Disadvantages Of Plastic Bags

Almost every market that you go today, you will see people carrying their shopping items in plastic bags. Right from food items to clothes to shoes, there is hardly any item that we do not use a plastic bag to carry. However, before stuffing your home with different styles, colors and shapes of plastic bags, have you every considered the dangers that are inherent in using them? No? Then, reading through this article is a must for you. Go through the following lines and explore the disadvantages of plastic bags. After reading them, we are sure that you will prefer sticking to paper bags and the like.

 

 

Plastic bags have been known to cause a lot of environmental damage. A single plastic bag can take up to 1000 years, to decay completely. This makes the bags stay in environments longer, in turn leading to great build-up on the natural landscape (much more than degradable materials like paper). In other words, the more plastic bags you use, the greater the chances of environmental damage.

 

As per Marrickville Council of Australia, as many as 100,000 whales, turtles and birds die have been reported to die every year, mainly because of plastic in their environment. Plastic bags not only have adverse effects on our natural habitats, but have also been found to be responsible for the death of many animals, mainly on account of the suffocation encountered on eating them.

 

Not only animals, infants and young children have also been reported to have lost their life, on account of plastic bags. Since plastic bags are thin and airtight as well, children often end up blocking their mouths and nostrils with them. In case they are not being monitored by an adult, this leads to suffocation and, in some cases, even death.

 

Plastic bags are extremely durable. In case you are thinking of this as an advantage, just bring to mind an image of the huge landfill that you visited on the city outskirts, the other day. In most probability, majority of the rubbish present there will comprise of plastic bags only. In other words, plastic bags have led to a great increase in the pollution levels.

 

Since plastic bags are not bio-degradable, the only way to get rid of them is to burn them up. Though lighting a match to them is easy, it has more than its fair share of disadvantages. The biggest of them is that smoldering plastics can release toxic fumes into the environment, in turn taking the air pollution to much higher levels.

 

One of the main disadvantages of plastic bags is that they are not renewable. The reason behind this is that they are made of petrochemicals, a non-renewable source of energy. They can be recycled, but not as easily as paper bags. Plastic bags can last for as much as hundred of years. In other words, long after you are no more, the plastic bag used by you will be in existence.