This prevents runoff water from properly draining, which often inconveniences those living or working in the area. For example, roads often flood when storm sewers become blocked, which forces them to be closed until the water drains. This excess water can damage cars, buildings and other property, and it also collects pollutants and spreads them far and wide, where they cause additional damage.
Clogged storm sewers can also disrupt the water flow throughout local watersheds. Blocked sewer pipes can starve local wetlands, creeks and streams of the water they require, which can lead to massive die-offs and in some cases, total collapse. The vast majority of people would agree that plastic bags ruin the appearance of just about every imaginable habitat, from forests and fields to deserts and wetlands.
Among other things, natural habitats and greenspaces help to reduce recovery times and improve outcomes of hospital patients, they help to improve focus and concentration among children, they help to reduce crime and they help to increase property values. But when these same habitats are littered with plastic bags and other types of debris, these benefits are reduced. Accordingly, it is important to value the aesthetic value of natural habitats, take steps to reduce plastic bag pollution and address these issues when developing public policy.
It is difficult to grasp the scope of the plastic bag problem, despite the ubiquity of plastic bags in the landscape. No one knows exactly how many bags are littering the planet, but researchers estimate that billion used around the globe each year. A small percentage of these end up being recycled, and some people try to reuse old plastic bags for other purposes, but the vast majority of plastic bags are used a single time.
Many are discarded into the trash, but a significant percentage end up polluting natural habitats. Whereas a paper towel breaks down in a month, and a piece of plywood may take a year to degrade, plastic bags persist for much longer — typically decades, and in some cases centuries. In fact, plastic bags that make their way into rivers, lakes or oceans never completely biodegrade.
This post was originally published in June, It has been updated for accuracy and comprehensiveness. Save money by converting your home to solar power. Calculate your savings. I have heard this before but no one will say what toxic substance is in the bag…. Nothing completely degrades in modern landfills because of the lack of water, light, oxygen and other important elements that are necessary for the degradation process to be completed.
Plastic bags never biodegrade. They photodegrade, meaning they simply break into smaller pieces of plastic. This suggests that plastic bags will eventually fragment into microscopic granules. This is a problem because crude oil emits significant amounts of pollution and it means the product is not biodegradable. According to the Natural Environment website it takes at least years for a bag to biodegrade which has the following effects:.
The best alternative to plastic bags are reusable bags, which save 11 barrels of oil. At Non Plastic Beach, we feel we do our bit to discourage plastic bag usage, by offering our customers organic cotton , reusable shopping bags. Like with plastic bags, plastic water bottles were until recently considered an essential part of everyday life, whilst being thrown away at will. This leads to some of the following effects:.
Despite the fact that tap water is declared safe for consumption by the EPA, plastic water bottles are being used every second in the United States alone.
What needs to be done? There need to be more drinking facilities with extra convenience so that people are encouraged to reuse plastic bottles rather than throw them away.
By now you should know some of the effects that plastics have on the environment, but let's look specifically at plastic pollution. Plastic pollution causes harm to humans, animals and plants through toxic pollutants. It can take hundreds or even thousands of years for plastic to break down so the environmental damage is long-lasting.
It affects all organisms in the food chain from tiny species like plankton through to whales. Toxins work their way up the food chain when plastic is ingested and can even be present in the fish people eat. Over the last 10 years, most people will have noticed the unnecessary overuse of plastic in packaging. We have already discussed the positive effects of reusing plastics, but there are some further actions that can be taken to reduce plastic packaging:.
They even wash off synthetic clothes. Once they enter our rivers, soils and oceans, they can get into the food chain. As of yet, the impacts on our health are unknown. But all our best efforts are in danger of being undermined. Businesses are set to churn out more plastics , making our reliance on them even harder to avoid. We need the government to step in. We need a law to phase out single-use plastics now. That's what we're working on. How can you help? Click the green button. The total amount of plastic entering the marine environment is over 12m tonnes a year — according to a report by Eunomia in For comparison, a double-decker bus weighs about 12 tonnes.
Sea creatures can get tangled in plastic or mistake it for food, and the effects are often fatal. Harmful chemicals linked to plastic have been found in species from plankton to dolphins.
The best alternative to single-use plastic is something that you can use over and over again — or something that can be easily recycled or composted. For example, one of the first things you use every morning and one of the last things you use every night -- your toothbrush -- is made of plastics. Every time you visit your supermarket, you meet many sorts of plastics that serve as packaging to prolong the freshness of foods, and in a hospital, a variety of plastics help prolong your life.
The key lies in the chemical structure of plastics. Plastics are made of long chains -- polymers -- of carbon molecules, such as carbon dioxide CO2 and methane CH4. Methane gas is a molecule in cow farts that is eighty times more powerful than CO2 for causing climate change. CO2 gas is produced by burning natural things, like gas, oil, wood or plastics, and for this reason, we produce far more CO2 than methane, so the cumulative effects of all that CO2 are much greater than those of methane gas.
Basically, if we could permanently remove a portion of CO2 or CH4 gases from the atmosphere by sequestering them into plastics, we would effectively be preventing these gases from causing further damage to the climate.
One such enterprising company, Mango Materials , a small start-up in California, is working to reduce the methane gas problem in wastewater treatment plants by harnessing the ability of particular microbes to capture methane and stick them together to create polymers that then can be manufactured into larger and more useful pieces of plastic. This company converts already existing plastics, like water bottles, into plastic filaments that are used by 3D printers.
This repurposes plastic waste into other useful forms instead of dumping it into the ocean, or incinerating it, which then liberates CO2 into the atmosphere where it can contribute to climate change.
Mother Nature herself has a number of clever innovations that we are only beginning to discover and to understand.
For example, there is evidence that at least some animals, such as caterpillars link , manage to provide homes to their own special collection of gut microbes that can biodegrade at least some sorts traditionally non-biodegradable plastics -- a discovery that could lead to innovations in truly recycling plastics. Hopefully these new innovations and discoveries will inspire yet more creative thinkers to harness the power of their imaginations, perhaps assisted by vast armies of microbes, so we can re-purpose apparently immortal plastics into other useful forms -- maybe even a few more rubber duckies -- whilst preventing the escape of damaging CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere.
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