Every year, around 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide. 500,000,000,000. Five hundred followed by nine zeros. That's a lot of bags. So many that over one million bags are being used every minute and they're damaging our environment.
Big numbers can be daunting so let's put it another way. Every man, woman and child on our planet uses 83 plastic bags every year. That's one bag per person every four and half days. Of those 500 billion bags, 100 billion are consumed in the United States alone.
Causes of Plastic Pollution
Plastics are used because they are easy and cheap to make and they can last a long time. Unfortunately these same useful qualities can make plastic a huge pollution problem. Because the plastic is cheap it gets discarded easily and its persistence in the environment can do great harm. Urbanisation has added to the plastic pollution in concentrated form in cities. Plastic thrown on land can enter into drainage lines and chokes them resulting into floods in local areas in cities as experienced in Mumbai, India in 1998. It was claimed in one of the programmes on TV Channel that eating plastic bags results in death of 100 cattles per day in U.P. in India. In stomach of one dead cow, as much as 35 kg of plastic was found. Because plastic does not decompose, and requires high energy ultra-violet light to break down, the amount of plastic waste in our oceans is steadily increasing. More than 90% of the articles found on the sea beaches contained plastic. The plastic rubbish found on beaches near urban areas tends to originate from use on land, such as packaging material used to wrap around other goods
Control Measures
• REDUCE
The weight of a plastic bag is about one-tenth the weight of a paper bag. Besides using less material, plastic bags produce less than half the greenhouse gas emissions (a lower carbon footprint), require 70 per cent less energy to manufacture and generate 80 per cent less waste than paper alternatives. Proper bagging can help reduce waste even further.
• REUSE
Plastic bags are arguably one of the most reused products in our society. Over 90 per cent of families reuse plastic bags around their homes for a wide range of purposes, such as bringing lunch to work, lining garbage bins, disposing of diapers and for other sundry usages. The high percentage of reuse enables shoppers to avoid the added environmental impacts associated with using a new bag.
• RECYCLE
Plastic bags are fully recyclable. They are a valuable resource that can be reused and recycled several times over. These are used in building & construction, roads and new plastic bags. (Wal-Mart reportedly recycles about 120 million pounds or approx. 54 KT per year). While recycling helps in protecting the environment and in recovery of energy, it also provides immense employment generation opportunities.
