Wonderful Plastic
posted in Conservation, Letting Off Steam |One of the most amazing inventions of all time, and one of the most common at the same time. Can you think back to a time before plastic bags? What kept your food fresh? What did you carry things in? How did you live?
The next time you walk into a shop, look at all the products lining the shelves. Nearly everything is wrapped securely in an airtight, vacuum sealed, germ free plastic bag. Bread, meat, vegetables, pillows, motorcycle parts, furniture accessories, products from every aspect of our modern world. Some even include several layers of wonderful, gleaming, plastic security protecting them from the evils of the open air.
When you finally assemble all these wonderful items in your plastic coated shopping cart and bring them to the checkout, you are faced with one of the most morally difficult questions of our time, “Paper or plastic?” Should you be party to the death of a tree? Lets face it, paper bags are no real gem of modern science anyway. If it is raining, you are certain to be picking up your shopping from a mud puddle in the parking lot, thank goodness all the contents are wrapped in plastic. They tear easily, and reusing them for anything but fire kindling or to line the paper recycling bin is a little ambitious. Plastic however is unaffected by water, is relatively difficult to tear (unless you shop at some of the cheaper markets) and is reusable in so many wonderful ways. So plastic then, why not?
On a typical food shopping trip where ten kilos of total grocery weight is purchased, providing there are no heavy cans in those bags, between 5 and 10% of that weight will be none other than glorious, wonderful plastic. All that plastic then comes home with you and is from that point on, your responsibility. So what can you do with it? Well, for starters most of the packaging for the products you purchase goes directly into the bin. The bags you have acquired can be used for carrying snacks to work or school, holding bits and bobs that otherwise would get spread around and make a mess, or most commonly, for lining the garbage can. Again the wonderful properties of plastic are an advantage here. If you have a particularly messy, wet, and otherwise nasty bit of something to dispose of, no worries, drop it in the bin. The plastic bag you inserted beforehand will prevent any of that icky stuff from leaking out and make your home a more wonderful place to live.
Another layer of plastic for our safety and peace of mind is often added after this step in the Hefty or King Size variety. This occurs just before it is hauled off to wherever plastic is taken. Recycled? Reused? Plastic Heaven? What does it matter as long as the mess is cleaned up, it is not deposited in your backyard or anywhere remotely close to it and you can’t see or smell it anymore. There, all that plastic is gone and you can head back to the shop to pick up another load.
Now where that plastic goes is something of a mystery. A land fill is one option, far from your town, out in the country where it is buried along with all the millions and billions of other plastic bags and food scraps and lead based paints and…. You get the picture. Plastic will remain for centuries upon centuries leaching poisons into the ground water long after we are dead and gone.
Sometimes it is burned to create energy, alternative fuels they are called. This sends those poisons out into the air in one fail swoop so we don’t have to worry about the time release scenario. Of course we filter that air as much as is legally required so tat makes it all better. No matter, the poisons still get out and they certainly linger. A plastic bag will endure, have no fear about that.
What often happens to plastic bags is that they are placed on a barge with all our other wastes and sent out to sea. Now if you flew over the ocean, you wouldn’t see thousands or millions of barges sitting in an inconspicuous place in the middle of the sea waiting for the waste on board to magically disappear. The barges always return to port but strangely empty. This is a wonderful way to dispose of plastic. Dump it into the deepest darkest reaches of the sea. No one can see it down there, no one can smell it and it is certainly nowhere near anyone’s backyard that I know of.
The only real problems with this method arise from the fact that that poison still leeches into our environment (Of course it takes a while longer for us to get it back) and the bags that get loose from the mass on their way down to the depths end up floating around in the sea. Now this is relatively okay until this bag attaches itself to a coral reef and chokes off the supply of sunlight and plankton so necessary to the survival of that reef. Or until it is mistaken for a Jellyfish by a hungry Sea Turtle and ingested. All well and good you may say but remember the longevity of plastic. The turtle or dolphin or sea bird that attempts to eat that glittery, all purpose, and highly durable plastic wonder bag will soon find out how enduring they are in the grand scheme of things. A sobering statistic, it is estimated that over a million sea birds, marine mammals and sea turtles die each year due to ingestion of plastic bags. So, paper or plastic?