Are Plastic Grocery Bags Sacking the Environment?

The “paper or plastic” conundrum that vexed earnest shoppers throughout the 1980s and 90s is largely moot today. Most grocery store baggers don’t bother to ask anymore. They drop the bananas in one plastic bag as they reach for another to hold the six-pack of soda. The pasta sauce and noodles will get one too, as will the dish soap.

Plastic bags are so cheap to produce, sturdy, plentiful, easy to carry and store that they have captured at least 80 percent of the grocery and convenience store market since they were introduced a quarter century ago, according to the Arlington, Virginia-based American Plastics Council.

The Great Plastic Bag Plague

They’re ubiquitous. They accompany us home each time we shop. They swirl about our oceans, they cling to our trees, they drift down our city sidewalks, they adorn metal fences, they’re consumed by animals.

They are an urban tumbleweed, a flag of the consumer era.

Each year across the world some 500 billion plastic bags are used, and only a tiny fraction of them are recycled. Most of them will have a short lifetime with a consumer — they’ll be used for the few minutes it takes to get from the store to home and then they’re thrown away.

But what does “away” really mean? Plastic shopping bags can last up to a thousand years in a landfill. In the environment, they break down into tiny, toxic particles that become part of the soil and water. Fortunately, some communities in America have started taking serious action.

Plastic Bags: Environmentally Harmful and Completely Unnecessary

According to the EPA, between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. Americans alone throw away over 100 billion bags a year.

Every hour, approximately 200,000 plastic bags are landfilled and may take 1,000 years to break down. For the plastic bags that become litter, rain washes them into bodies of water where they threaten the lives of avian and marine species that can die from consuming or choking on the bags. Plastic pollution travels through our local waterways, eventually reaching the global oceans. On average, 46,000 pieces of plastic are swirling in each square mile of our oceans.

The impacts of plastic bag pollution have ignited a global movement to dramatically reduce the amount of disposable plastic shopping bags. Promoting reusable bags and plastic bag recycling are just one of the many ways to protect our waterways and wildlife. CCE works with the public, local, and state governments to reduce the plastic bag pollution.

Top UN Environmental Official: Ban Plastic Bags

Plastic bags, which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly, says Achim Steiner, executive director of the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

UNEP released a report that identifies plastic as the most pervasive form of ocean litter. The report’s findings reveal that despite several international, regional and national efforts to reverse marine pollution, ocean litter continues to endanger people’s safety and health, entrap wildlife, damage nautical equipment and deface coastal areas around the world.

Although recycling bags is on the rise in the United States, an estimated 90 billion thin bags a year go unrecycled, reports McClatchy Newspapers, and they were the second most common form of litter after cigarette butts at the 2008 International Coastal Cleanup Day sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy, a marine environmental group.

The ban on plastic bags is already being tested in China, where retailers who give out thin bags can be fined up to $1,464, reports McClatchy.

Plastic bag usage at foreign and domestic supermarkets dropped more than 80 percent and 60 percent, respectively, according to a recent survey conducted by China Chain Store & Franchise Association (CCFA). The retail organization estimates that plastic bag use at China’s supermarkets dropped 66 percent on average or about 40 billion plastic bags.

How Plastic Bags Kill in the Marine Environment

In the article on how plastic bags affect the environment, we talked about how these bags can be a menace to innocent animals and even babies. In this article we have illustrated just how this happens.

First let’s take the marine environment which seems to be at the greatest risk from these bags. Some of the animals that are killed by ingesting this plastic are whales, seals and turtles. These bags when in the water seem to take a life of their own and appear like moving food to hungry marine life. Turtles commonly mistake them for jellyfish.

Once a plastic bag is swallowed, it is not digested like other food. It gets trapped within the gastric tube, not allowing any other food to go down. This results in starvation. In the case of turtles, the threat is higher because turtles don’t have the mechanism to regurgitate what they have swallowed. The downward facing spines in their throats prevent the bag from coming out, instead tangling it even more. Food trapped in the gut causes gases to accumulate in the body cavity of the animal, making them float and unable to search for food in deep waters. It even makes them easy prey for secondary predators.

Plastic bags are so persistent even in the gut of an animal. For instance, if the animal that has swallowed the bag is eaten by another animal, the second animal too will be at risk of choking on the plastic. If the animal that swallowed the plastic bag dies in the water, its body decomposes but the plastic is released back into the water where it can kill again.

There are many examples of such sad stories. In 2002, a minke whale was beached in France having eaten almost a kilogram of plastic bags. The plastic can act like a chemical sponge-it absorbs pollutants in the sea and becomes quite toxic if swallowed. This leads to prolonged suffering and ultimately death.