The Ban on Plastic Bags - Essay Example

EWRT 2 June 24th Plastic Bags Recently, the council of Cupertino passed a reusable bag ordinance that went to effect on October The ordinance may require people to pay a prescribed fee for any plastic bags found during the checkout. Plastic bags became popular Sweden in the year 1962 because of an increase in the market for petroleum product derived compound know as polyethylene. Approximately, the residents of California use more than 10 billion plastic bags annually. It is further estimated that 100 billion plastic bags are used in the entire United States every year (Visser). In her book called Everything Is a Human Being, Alice Walker states, “While the earth is enslaved, none of us is free’’ (Walker 666). Accordingly, she suggested so long as the earth suffers, then each and every person, together with other living creature will suffer.As such, it is therefore essential for us to take actions to protect the Earth. To reverse the gains made in polluting the earth, a piece of legislation was enacted in August 2014. The law induced a ban on all plastic bags mostly used to pack commodities in chain retail stores was enacted. California was the first state to put to work the legislation. In this case, a large number of stalls complied with the directive. The bill,accented by Governor Jerry Brown, will be valid from July 1, 2015. Consumers are not able to get normal commodities in plastic bags in accordance with the provisions. The ban on the aforementioned traders has will soon trickle to other small scale traders such as convenience stores and other small food retailers after one year. the use plastic bag has been discredited for causing economic losses, damages the environment and ecosystem, and is harmful to human health, the authority will continue to engage in the throughout the united states since the use of plastic bags     It is estimated that each and every American uses one plastic paper per day. As such, apart from the use of plastic bags by traders, the law also focuses on activities around producing plastic bags and dealing plastic bags trash involve high economic cost that add burden to the society. In addition, we regular reuse our plastic bags, we just throw them as a trash after one-time use.Approximately $10 million of the New York City money goes to send 100 thousand tons of plastic bags that are dumped as general trash in the landfill of South Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania every year. According to the deputy commissioner in charge of satiation in New York states that, “Plastic shopping bags are an enormous problem for New York City” (Rosenthal). A large number of plastic bags in the market are harmful. In this case, they cause jam and damages in the sorting machines as well as costing a large amount of money to repair. Plastics are non-biodegradable and hence take infinitely a lot of time to decompose. As such, they cause various problems to our environment. . It can last for hundreds of years and it is possible to leach out chemical components which are harmful, but never disappearing Natural gas or petroleum takes million of years to produce and they are used to make plastic bags, but those bags are being discarded either to a dump or incinerator. Another significant negative implication of plastic bags is that animals may confuse them with food and hence causing them entangled, injured, or dead. Furthermore, the ingested plastic bags cause illness related complications. This further extends to the ocean animals. Another worrying revelation is that at least 267 species of ocean animals are adversely affected by the marine debris. This is reported courtesy of the non-profit World watch Institute reports. Plastic debris has been discredited for causing more deaths to marine animals. The animals that are mostly affected include whales, seals and turtles. Another worrying research revealed that a large number of birds are ingesting a large amount of plastics. Similarly, 90 percent of the birds inspected had plastic in their gut in a study by (Clarke). This has further been emphasized by the research conducted by European Commission on the impact of litter on North Sea wildlife. The Earth Policy Institute supports the research by declaring that “plastic from discarded bags actually soaks up additional pollutants like pesticides and industrial waste that are in the ocean and delivers them in large doses to sea life” (Larsen). Another way that that plastic kills cattle is through the contamination of cotton. In this case, they pollute cotton fields and hence the quality of the final is diminished. Consequently, small cities like Fort Stockton and Kermit banned the use of plastic bags in 2011 and 2013 respectively to improve the situation (Larsen). Apart from direct ingestion of the plastic pollutants, smaller animals that have ingested plastic can pass the same to higher animals. In this case, the plastic material accumulates it the animal’s system and hence increases the chances of moving up to food chain to the food we eat, and thus derive health problems to us.These revelations have also been recorded in Sandra Steingraber book, Having Faith. In the book, she reckons that, “However it is made, dioxin reaches us when it falls from the sky. Blades of grass , and then by us. And then we feed our babies” (Steingraber 938). The book makes illustration of how plastic compounds can end up in the guts of human beings though the food chain. Human beings are not commonly involved in directly ingesting plastic compounds. However, they do so indirectly through accumulation of plastics in the food chain. When human being ingest plastic commodities, various adverse effects become inevitable. For this matter, plastic accumulation in the body causes some cancers, infertility and disruption of the endocrine and reproductive systems. This also happens among organisms living in the oceans and seas. In this case, plastics release toxic substances which end up being ingested by these organisms. As human being consumes fish and other sea foods, they may end up ingesting harmful substances such as Lead, cadmium, and mercury are the direct toxicity from plastic and other contaminated.     The efforts of establishing a complete substitution of plastic bags with other environmental-friendly bags has been met with massive resistance. This is because its opponents believe that consumers will be inconvenienced as there exist no close substitute for plastic bags. According to a story told by a reporter working for The New York Times, plastic bags collected for the recycling program by the pharmacies and supermarkets had disappeared as they are tossed in to the trash.  Frank Convery, economist at University College, states that “As regards the plastic bag issue, whatever is done has to be mandatory” (Rosenthal). On the issues of the legislation, Lee Califf says, “If this law were allowed to go into effect, it would jeopardize thousands of California manufacturing jobs, hurt the environment, and fleece consumers for billions so grocery store shareholders and their union partners can line their pockets” (Fudge). The government has made efforts to amass manufacturers of plastic commodities to abandon or scale down of the number of plastics injected into the market. Whereas people working in the plastic industry will eventually lose jobs due to reduced sales and profitability, $2 million in loans for plastic bag producers so that they can venture in other trades to curb massive job loss. As a result of the bill encouraging the reusability of plastic bags, two Los Angeles Senators Ricardo Lara and Kevin De Leon, who rejected the earlier versions of the legislation, have now thrown their weight behind the bill. Similarly, Aldo Leopold in his book, In A Sand County Almanac, has pointed out that “Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making” (Leopold 278). Currently, American has shown positive efforts towards solving the plastic bags menace. The regulation of the use of plastic commodities can trace its origin at San Francisco in the year 2007. Initially, the ban was implemented in shops and restaurants. The state looked forward to achieving an overall strategy of “zero waste” by 2020. San Francisco, according to available data, diverts 80% of trash to recyclers instead of landfills, which is a desirable outcome. According to information collected by Plastic bags purchases by retailers have a drastic drop from “107 million pounds in 2008 to 62 million pounds in 2012” (Clarke). Similarly, San Jose conducted a research that concluded that the prohibition of plastic bags in the year 2011 has drastically reduced the plastic related litter. In this he reiterates that, ‘’approximately 89 percent in the storm drain system, 60 percent in the creeks and rivers, and 59 percent in City streets and neighborhoods” (Clarke). Further, Calvin B. Dewitt writes that “We must keep the earth, not as we would a pickled specimen or an animal in a cage or a plant in an herbarium or a seed bank” in his book Inspirations for Sustaining Life on Earth (DeWitt 921). In conclusion, every person has a duty to ensure that the Earth remains safe and habitable. In this case, let us take the first step of carrying shopping bags to the market. Read More