It is easy to assume of the negative effects of plastic bags on the atmosphere when you take into consideration that 100 billion plastic bags are put to use every single year in the United States and that they take up to 1,000 years to break down. Fifty years ago there had been no bags on this planet. Now think about based on their break down rate that each bag ever manufactured, except for the recycled or incinerated ones are either filling our landfills, polluting our waterways or hanging in our kitchen closets as clutter.
Often comforts of everyday life, items we now take into account a necessity had been developed and pushed into our lives only for the reason that they were the cheapest alternative. Lengthy-term fees, such as the impact on our environment and the clean up of it weren't thought to be. This appears to be the case with plastic bags.
• Dependence on Foreign Oil - Plastic bags are manufactured utilizing polyethylene a byproduct of oil. Roughly 60 to 100 million barrels of oil go into their production every single year. China lately banned the use of plastic bags and their estimated savings in oil was about 37 million barrels per year.
• They Take a Incredibly, Rather Long Time to Break Down - Plastic bags haven't been about for lengthy, much less than fifty years. So no one knows for certain how extended they take to break down. One factor is for positive even though 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, roadways and lakes, or just piled in corners of our closets, garages or kitchens. Grocery bags are made from polyethylene and are photodegradable and not biodegradable. Being photodegradable signifies, these bags have to have sunlight to break down. As a result, burying them in a landfill accomplishes nothing at all other than to hide the trouble and build mountains of trash buried out of sight. When and if they do degrade, they just break down into smaller additional toxic microscopic particles called petrol-polymers that seep into waterways and ultimately enter our food chain.
• Plastic Bags Account for ten% of Debris Washed Up On Our Shoreline - They have been seen floating in the oceans, and washing up on shorelines as far North as the Arctic Circle and as far south as The Falkland Islands. What an awful eyesore to our planet as a whole.
• Kill Hundreds of Thousands of Animals Per Year - Believing the bags to be food, marine wildlife choke on the bags and die or they enter their digestive systems until they die. Following death their bodies decompose, but not the bags.
Plastic bags are low cost, effective and robust. They make shopping very simple and straightforward. On the other hand plastic bags have several negative effects on the atmosphere. They increase our dependence on foreign oil, pollute our waterways, fill our landfills, kill our wildlife and are an eyesore.
