Plastic bags surround us … They are everywhere
Can you remember the last time you went shopping and didn’t use a plastic bag? Most of us can’t. Single use plastic bags are convenient for consumers. But this convenience comes with a huge burden on the environment and human health. (convenience is a single advantage against a huge number of cons). Plastic bag usage amounts to 10 million plastic bags every minute. Imagine how many until you end reading up this post! A handful of nations have taken up the responsibility of reducing plastic bag pollution.
Plastic bags result in multiple forms of pollution, especially on land and in water. We see them around us quite often. Even if we clean our backyard every day, at least one plastic bag is bound to wind up on the fence, on the trees, or in the litter. The reason plastic material ends up in your backyard (even though you didn’t throw it in there) is because plastic items are lightweight. They can easily be lifted up by air and travel long distances before dropping on another piece of land. They can even make it to several of world’s oceans. Plastic trash is the most common constituent of garbage collected from homes and offices. Ironically; trash bags are also, usually, made of plastic. Thin-film plastic bags are smallest in terms of garbage but their huge quantity can cause major problems around the world.
Manufacturing plastic bags utilizes non-renewable sources; this contributes to global warming and climate change. The raw materials of plastics (polypropylene) include petroleum and natural gas. These non-renewable sources contribute highly to global warming and climate change along with release of harmful greenhouse gasses. Worldwide plastic bottle production uses 24 Million liters of oil to produce billions of water bottles.
Plastic bags are extremely harmful to wildlife, especially to marine animals. Many organisms of the food web including birds, terrestrial animals like snails and especially the marine life organisms such as fishes and turtles mistake plastic material as food and eat them. What happens is, plastic bags or other plastics get stuck in the small digestive systems of these animals. This causes obstruction of the digestive systems and because they get blocked, these animals either die of suffocation or starvation. Turtles feed on jellyfish primarily and because plastic bags resemble jellyfish to the sea turtles, mostly leatherback species which are endangered, they ingest these plastic bags. Plastic waste is also one of the major blockages for baby turtles making their way across the beach into oceans.
Plastic bags are harmful to human health as well –
Micro-plastics have been found in human feces. But it doesn’t come as a surprise because most of what we drink or eat have plastic residue. Research estimates that every second person in the world could have a bit of micro-plastic in their bodies. The worrisome part is what would happen if plastic concentrations were to get too high in human bodies. This is because it has not been tested before. As we discussed, they have turned out to be deadly for animals, so what about humans? Iron absorption could be affected by ingesting plastics. Micro-plastics act as Iron chelators and impact the absorption of iron in the small intestines. Chelators are very small particles that block absorption of food and water into small and large intestines. Raw plastic is subjected to numerous chemicals before it reaches the hands of consumers, most commonly the inorganic dyes to color the plastic products. These dyes often contain trace quantities of heavy metals like lead, which could result in disastrous effects on the body, especially the kidneys that try to filter them out. The fragments of plastic bags that end up in the ocean absorb numerous chemicals, the more dangerous ones being PCBs (Polychlorinated Biphenyls) and PAH (Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons). These chemicals, if ingested, have been reported to cause issues in normal hormone functions of the human body.
Plastic bags are certainly not easy to recycle.
The machines used to recycle waste gets plastic stuck in it which is even more difficult to remove. Most of the recycling facilities don’t have the capacity to recycle plastic bags and therefore don’t accept them.
To recycle these plastic bags, they need to be clean and considering that we use them for our groceries and they are mixed up with garbage, separating and then cleaning them would be almost impossible.
This may be the reason that the annual rate of recycling of plastics is just around 5-10%.
Plastic bags made out of petroleum are completely non-degradable. Instead of degrading, these plastic bags stay long enough to be broken down into tiny pieces which make their way into the waterways and eventually to the oceans where they affect marine life. Approximately 50,000 to 1 Million of these tiny plastic fragments are floating around in every square mile of the world’s oceans.
However, there are other types of Plastic bags that can be recycled. REALLY?
The average person uses a typical plastic bag for as short a time as 12 minutes before throwing it away, never thinking of where it may end up.
Biodegradable plastic bags are marketed as more eco-friendly solutions, able to break down into harmless material more quickly than traditional plastics. One company claims their shopping bag “will degrade and biodegrade in a continuous, irreversible and unstoppable process” if it ends up as litter in the environment.
