Litter par excellence

Plastic shopping bags are no less than a plague in the world today, and they have only been around since the ‘80s!

They flutter in the breeze over our cities; hang from branches in the parks; clog our sewers; and form massive “patches” in our oceans. What makes the seemingly harmless plastic bag the eyesore number one, and the litterbug’s favourite weapon?

Polluting the Environment

For one, it’s their weight, or the lack of it. Considering its volume, a plastic shopping bag is very light. No better sail was ever made to catch the slightest wind and take off on a gliding tour across the landscape.

It also makes them difficult to collect and transport for recycling. Anything between 1 to 5% of the nearly a trillion shopping bags used worldwide every year actually end up at the recycler’s factory. As it is, with the high level of contamination and the presence of a wide variety of plastic waste, they are difficult to segregate and recycle to food grade standards, and the market for recycled plastic is nowhere near what it ought to be. The result is that a stupendous number of plastic shopping bags are out there polluting the environment.

Plastic shopping bags having a free run across the planet also draw the annoyance and derision of people all over the world.

• In China, they are called “white pollution.”
  
  
• In South Africa, the country’s environment minister christened them “national flower.”
  
  
• In the USA, plastic bags blowing in the wind have been called “urban tumbleweed.”
  
  
• Somalis have named them “flowers of Hargeisa” after their capital.

Littering of plastic shopping bags is not just an eyesore; it represents a terrible threat to the environment.

For one, they clog up our waterways and sewerage systems. They were identified as one of the major causes of the terrible floods in Bangladesh in the late 1990s, and banned by that country as early as 2002.

A huge number is washed out to sea, causing tremendous pollution to the marine ecosystem and killing millions of marine wildlife each year.

Slow Rate of Decay

The most disquieting thing about plastic shopping bags is that they may take anything up to a thousand years to break down in the environment. While they do not biodegrade in a landfill, they do photo-degrade or break down into tiny toxic bits in the presence of light – polluting the soil and the water.

They even enter the food chain when animals (in both land and sea) accidentally eat them. The plastic fills their stomach and blocks their intestine. They literally starve to death. It doesn’t end with one death though. The slow rate of decay means that the dead animal decomposes much faster than the plastic, which re-enters the ecosystem to be eaten by another hapless animal!

With the costs and problems related to recycling, the best option is to cut down on the use of plastic shopping bags, and ultimately stop using them altogether.