You’d have to have been living on Mars not to notice the push recently for us to use less plastic bags. We’re given incentives to re-use them, re-cycle them, use bags for life, or not use them at all.
And yet they are still a major environmental problem.
In 2007 the government’s Department of the Environment, Defra, collated the following facts about plastic bags:
Plastic bags can travel many miles in this way but once they land on water, due to its surface tension, they remain there. This means that our seas and rivers are full of old plastic bags.
During the Marine Conservation Society’s Beachwatch survey for 2007, seven and a half thousand bags were recorded on UK beaches. This is an increase of two thousand within three years and the number is unfortunately still climbing, despite growing awareness of their environmental damage. It means that for every kilometre of beach surveyed, approximately 45 bags were found.
What happens is that many types of sea life mistake the bags for food. This is most particularly the case with creatures for which squid or jelly fish are part of their natural diet. For a Leatherback turtle, for instance, a floating plastic bag looks almost indistinguishable to a jelly fish, and they attempt to eat the bag.
However ingestion and digestion is almost impossible and the bag either gets tangled in their stomach or completely blocks their gut, causing them to die a slow and painful death of starvation.
Amongst the worst affected are creatures who are already endangered and who, if they are not protected, could soon become extinct.
Records of dead animals from the Marine Conservation Society include an endangered Leatherback turtle which was found with 57kg of plastic bags blocking its insides and a rare Curviers Beaked Whale, whose gut was totally obstructed by compacted bags. A further incident reported a Minke Whale found washed up in France with 800kg of plastic bags inside it, including some from British supermarkets. These are just a few examples of a growing list.
The high and low density polyethylene from which plastic bags are made, are full of chemicals which have been found to be able to migrate from plastic and thus contaminate other things. Such chemicals can affect the immune system of animals.
However, even then, it may never actually disappear. Tiny microscopic particles or ‘plastic dust’ could persist, going on to affect a whole new host of marine life such as filter feeders by which the plastic – and its inherent toxins - could be transferred up the food chain.