In a study published this week in Environmental Science and Technology, researchers put supposedly eco-friendly bags made from various organic and plastic materials and sourced from U.K. stores to the test. After three years buried in garden soil, submerged in ocean water, exposed to open light and air or stashed in a laboratory, none of the bags broke down completely in all the environments. In fact, the biodegradable bags that had been left underwater in a marina could still hold a full load of groceries. “What is the role of some of these really innovative and novel polymers?” asked Richard Thompson, a marine biologist from the University of Plymouth and the study’s senior author. A polymer is a repeating chain of chemicals that makes up a plastic’s structure, whether biodegradable or synthetic. “They’re challenging to recycle and are very slow to degrade if they become litter in the environment,” Thompson said, suggesting these biodegradable plastics may be causing more problems than they solve.
What the researchers did:
The researchers collected samples off five types of plastic bags. The first type was made of high-density polyethylene — the standard plastic found in grocery store bags. It was used as a comparison for four other bags labeled as eco-friendly:
• A biodegradable plastic bag made in part from oyster shells.
• Two kinds of bags made from oxo-biodegradable plastic, which contain additives that companies say helps plastic break down faster
• A compostable bag made from plant products
Each bag type was placed in four environments. Whole bags and bags cut into strips were buried in garden soil outdoors, submerged in salt water in a marina, left exposed to daylight and open air, or sealed in a dark container in a temperature-controlled lab. Oxygen, temperature and light all change the structure of plastic polymers, said Julia Kalow, a polymer chemist from Northwestern University, who was not involved in this study. So too can reactions with water and interactions with bacteria or other forms of life.
What the scientists found out
Even in a tough marine environment, where algae and animals quickly covered the plastic, three years wasn’t long enough to break down any of the plastics except for the plant-based compostable option, which did disappear underwater within three months. The plant-derived bags, however, remained intact but weakened when buried under garden soil for 27 months. The only treatment that consistently broke down all of the bags was exposure to open air for more than nine months, and in that case even the standard, traditional polyethylene bag disintegrated into pieces before 18 months had passed. “I would take that timescale to be too long for these products to be regarded as providing an environmental advantage,” Thompson said.
Even if these bags take less time to break down then traditional plastic bags, as litter they would still have enough time to become potentially deadly food for ocean animals like seabirds, whales, turtles or fish. Moreover, they would still be an eyesore and take up space at waste facilities for months or years. And when some of the plastic bags did seem to break down, such as the bags left to the open air, it was unclear if the disintegration was complete.
“Did the plastic that was lost just become smaller pieces of plastic?” Kalow asked, “Or did it become molecules that could dissolve in water and be consumed?”
Future studies, she said, should dig into the fate of those disintegrated plastic particles, to ascertain whether they truly break down and disappear — or become micro-plastics and harmful chemicals.
Why it matters?
Even standard plastic bags can’t be recycled from your home recycling bin, so most end up in landfill or are swept away by water or wind, becoming litter. Labels like “biodegradable,” “compostable” or even “recyclable” are theoretical — they don’t reflect the reality of what happens to the materials. Biodegradable and compostable bags are meant to solve these problems, but the study indicates that’s not the case so far. These alternative bags aren’t meant to end up as litter in the street or in the natural environment — ideally, they’d all be treated just as manufacturers expect. Biodegradable bags would be landfilled or, in some cases, recycled into new plastics — at least in theory.
But “even if we can make something that’s recyclable, that doesn’t mean any commercial recycling plant would be interested in dealing with it,” Kalow said. Biodegradable plastics can’t generally be recycled with other plastics — in fact, they can ruin other batches of recyclable plastic, degrading the product until it becomes unusable. Meanwhile, the eco-conscious individual should hope their compostable bags end up in industrial composting facilities where high temperatures and favorable conditions for bacteria and other living things would break them down. (Compostable bags in chilly, oxygen-starved landfills can actually be preserved rather than destroyed). These are the real problems, Thompson said. Labels like “biodegradable,” “compostable” or even “recyclable” are theoretical — they don’t reflect the reality of what happens to the materials we throw away or litter into the oceans, and they don’t help people accurately understand how to get rid of them.
Three years after the researchers’ plastic bags were buried or submerged, they were nearly as useful — and as harmful — as the day they were made. Some simple solutions might help. Thompson suggested that standardized products, made of the same sets of materials, could streamline our waste management systems and allow much more of our waste to be profitably recycled. Kalow, the polymer chemist said, there may yet be hope for new, improved biodegradable plastics if only we could discover that technology. In the meantime, it doesn’t hurt to remember your reusable bag on your way to the store.
We do not use plastic bags – neither plastic nor biodegradable. We just don’t use bags at all.
