Folks in Portland are taking the bold step of eliminating plastic sacks, a green step that has lots of environmental implications.
First, the key ingredients in making these things are petroleum and natural gas, certainly things we want to conserve.
Bags can be made from a starch product using corn or potatoes. Again, we are already using corn to make ethanol to supplement gasoline now. There's not much sense in growing items that can otherwise be used for food instead to made for throw-away sacks.
That is actually the big issue with these bags, the throwing away part. Disposal of them is not going well. For one thing, even properly dispatched they can stay in the ground for anywhere from 20 to 1,000 years depending on what it was made from.
You think it's only a plastic sack. It doesn't take up that much space. In Australia, they did a study of the make up of its landfills. It looks as if six billion — that's a "B" — are discarded annually. They estimate that only 10 percent were being recycled.
If you take six billion last year and add it to six billion this season and realize they are still in landfills for a minimum of 20 years, pretty soon it adds up to one overstuffed landfill!
So landfill space is a key element. Another factor in how they are being disposed of comes up when you ask sailors what is the one item that they see the most on the worlds oceans. Yep, that would be plastic sacks.
On the way to the seas they float streams and rivers. They are a principal problem in storm drains, sewers, drainage ditches and irrigation systems.
When they do wind up in the sea, there are other issues. It is claimed that the single most dangerous threat to ocean life is the disposable plastic bag.
They can look similar to jellyfish and be consumed as food, dooming that sea life. Sometimes they wrap around fish and kill them that way. Smaller marine animals swim into them and suffocate. Larger fish will inhale the things and that will make victims out of them. Many sea turtles have been found ensnared in the bags.
So the best single way to something about them is to not deal with them in the first place. Tote your items home some other way. Go with a reusable, cloth sack or a knapsack. A container that may eventually wear out after multiple usages is still a better choice than the "one and done" disposable bag.
The overall problems incurred don't seem to be worth the tradeoff for an item that is of such limited use. We should all be interested in Portland's progress.
