Plastic Bags: Sword Towards Ourselves

Five hundred billion used globally and one hundred billion of them end up in U.S. landfills, taking about one thousand years to decompose, but only 5.2 percent were recycled (Borrud, 2007, p.75).-These are the figures plastic bags have produced every year. Human beings invented plastic bags for the convenience of carriers and packers. However, just as other great inventions, say, nuclear energy and biotechnology, plastic bags are causing serious issues like global warming, environment pollution and energy consumption. They are gradually becoming sword towards ourselves. In responding to this problem, the city of San Francisco has become the trail blazer to prohibit non-biodegradable plastic bags in its large supermarkets and pharmacies. Actually, petroleum-based plastic bags should be banned because they consume colossal amount of natural resources and energy, cause inefficient in economics and can badly pollute the environment.

According to Patricia Riedman, plastic bags were to celebrating their 30th anniversary of appearance in U.S. supermarkets (2007, p.76). Indeed, they have brought great merits since their debut. People would not have to worry about what if they forget to take their canvas bags to shopping. However, the San Francisco City Council believed that the petroleum-based bags had always ended up littering around and would leave the wildlife in great dangers. In this way, the petroleum-based bags have to respond to their curtain fall finally, and biodegradable plastic bags will take their positions in the future ("100 Billion Reasons," 2007, p.77). As things come in pairs, other cities in U.S. are considering following the steps of San Francisco for miscellaneous reasons.

First of all, petroleum-based bags should be banned because they unnecessarily consume a large amount of energy. Hillary Borrud claims that if half of the annually littered plastic bags can be saved, more than 2,000 barrels will be deducted from the daily oil depletion in California (2007, p.75). In other words, in this era of high oil prices and energy scarcity, petroleum-based bags are costing considerable natural resources, and ultimately turn them into a huge pile of useless garbage. Actually, significant energies like fuel, from which ethylene gas is obtained and plastic bags are made, are nonrenewable, while human beings are still consuming these precious treasures recklessly. What's more, the plastic bags easily catch wind and blow, causing the difficulty of confining it to where disposed of (Borrud, 2007, p.75). This leads to the difficulty in recycling, which hinders the circulation and reuse of the material to a large extent. Moreover, Ross Mirkarimi, the author of the ban, also notes that the only 1% of the plastic bags in San Francisco is recycled, in spite of the city's perfect local recycling system ("100 Billion Reasons," 2007, p.77). People's poor awareness on energy-saving has brought the oil-shortage crisis one step further. A prohibitory edict on petroleum-based bags might be a right way out before we ultimately realize that the last calorie on the earth comes from our body temperature.

Another reason of supporting the prohibition on petroleum-based bags is that they are economically inefficient. Angela Spivey reports the city of New York once suspended their services in plastic recycling, which cost $65 a ton for the vendor's fee of transportation and processing. However, since the issue was still of great importance, the city resumed the costly recycling system with a cheaper price offered by a company. Nevertheless, there are still 94.6% of plastic packs floating out of control, which makes them impossible to be recycled (2003, p.86). The city of New York has already been in heavy economical burden dealing with a tiny portion of its plastic bags, let alone those smaller cities which are facing more percentiles. In addition, the Public Works Department hasn't figured out a cost-effective method to classify and reproduce the bags (Wu & Woodman, 2007, p.85). Actually, the costs of recycling and processing can be totally prohibitive, if a ban is put on the petroleum-based bags. In San Francisco, this amount can reach $8 million annually ("100 Billion Reasons," 2007, p.77). With that much money, the government can pay more attention on solving other serious social issues.

Last but not least, petroleum-based bags should be banned because they cause severe pollutions to the environment. According to Mirkarimi (cited in Jesse McKinley, 2007, p.78), the plastic bags used by San Franciscans every year will leave 1,400 tons of landfill garbage. In addition, "Plastics never fully degrade, plastic bags eventually turn into plastic 'dust'."(qtd. in "Long Term Impacts", 2004, p.71). Actually, this is not different from dropping down an atom bomb because they both leave serious sequela to the city. Also, since San Francisco is a coastal city, the bags have a great chance end up floating into the ocean. It is irresponsible for the residents to litter the petroleum-based bags around, which leads to serious water pollutions because they can be wrongly taken as food supply for submarine animals with ease, causing fatal ingestions and entanglements. What's worse, plastic is highly toxic. Once eaten, the toxins can promptly pass up through the food chain and ultimately reach human beings ("Long Term Impacts," 2004, p.71). From this aspect, plastic bags are even more dangerous than nuclear weapons because people