Why are plastic bags bad for the environment?

Question

list reasons why they are bad. i am doing a debate for school and i need some reasons. please help.

Answer 1

non-biodegradable

Answer 2

Phase 1: Production Costs

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.

Phase 2: Consumption Costs

Annual cost to US retailers alone is estimated at $4 billion.

When retailers give away free bags, their costs are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

Phase 3: Disposal and Litter Costs

Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food. Turtles think the bags are jellyfish, their primary food source. Once swallowed, plastic bags choke animals or block their intestines, leading to an agonizing death.

On land, many cows, goats and other animals suffer a similar fate to marine life when they accidentally ingest plastic bags while foraging for food.

In a landfill, plastic bags take up to 1,000 years to degrade. As litter, they breakdown into tiny bits, contaminating our soil and water.

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.

Collection, hauling and disposal of plastic bag waste create an additional environmental impact. An estimated 8 billion pounds of plastic bags, wraps and sacks enter the waste stream every year in the US alone, putting an unnecessary burden on our diminishing landfill space and causing air pollution if incinerated.

Recycling requires energy for the collection, processing, etc. and doesn't address the above issues.

Info from reusablebags.com

Answer 3

um they dont degrade quickly enough.

when they get stuck in trees for years its an eyesore

they choke and suffocate animals

Answer 4

they are  not biodegradeble

they use oil to make them

they get stuck in trees

animal choke on then

they end up in the ocean they stay on the earth for ev

Answer 5

they are made out of crude oil so they aren't recyclable

Answer 6

Plastic bags are not bad for the environment at all. They come from oil, and nobody worries about oil in the ground.

Hardly any oil at all is used to make them: they are so thin and only way a fraction of a gram. And even if they did require a lot of oil (they don't), then the greenies should be happy, because that leaves just that much less oil to run cars with.

The whole scenario is designed to get the common man in the street distracted into thinking he is a scientist: the best way to manipulate masses is to make them feel knowledgeable. The same thing happened with the Ozone scare: housewives were made to get involved via their hairspray cans.

Basically, the world's people always need something to worry about. The cold war finished in 1988, so in stepped the Ozone Hole, the Greenhoax, and now, mum's and dad's plastic bags from Kmart. Goodness me people are naive.

And why are they naive? Simple: they DON'T THINK ABOUT ANYTHING IN LIFE EXCEPT FOOTBALL, PAYING BILLS, HORSE RACING, AND HAVING A GOOD TIME. You can't expect empty heads to ward off false science, or false politics, or false philosophy.

AND THAT IS WHY WE ARE PROGRESSIVELY GOING DOWN HILL, FOR WE ARE NOW A WORLD OF MINDLESS MORONS WHO SPEND THEIR DAYS WORRYING ABOUT TURNING OFF LIGHTS, BREATHING LESS, USING LESS PLASTIS BAGS, AND WORSHIPPING NATURE. NATURE IS THE NEW GOD. ALL PRAISE THE TREE. PRAISE YOU TREE, PRAISE YOU!

As the world moves more and more rappidly toward atheism, God will more and more rappidly remove the light of common sense from their minds, so that they run around with all kinds of silly ideas which to 15 year-olds in the 1970s would have seemed puerile. Adults now are like little children and will continue to become younger and younger in the mind, seeking to replace the long-lost God of their parents with synthetic morality and pseudo-science in a bid to quash their conscience and escape their own thoughts.

Although our knowledge is now greater than ever before, our wisdom is less than ever before.

Answer 7

Need to use oil to make plastic, they are not bio-degradable

Answer 8

They kill LOTS of animals.

http://www.buzzle.com/articles/environme...

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=G...

Answer 9

because takes 200000years to decay.It affects the soil fertility.

Answer 10

They are non-biodegradable. And burning them in trash creates more harmful air pollution.

Answer 11

They're only bad if you get one wrapped around your head and can't get it off.

Answer 12

They aren't. A study showed they are better than paper bags because paper bags are thrown away and plastic bags are reused for countless things. Like, cleaning a litter box, using them as a trash bag for smaller garbage bins, shipping.(replaces popcorn to keep item from breaking)

THANK YOU JOHN!!!!!  did you know they actually had a website that told the temps of different places, trying to prove global warming, and it had the longitute, latitude for them so one guy went and found them and they were on power plants, sidewalks, parking lots, chimneys, everywhere hot. So the guy e mailed them and tried to tell everyone about it and they took the locations of them off of the website. And even then, they only got the temp to raise 1.4 degrees! unbelievable. and, did you know that even when fed random "red noise" the IPCC's computers nearly always drew hockey stick shaped graphs.