Plastic bag bans are becoming more prevalent. 1. Shoppers worldwide use approximately 500 billion one-time-use plastic bags a year (Plastic Bags Are Killing Us). 2. Mexico City, Burma, Bangladesh, Rwanda and many others have already implemented plastic bag bans (Plastic Bags Are Killing Us).
While plastic bags may provide convenience for customers, there is an overwhelming concern about the effect of them on the health and safety of people, marine life, and the surrounding environment. Since stores are the culprit of a vast majority of the plastic bag pollution, a 5-cent charge for each plastic bag used should be implemented across the country in an effort to decrease the amount of bags used by all customers like it has been in Suffolk
Plastic bags and paper bags are used for various purposes such as for shopping, packaging, disposal, carrying and transporting of products from one place to another etc. Millions of people all over the world uses plastic bag as compared to paper bag because they are densely used everywhere (Cave, 2011). The manufacturing process of plastic bags consumes less energy but they have an adverse effect on the environment than paper bags. These plastic bags are generated from the natural resources like petroleum as well as through natural gas because both resources are easily available in a plenty of amount and are cheaper than paper bags. However, paper bags are manufactured by the tree named as “Pulpwood” and they consumes 4 times more energy than plastic bags.
Each bag takes one cent to make, and seventeen cents per bag to clean up. Taxpayers pay around $88 a year, minimum, on plastic bags. California alone pays about $25 million a year to landfill bags, and public agencies spend around $500 million a year in litter cleanup. Closer to home, The New York Sanitation Department collects more than 1,700 tons of single use carry out bags, a week, and has to spend $12.5 million a year for disposale. Olin Jenner, an executive committee member of Sierra Club Maine says, “According to the U.S. International Trade Commission, the 100 billion plastic shopping bags in use each year in the U.S. are made from the estimated equivalent of 439 million gallons of oil, and they cost retailers an estimated $4 billion.” An average plastic bag holds from five to ten items, so in reality, plastic bags are not cheap, and not quite as useful as you think.
Obviously the development of producing plastic went to quick and people did not think of a unified and sustainable way of how to dispose the huge amount of plastic. Unfortunately many countries decided to dispose all the garbage into the ocean but also ship accidents are a reason why so much plastic accumulated in our ocean. Every year more than eight million tons of plastic waste leak into the ocean. A big issue nowadays is that most of the plastic which is produced in one year is used to make disposable items of packaging or other short lived products that are discarded within a year (Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society, 2009). That means that our use of plastic is not sustainable at all.
Adam B. Summers builds an argument to persuade his audience be first mentioning the increase of health problems, that people use plastic bags more than one way, and a huge loss of jobs. He mentions that several studies have found that plastic bag bans lead to increased health problems, due to food contamination from bacteria that remains in the reusable bags. He also mentions that there was a subsequent spike in hospital emergency room visits due to E. Coli, salmonella, and campylobacter-related intestinal infectious diseases. To really make the reader think deeply into it, he says many deaths have been caused as a result of this. Many people reuse the plastic bags for other uses such as trash bin lining and for picking up after their dogs.
It will evolve and it will not stop helping our lives. All the states in plastic from the powerfulness, durability and usefulness will always help us. But it will also destroy us through the trashes created from plastic. Those waste could be the plastic bags, plastic bottles, plastic cups, broken pieces of plastic and more. It will collected and dump somewhere, those dump keeps piling up into a range of mountains of plastic trashes.
These bags not only affect us humans in a negative way but also are a significant harm to many animal and our mother Earth. The bags themselves do not impact us humans the most even though we are the source for them becoming a harm in the first place. They hurt the world around us which in turn harms us. Many people might say that the
So how could it be that plastics have turned out to be so broadly used? How did plastics turn into the choice for such a large number of uses? The simple answer is that plastics are the material that can provide the things consumers want and need. Plastics have the unique capability to be manufactured, to meet very particular practical requirements for buyers. So maybe there 's another question that 's relevant: What do I want?
After the invention of different methods for the polymers’ manufacturing, the industry of plastics developed significantly. Plastic has several essential advantages, such as light weight, durability, an available price compared with other materials and an ability to be easily molded (Andrady and Neal 2009). That is why plastics are progressively more used in many areas; for example, in packaging, transportation, medicine, sport, agriculture, electronics, building and construction. By controlling the temperature inside the package using oxygen scavenger technology and gas-flush packaging, it is possible to provide storage and secure of products (Andrady and Neal 2009). Therefore, plastics have a great contribution to the safety of water and food packaging, and subsequently to the consumers’ health.