
Plastic bags are cheap, efficient and resistant. They make shopping simple and easy. However, plastic bags have many negative effects on the environment. They increase our dependence on foreign oil, pollute our waterways, fill our landfills, kill our wildlife, and are an eyesore.
