Reuse, Reduce and Recycle

Plastic has become so ubiquitous that it is hard to live without it. It makes our lives so much easier. Imagine trying to carry water for a long car journey without plastic or buying sterile milk without plastic. Our lives are so encased in plastic that it piling up in monumental proportions in our wastelands and dump-yards.

I thought that me as a single individual consumed very little plastic on a day-to-day basis. But i was surprised at what i found. I decided to survey (for starters) just how many plastic bag/covers/packaging material I consumed for a week.

This is my (family of 2 adults) average plastic bag collection for a week -

1. 7 half litre milk pkts

2. 1 soap pkt

3. 20 pkts from vegetable shopping- reused as garbage carry-bags

4. 5 large bags from super market shopping

5. 10 plastic wrappers of different food stuffs

6. 5 plastic covers over different stationary items

Thats a lot! about 50 bags of plastic of different grades used by 2 adults.

Imagine my shock as i read more about plastic..

One of the biggest negative impacts of plastic bags comes from their disposal. Plastic bag litter has been a driving force behind bans and other restrictions on their use. Problems caused by plastic bags in the environment include:

• Bags clog gutters and sewer grates, causing flooding.
• Bags get caught in trees, fences and other objects, where they become an eyesore.
• Bags kill animals--particularly birds and marine life--when the animals become entangled in the plastic or when they mistake pieces of plastic for food.

Plastic can take hundreds of years to degrade, and can pose risks even when it has degraded into smaller pieces, since these are especially attractive to animals as food. They are also believed to adversely affect landfill operations by interfering with moisture distribution and leachate flow within landfilled waste.

So i asked myself, if I should go back to using paper bags- like i remember from my childhood days.. but then i read this somewhere..

It takes 40 percent more energy (and releases more greenhouse gases and air and water pollution) to manufacture paper bags than plastic, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It also takes more energy to transport paper bags because they are heavier than plastic.

On the other hand, paper bags are currently easier to recycle in most locations, although again, recycling paper requires more energy than recycling plastic. They also break down much more quickly in the environment (in one month vs. 1,000 years, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), eliminating many of the problems of plastic-bag litter.

The bottom line: the best option is to use a reusable cloth bag or other reusable container, and reuse or recycle paper and plastic bags when you do have them.

So right now i'm on a mission to find a good cloth bag for shopping.. but what about all the plastic wrappers around food stuffs.. can be ever do away with that? The solution for that probably lies in using "bioplastics" rather than "petroleum-based plastics" for packaging purposes. But till such technology is made compulsory- perhaps the only we can do is to recycle and reuse plastic bags.