Each year, approximately 500 billion to one trillion plastic
bags are consumed worldwide. That’s over one million bags per minute. Over
100,000 marine animals, including highly intelligent, adorable sea turtles,
whales and dolphins, and at least 2 million birds die every year because of
plastic bags. They choke or get tangled in plastic or they eat plastic, leading
to internal infections, starvation, and death.
Plastic bags are extremely durable. In case you are thinking
of this as an advantage, just bring to mind an image of the huge landfill that
you may have seen on the city outskirts. Probably, the majority of the rubbish
present there will comprise of plastic bags only. Plastic bags have led to a
great increase in the pollution levels.
Plastic bags have been known to cause a lot of environmental
damage. A single plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to decay completely.
This makes the bags stay in the environment longer, in turn, leading to a great
build-up on the natural landscape. The more plastic bags you use, the greater
the chances of environmental damage.
A way to avoid or reduce water and air pollution is to avoid
throwing away plastic bags. You can just reuse or donate them to recycling
centers. It is also a good approach to throw them into the right garbage can,
which must be the non-biodegradable can.
As plastic bags won’t be easy to stop causing threats to
humans and polluting the environment, doing your own way to help prevent it
from getting worse is not difficult either. Just do the things that you think
can contribute to the reduction of air, water and soil pollution caused by
plastic bags.
Remember that changes in the environment have to start
within and from you.
Plastic bags look like jellyfish, so turtles try to eat them.
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