on Mar 13th, 2008Plastic bags ARE bad. List of resources
Japan Times - Japan banning plastic bags
But concerns that the estimated 30 billion plastic shopping bags utilized every year are contributing to global climate change when incinerated have prompted the government to call for restraint.
“Our country consumes a huge amount of plastic shopping bags each year,” said the State Council, China’s cabinet. “While plastic shopping bags provide convenience to consumers, this has caused a serious waste of energy and resources and environmental pollution because of excessive usage, inadequate recycling and other reasons.“
But like candy wrappers, chewing gum, cigarette butts, and thousands of other pieces of junk, millions of the plastic bags end up as litter. Once in the environment, it takes months to hundreds of years for plastic bags to breakdown. As they decompose, tiny toxic bits seep into soils, lakes, rivers, and the oceans, said Cobb.
* The production of plastic bags requires petroleum and often natural gas, both non-renewable resources that increase our dependency on foreign suppliers. Additionally, prospecting and drilling for these resources contributes to the destruction of fragile habitats and ecosystems around the world.
* The toxic chemical ingredients needed to make plastic produces pollution during the manufacturing process.
* The energy needed to manufacture and transport disposable bags eats up more resources and creates global warming emissions.
When plastic bags breakdown, small plastic particles can pose threats to marine life and contaminate the food web. A 2001 paper by Japanese researchers reported that plastic debris acts like a sponge for toxic chemicals, soaking up a million fold greater concentration of such deadly compounds as PCBs and DDE (a breakdown product of the notorious insecticide DDT), than the surrounding seawater. These turn into toxic gut bombs for marine animals which frequently mistake these bits for food.
Please don’t try to convince others that plastic bags aren’t a problem to the environment. Try to convince yourself it is.
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Priss,
Fact: Plastics are essentially long hydro-carbon chains.
IMO, that means oil will be a component in making plastics, since you don’t need to crack your head on how to synthesize long hydro-carbon chains out of hydrogen and pieces of carbon. Thus, by reducing the use of plastics we are also taking some pressure off the demand in oil. Also, the production of plastics sometimes result in the emission of hydrochloric gases, which is harmful to human beings. I know of someone who ran to the toilet to puke when it got too bad. (IIRC, when I worked in First Engineering a long time ago, a Japanese customer insisted that meeting the ISO standards in the emission of harmful substances during production is a pre-requisite before they sign the production contract.) So, to reduce the use of plastics as a environmentally friendly measure, is really a no brainer.
But as I said before, the measures taken by this country to reduce the use of plastics is insufficient and ineffective. If this gahmen even cares at all, by now legislation that styro-foam lunch boxes and plastic containers for soup will be banned in 6 months and converted to the use of cardboard / hard paper containers will already be passed. Taiwan did that several years ago! (And preferably, a plastic ‘tax’ should be imposed on the environmentally unconscious.)
While this is a hard decision to make, let me point out the Tokugawa Shoguns make the hard decision on protecting their environment when faced with massive deforestation in Japan in the 1600s. And one of the decisions they made was to ensure that the existing trees are protected, and anyone who disobey the order will lose their heads. Today, Japan is the greenest and most forested First World country compared to Easter Island, which is almost completely barren.
But of course, I suspect once there are plans to squeeze more money out of the people from this… this money-faced gahmen will implement the legislation in a jiffy.