Plastic bags are difficult and expensive to recycle and most end up in landfills where they take about 300 years to photodegrade. They break down into small toxic particles that contaminate soil and waterways and enter the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them. Plastic bags start as fossil fuels and end up as deadly waste in landfills and the ocean. Birds often mistake shredded plastic bags for food, filling their stomachs of toxic waste.
For hungry sea turtles, it's almost impossible to distinguish between jellyfish and floating plastic shopping bags. Fish eat thousands of tons of plastic a year and transfer it along the food chain and transfer it to larger fish and marine mammals. People also consume microplastics through food and air. It is estimated that, around the world, people consume the equivalent of a credit card full of plastic every week,1 and it is expected that by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the sea.
Plastic bags that are recycled on the sidewalks of homes end up entangled in equipment of classification. This delays the recycling process, damages or breaks recycling equipment, and puts workers at risk of harm. The photo shows workers unraveling dozens of plastic bags from sorting equipment. The physical light weight of plastic bags means they can pose a deadly risk to animals, especially marine life.
They are easily caught by the wind and are therefore deposited in the natural world and pollute our oceans. Even if discarded far from the coast, they can crawl into drains during rain and enter waterways. This takes them to the sea. The sea creatures then ingest the bags and mistake them for food.
Once ingested, the creatures often drown in plastic or contract internal infections and die of hunger as a result. Once the animal's corpse has rotted, the plastic bag escapes from its corpse and the process can be repeated with another animal. After the break, we'll look at the weaknesses of the bag ban, the advantages and disadvantages of other types of shopping bags, and other ideas that haven't reached the same level of popularity as Dijon's crusty plastic ones. Practically in any case, people opt for another type of bag for shopping, and although plastic is unique because it doesn't break down, other types of bags have their own problems.
In fact, 6% of all the world's oil resources are used to make plastic, and 40% of that 6% is used to make plastic bags. Fortunately, initiatives are being developed to counter the problems posed by plastic bags by using completely environmentally friendly alternatives. A study has revealed that 3 uses are needed for a paper bag to be more environmentally friendly than its plastic counterpart. It is estimated that approximately 100,000 marine mammals die each year just from the ingestion of plastic bags.
One of the first steps in leading an environmentally friendly lifestyle is to eliminate plastic bags from your life. If you melt a plastic bag, you can absolutely recycle that polyethylene, and in fact, recycled HDPE has about one-third of the carbon footprint of virgin HDPE. This means that fewer animals get entangled over time, which is good, but unfortunately it also means that plastic bags take much less time to turn into microplastics. Compared to plastic bags, paper bags also require much more energy and water to manufacture, and more energy to transport, as they are heavier. If animals don't consume plastic bags in their entirety, they are likely to continue to ingest some of them.
