Never put your head in a plastic bag!
You don’t need me to tell you how bad plastic bags are for the environment. We know they are suffocating our planet and filling our seas with waste and poison. There is no getting away from it.
An average plastic bag weighs 5.5grams. In last week’s chat I discussed how we inhale and ingest over 200,000 pieces of plastic per year. That is the same as eating a full 5g plastic credit card or in this case, it’s the same as eating a plastic bag per person per week!
Our bodies haven’t evolved to digest and process plastic as a food source yet.
Single use plastic bottles are a serious problem but plastic bags are just as big a contribution to this problem. Both are easily discarded products. They are also the single biggest source of litter on earth and contribute to pollution in so many ways. Globally there are 100,000 plastic bags consumed every three seconds! That’s Two Million plastic bags per minute, this is staggering!
Bags are created by the processing of fossil fuels and require massive amounts of heat and energy. Then they are transported around the world before they are used once and sent to landfill. Each bag is responsible for 33g of CO2emissions and we use about 200 bags per family per year in Ireland. But even this isn’t the real problem.
When the bags sit in landfill they slowly release:
Chemicals into the ground affecting our water supply and food
Dangerous toxins into the air affecting our health
Emissions into the atmosphere affecting our lungs and speeding up the Climate Crisis.
And it gets worse, the bags don’t break down and can spend more than 100 years leaking into the ground and air. During their time in the ocean or landfill the plastic bags can absorb the toxins from other plastics and pump out even more new toxins. And incineration only releases even more emissions back into the atmosphere. Every piece of plastic ever created still exits.
The plastic bags are so difficult to recycle that most countries can’t recycle them and that’s why there is generally no legislation to recycle them. That is of course unless you are a worker in a non-industrialised nation and your human rights are swiped away, so that you can sift through other countries shipped in, plastic waste to find salvageable plastic, to melt down and repurpose. The toll on these workers health and welfare is measured in how long they can stay alive for.
So what can we do to slow this problem down?
The first step is to stop using plastic bags.
Buy a natural fabric bag or ask for a cardboard box at your local store.
Tell your friends and family that it’s just as convenient to go to the shop prepared with your own bags.
Harass you newly elected local politicians to ban plastic bags.
Let us know how you feel about this issue. GROWN is determined to protect our oceans and environment – we love your feedback.