Ban on Plastic Bags: a Call to Re-think About This Issue

Hello, my name is Jose and I will be talking about plastic pollution. I will also touched on the theme of ban on plastic bags in this essay.

Plastic as Modern Disaster and a Part of Our Lives

What would the world be like without plastic? Our daily lives wouldn’t be the same. Plastic has been in our lives for the things we buy in the shops or things we use in our everyday life. Plastic is a man-made material and has changed the way we live for over the last fifty or sixty years. Plastic is one of the very few things that man has invented that have had such an impact in our world. Plastic pollution is an ongoing issue in today’s society. The disasters caused by plastic use in animals is a major & concerning issue.

Plastic is currently seen as a threat to our planet. Marine life, for example, is suffering from the millions of tonnes of plastic waste that ends up being dumped in our oceans every year. Whale, sea lions and birds are all being affected by plastic pollution onshore and offshore. Researchers have estimated that ten million tonnes of plastic waste ends up in the ocean every year. Where sea-birds and marine creatures such as turtles, seals, and dolphins struggle to tell the difference between plastic and jellyfish due to the eating habits. Plastic in the animals damages their digestive systems and can lead them to suffer and die. According to experts, they believe that nearly all the plastic ever created by chemical companies still exist in some form. An estimated 8.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been produced to date. Some of it is still used however, since 2015, approximately 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic have been thrown away.

Roughly 9% of the plastic waste that we have generated over the years has been recycled. Twelve percent has been burned and seventy-nine percent has ended up in landfill sites or been thrown randomly into the street, countryside, and into rivers and oceans.

The majority of plastic waste is caused by modern life, where plastic is used for many single-use' or 'throwaway' items such as drink bottles. More than four-hundred and eighty billion throw-away plastic bottles were sold globally in 2016. Which is equivalent to a million bottles per minute, or twenty thousand per second. Saying this, Another twenty thousand plastic bottles have just been sold.

Implementation of the Ban on Plastic Bags in Australia

Since the 1st of July 2018, the supply of plastic bags was banned in Western Australia. Each year billions of plastic shopping bags are supplied nationwide, with close to around seven million littered in WA alone. Although plastic shopping bags don’t make up a large portion of waste and litter, they however do not break down easily and can have shocking impacts on marine wildlife and birds.

Since the ban, WA's plastic bag ban has been widely supported by the community and industries, including some of the biggest suppliers of plastic shopping bags. The ban on plastic bags brings WA with other Australian states closer to the similar bans in place. Queensland also introduced its ban on 1 July and Victoria has announced that it will introduce a ban in November. Approximately 7% are turned into new bottles and less than half of these are collected for recycling.

To end up, today is the day for us all to re-think about plastic and the ways we use it and do something about it before it’s too late - before we continue to damage our planet even more than it is already. 

References

1. Geyer, R., Jambeck, J. R., & Law, K. L. (2017). Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made. Science Advances, 3(7), e1700782. DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700782

2. Thompson, R. C., Moore, C. J., vom Saal, F. S., & Swan, S. H. (2009). Plastics, the environment and human health: Current consensus and future trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1526), 2153-2166. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2009.0053

3. Rochman, C. M., Browne, M. A., Halpern, B. S., Hentschel, B. T., Hoh, E., Karapanagioti, H. K., ... & Thompson, R. C. (2013). Policy: Classify plastic waste as hazardous. Nature, 494(7436), 169-171. DOI: 10.1038/494169a

4. Lebreton, L. C., van der Zwet, J., Damsteeg, J. W., Slat, B., Andrady, A., & Reisser, J. (2017). River plastic emissions to the world’s oceans. Nature Communications, 8(1), 1-10. DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-02188-4

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5. Andrady, A. L. (2015). The plastic in microplastics: A review. Marine Pollution Bulletin, 97(1-2), 8-12. DOI: 10.1016/j.marpolbul.2015.06.058