Please tell me why plastic grocery bags are bad?

There are many reasons why plastic bags are not good. For one thing many of them end up as litter, enter drains and open waters, and some animals may eat them thinking they are food. I know it sounds silly but it is a proven fact - it happens all the time. Also, people put their waste in them as rubbish bags, and in particular they put in stuff that would normally break down and return nutrients to the earth, such as green waste (peelings, egg shells, stale bread etc). Even those enviro bags arent very enviro friendly if they are not made from recycled items, nor the dye being biodegradabe, and we get more and more of them than we really need, because many companies have turned them into a fashion item. There are companies that are making huge profits from the production of these 'enviro' bags which are meant to help us avoid plastic bags altogether. Oh and I once asked the manager of a store why he didn't use alternative packaging to the plastic bags. He said that the bags act as advertising for them - huge logo right in the middle! Hmmmm. With plastic bags, don't think of it as a habit you have to break, but more of an ethical alternative you wish to adopt - using reusable bags and creating less landfill. Cheers! :) PS. I live practically plastic bag free. Very easy to do.

Good for your community for trying to eliminate plastic bags. 380 million plastic bags are made every year and less than one percent are recycled. That creates excess waste in your landfills and more plastic bags being introduced as litter in our environment. Plastic takes more than 1000 years to biodegrade and that's under good circumstances. But even that's a misstatement because plastic doesn't ever biodegrade fully but into small, tiny bits of plastic.

You should recycle or reuse the plastic bags that you may or may not have accumulated and invest in a reuable bag(s) that you can store in your car for when you go to the store. You can get reusable bags at many groceries or buy a plain bag at your local craft store.

Hope that helps ^_^

According to me, paper bags are even worse than plastic bags. By using paper bags, you cut a lot of trees. Plastic bags are not bad but throwing them is bad. Plastic is recycleable so we can't make it bad. But the problem is that they are non biodegradable which means that they do not dispose in the soil. so people think that they are bad.

i don't know much about what kinds of plastic can be recycled and what kinds can not, but my own experience of the general public, is that people may reuse plastic grocery bags, but generally people don't recycle them, and indeed they aren't biodegradable... unless you have several thousand years! the other thing that springs to mind, and often confuses me about plastic recycling, is that i have heard several places that the debate about recycling plastic is that it takes so much energy to actually do it, it becomes debatable as to whether it makes it worth while. therefore using reusable cloth/plastic grocergy bags and taking them back to the store to use them time and time again really a better option.

many areas do not have the facilities to recycle plastic bags but the biggest problem with them is they are everywhere look around in any metropolitan area and you will see them blowing around everywhere and they take centuries to decompose.Paper bags not much better but I don't know of anywhere they will replace them with plastic the big thing is the canvas bag it will come to the point were you will not get a bag from the store you will need your own when you shop

Plastic is not biodegradable. The real move is not as much toward paper as it is to the customer bringing cloth bags to the store and carrying their purchases in them. They are reusable and cost about $1 each. They are actually much easier to carry as you can put the bag on your shoulder as a female does with a pocket book.

That is the way it is done in Europe and if you watch, it will happen here. Public Supermarket is the leader of the pack in this effort.

The most environmentally friendly is to bring your own reusable bag (i.e. canvas bag).

If you can't or won't, then it depends.

Paper bags require more energy to produce and trees to be cut down, but are easily recyclable.

Plastic bags require less energy to produce, but are not recyclable. They are reusable for other applications, but only if your area has a specific plastic grocery bag recycling program (every retail store in California is now required by law to have one, for example).

So from most to least environmentally friendly:

1) Bring canvas bag(s)

2) Plastic if there's a specific recycling program

3) Paper

4) Plastic if there's no recycling program

because plastic bags are not biodegradable. we cut the trees to

make the paper bags. but the effect from the plastic bag to the environment is high

with the aid of all ability plastic, it takes constantly to decompose. If the pilgrims used six packs the plastic rings from returned then could nonetheless be around in the present day. very nearly 89% of all marine muddle is plastic to boot, of the one hundred fifteen species of marine mammals, 40 9 species are standard to grow to be entangled in and/or ingest marine muddle. The worst section is that the plastic does not circulate away after it kills an animal no as quickly as the animal dies and decompose the plastic is alive and kicking, meaning the comparable piece of plastic that killed that wonderful little birdie over there nicely do it returned. not in basic terms that marine muddle that's plastic absorbs pollution so whilst that's ingested it additionally poisons the animals to boot. that's envisioned that there is over 40 six,000 products of plastic muddle floating on each sq. mile of ocean in the present day. It takes approximately 450 years in basic terms for one plastic bottle to interrupt down interior the floor! individuals use 2.5 million plastic bottles each HOUR. an uncomplicated 323 plastic luggage are taken into our homes each 3 hundred and sixty 5 days and it takes 500 years to decay whilst sent to landfill. A plastic milk jug takes a million million years to decompose. A plastic cup can take 50 - eighty years to decompose.

bring your own bad does not sound too healthy.I would leave my bags in the car trunk for days or weeks for that last minute shopping be for going home for dinner. no telling where other people bags have been.