by Linda Schreiber

Created on: January 22, 2009   Last Updated: May 31, 2011

Don't burn plastic bags! They are very toxic and they pollute the air in our neighborhoods and in our towns. When my neighbor burns her leaves, she burns them plastic bags and all. I wondered what chemicals were coming from burning the plastic bags, so I looked it up. I found that burning polyethylene emits fumes that include compounds such as methane, ethane, aldehydes, ketones and acrolein, plus additional compounds. I also found that burning Styrofoam containers emits styrene, benzene, benzaldehyde, formaldehyde, plus various poly-aromatic hydrocarbons.

Now breathing smoke from either one is bad. So all you campers who love to sit around a campfire and burn your plates and cups in it better think twice about breathing those fumes. And I am going to let my neighbor know I found out that burning plastic causes cancer. It has to start somewhere, right?

People all over the world are trying to figure out what to do with plastic bags. Some countries and municipalities are banning them. There are many very good reasons to question whether they should even be allowed to exist.
Plastic bags are a very large part of the toxic portions of our solid waste daily and there is no safe way to dispose of them. If you bury them, they will poison the soil for generations. If you burn them, you pollute the air with toxins. If they end up in the waterways and eventually the oceans they cause death by being swallowed which causes starvation. More than one million sea birds and approximately 100,000 sea mammals die each year after ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic debris.

Because plastic bags are so light weight, they are easily airborne and are found everywhere, littering the countryside with many potential dangers and choking up drains. They can hold pockets of water where mosquitoes breed. They can cause the soil underneath to become infertile. They are non-biodegradable and take hundreds of years to break down in the environment. Plastic bags are using up a slowly diminishing resource because they are made from oil.

Many countries are beginning to either ban them or control their use. For instance, in June of 2008, China banned free plastic bags after a survey conducted in Singapore found that the annual number of discarded plastic bags had reached 2.5 billion.

In Pakistan, the environmental protection agency is planning on banning the use of polythene bags. Bags are becoming a major landfill problem, a sewage treatment problem and health hazard from air pollution

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>