Do you understand the harm of plastic shopping bags?
- Plastic shopping bags are strong cheap plastic bags primarily used to carry groceries or other items bought from retail outlets.
- ‘Plastic shopping bags’ are called ‘plastic grocery bags’ and ‘carrier bags’, and they are also known by the generic terms ‘bags’, ‘shopping bags’ and ‘plastic bags’.
- Plastic shopping bags are most commonly made of polyethylene, although bags can be made of bioplastic that originates from vegetable sources and is said to decompose safely when exposed to sunlight and oxygen.
- Plastic bags were invented after the introduction of polyethylene in the 1930s, and in 1962, engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin of Sweden filed a patent for a one-piece plastic shopping bag with an integrated handle for the Celloplast company, and this style of bag is said to be the basis of most modern designs.
- Commercially used plastic shopping bags became highly popular worldwide by the 1980s, acting as a replacement to paper bags which were originally used for purchased goods.
- The cited number of plastic bags produced worldwide varies by source, with suggestions of 500 to 1,000 billion per year, with over 100 billion used in the United States in 2009 and approximately 13 billion used in the United Kingdom in 2008.
- Plastic shopping bags come in a wide variety of colours, made with the addition of different chemicals, and common colours include white, and grey, while words, logos, and other designs are often printed on the bags.
- Plastic shopping bags generally take a hundred years or more to breakdown, and therefore are significant polluters of the environment, killing thousands of marine wildlife yearly, and even causing drain blockages that cause flooding, especially in poor countries.
- Caution should be taken with plastic shopping bags, as they can cause suffocation in children, especially those of a young age, and warning information has been in place on some types of bags in some countries since 1959.
- Stores, nations and even countries like China, Rwanda and Bangladesh, have been banning, limiting or discouraging the use of plastic shopping bags for environmental reasons, including the large quantities of resources required to create the bags in the first place.
Bibliography:
Keller A, History of the Plastic Bag, 2011, Bag Monster, http://www.bagmonster.com/2011/05/history-of-the-plastic-bag.html
Plastic Shopping Bag, 2015, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_shopping_bag
Polythene’s story: The accidental birth of plastic bags, 2008, The Independent, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/polythenes-story-the-accidental-birth-of-plastic-bags-800602.html
