Plastic: The Mass Murderer That Gets Away

How many plastic shopping bags do you have hanging on your pantry door, stuffed in drawers or worse yet, in the trash can?

Plastic Bags, six-pack rings, those keep-it-fresh potato chips bags and all the other plastic things we so carelessly throw in the trash, are the culprit that wreck our environment and not many people seem to care. Those bags litter just about every street and park in our country. They hang from trees, flutter from fences, escape the trash can and fly wherever the wind will take them. They clog the storm drains and it costs millions to undo the damage they are doing every day.

Grocery Stores and large chains have bins set up to recycle the bags, but most of us keep forgetting to bring them back there, or better yet, they are hung onto, because they could be useful. They turn into book bags, the books end up all over the road and the bag goes into a roadside trash can were the wind can pick it up and blow it through the streets, we  carry our lunch in and then they go into the trash after lunch, any way we look at it, eventually they will end up in the trash.

When was the last time the clerk at Wal Mart gave you a choice between paper or plastic? I bet it was a while back.

Baggers at the grocery store see it as a mood point to ask. Plastic is cheap and light, so cheap the they only bag one or two pieces in each. At a cost of about 1 cent per bag, it is easy to see that no one puts a value on them and they are in ready supply. In the the early 1970’s, one bag was handed out to every three now.

According to Arlington, a Virginia based Plastic Council, 80 percent of the grocery and convenient stores in this country using exclusively plastic bags. Somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed yearly all over the world. The United States Environmental Agency estimated in 2001 that 3 percent end up outside of landfills and most show up as litter in streams and in our general environment. In the late 80’s and early 90’s. Plastic bags were considered a rare thing in parts of the world, now they are found from Spitsbergen (78* north latitude) to the Falklands (51* south latitude) and it is estimated that within a decade they will litter the Antarctica.
Only 1 percent of the plastic bags are recycled worldwide, 2 percent in the U.S. And the rest is getting in to the environment somehow. They exist thousands of years in landfills, but only a small percent will get there, The rest ends up in living environment, as tree ornaments, in drains and waterways and eventually out in the ocean. Albatrosses in the Midway Islands decorate their nest with them.

Several regions in other countries of the world like Taiwan,  Australia, South Africa and Bangladesh, have either placed a heavy tax on the nuisance or outright banned them. Other countries, including England and several cities in the U.S. considering similar actions. San Francisco and Oakland already have a similar system in place.

In Ireland the government levied a 15 cent tax on each bag and that has resulted in a 95 percent reduction in their use. Tony Lowes, the Director of Friend of the Irish Environment in County Cork explains that this is an exceptional success.  According to him, everybody in Ireland started to carry reusable bags and the eyesore’s in the Countryside have all but disappeared.

The American Plastic Council is weary of such tax. The cost of jobs and to the store owners would be in the millions, said a spokesman for the Plastic Council. But he also concede that a small tax on the bags may result in more responsibility and instead of using 5 bags to bag someone’s lunch, the clerks and stores may only use one, therefore cutting down on the waste.

Twice a week, the employes and students, all volunteers, of the Lake Merritt Institute gather on the shore of the Lake in the Nations oldest national wildlife refuge. But there is no fishing trip or bird watching going on. They come there to fish trash out of the water, mainly plastic bags.