Why Plastic and Paper Bags are Bad

If you're like most people, chances are you have a pile of plastic bags somewhere in your house - under the sink, in a closet, wherever. Plastic bags are seemingly unavoidable in today's world. Every time you go grocery shopping you come home with 7 more of them. And, if you're like 98% of the population, you don't recycle them. Sure, they can be used for other tasks (trash can liners in the bathroom, for example), but we all still end up with way more plastic bags than we need.

I'm sure you've also seen plastic bags littering the sides of roads or pictures of them wrapped around the neck of a dead animal. Many bags end up in the ocean, where they're mistaken for food and eaten, killing thousands of animals every year. Other bags end up at landfills where they sit for 1,000 years, decomposing and releasing toxic chemicals into the soil.

Let's also not forget to consider where all these bags come from. Oil is used in their production and producing these bags pollutes the atmosphere. More pollution comes from the trucks and ships that transport the nearly 1 Trillion bags used worldwide every year.

Paper bags aren't much better. They're made from freshly killed trees, not recycled paper, and actually create more pollution during their production. Since they're heavier, they take more energy (and pollution) to transport, and they also take up unnecessary space in landfills.

Pollution. Dead animals. Overfilled landfills. Consumption of finite resources (oil). Litter. These bags are not "free."

Do your part and stop using paper and plastic bags for your daily shopping. One of the more common eco-friendly products, the reusable shopping bag, can help save the use of thousands of bags.

Natural bio-degradation occurs when microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi break down organic materials into carbon dioxide and water. Most plastic bags are made out of low-density polyethylene, a man-made hydrocarbon polymer that microorganisms don't recognize as food. Polyethylene is unappealing to microorganisms because of its high molecular weight, its highly stable three-dimensional structure and its resistance to water. Plastic bags therefore take hundreds of years to biodegrade, and in a landfill the process takes even longer. The environmental problems caused by plastic's slow biodegradation is one of the reasons it is so urgent to stop using disposable plastic bags. Instead, I strongly encourage you to buy eco friendly products, like reusable bags.

Instead of biodegrading, which as mentioned will take hundreds of years, polyethylene photo-degrades, or breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces with the help of sunlight. Unfortunately, while the plastic seems to disappear, it remains in the environment and can be ingested by small organisms. In this way, it has the potential to enter the food chain, where it can do harm in the form of reproductive and hormonal disturbances in even the tiniest of organisms. These microscopic bits of plastic can also absorb organic pollutants such as PCB's and agricultural chemicals and then those pollutants can enter the food chain. In our oceans, these bits might be ingested by zooplankton-eating animals which are in turn ingested by larger organisms. It is easy to see the potential for damage on a world-wide scale that plastic bags pose.

Although plastic bags have only been used in supermarkets for about 30 years, they already pose a huge risk for our environment, especially in the ocean and landfills (where garbage and dirt placed on top of them prevents photodegradation). It's estimated that around 1 trillion plastic bags are produced each year, and over 97% of them enter our waste stream. We can help decrease this plague by beginning to regularly use reusable bags for our shopping.