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| What is "Plastic Shopping Bag" |
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Disadvantages
The following disadvantages have also been identified:
* Plastic bags are made of petrochemicals, a nonrenewable resource.
* Plastic bags are flimsy and often do not stand up as well as paper or cloth.
* When disposed of improperly, they are unsightly and represent a hazard to wildlife.
* Plastic bags, conventional or "biodegradable", do not readily biodegrade in a sanitary landfill, (but neither does paper due to lack of oxygen).
* Plastic bags can cause unsupervised infants to suffocate.[4]
Environmental impacts
Sturdy reusable shopping bags are EPA verified environmentally superior to single-use plastic shopping bags. A sturdy, reusable bag needs only be used 11 times to have a lower environmental impact than using 11 disposable plastic bags (providing you somehow dispose of your household waste without using bags). When unnecessary, taking single-use bags from stores is discouraged. In the case one is compelled to take a single-use bag, such bags can be recycled. Paper is accepted in most recycling programs while the recycling rate for plastic bags is very low, research from 2000 shows 20 percent of paper bags were recycled, while one percent of plastic bags were recycled. [1] Shopping bags can also be reused as trash bags, storage bags, etc. However, bags that are reused as trash bags typically still go to landfills. Current research demonstrates that paper in today's landfills does not degrade or break down at a substantially faster rate than plastic does. In fact, nothing completely degrades in modern landfills due to the lack of water, light, oxygen, and other important elements that are necessary for the degradation process to be completed. [2] Responsible solid waste disposal is encouraged. Used bags should not be littered: this is unsightly, damages wildlife and exposes fisheries to eminent danger. [3] Aquatic life can be threatened through entanglement, suffocation, and ingestion. [4] One animal dissected by Dutch researchers contained 1,603 pieces of plastic. All sea creatures are threatened by floating plastic, from whales down to zooplankton. Research proves the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" in the North Pacific Gyre contains six times as much plastic as it does plankton. [5]
Sea turtles may mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. The reason that turtles ingest marine debris is not known with certainty. It has been suggested that debris, such as plastic bags, look similar to, and are mistaken for jellyfish. [6] Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds. "These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs," Ocean Conservancy vice president Warner Chabot said. "It doesn't pass, and they literally starve to death." [7] A study of the seafloor using trawl nets in the North-Western Mediterranean around the coasts of Spain, France and Italy in 1993/4 reported a particularly high mean concentration of debris (1935 items/km2 or 19.35 items/hectare) (Galgani et al. 1995). 77% of the debris was plastics and of this, 92.8% were plastic bags. [8]
Nearly 80% of litter in the ocean comes from land-based sources. [5] Most of the land-based debris is conveyed to oceans via urban runoff through storm drains. The main source of plastic bags in the ocean is from urban runoff. [9]
