READ ESSAY: How We Could Make Waitaki Plastic Bag Free

What is deadly, you use it just once, often for thirty minutes, it floats away like a parachute and it ends up in the world’s biggest floating garbage dump. What is it? It’s a plastic bag. This essay is about why we shouldn’t use plastic bags and how they affect the environment.  What can we use instead of plastic bags?  Who else has already gone plastic bag free? Around the world we use 1 million plastic bags a minute;and 500 billion plastic bags get used a year!

How do plastic bags affect the environment?

Plastic is non-biodegradable. Plastic is harmful for the environment because bacteria can't eat it and it can’t break down on land or in the water.

Plastic bags get gathered up in the sea, twice the size of Texas! The world's biggest dump is the middle of the pacific ocean, it’s in between Japan and Hawaii, and America and Hawaii. On some of Hawaii’s beaches the beach is full of plastic and most of it is plastic or plastic bags!

Plastic can kill animals; Plastic bags kill more than 100,000 marine animals a year. If the sun gets to the plastic the plastic disintegrates into little pieces and fish think it’s food, eat it and die.  A little fish eats the plastic, then the bigger fish eats the little fish and so on.  We sometimes eat fish that has eaten plastic.  It is a domino effect.  It also strangles animals like birds and animals can swim and get caught up in plastic.

Who has become plastic bag free and how did they become plastic bag free?

Hawaii, Countdown Waiheke, Bali and Dublin are places that are plastic bag free. How Dublin became plastic bag free, was they taxed people. People got fed up with having to pay for the plastic bags so they brought their own reusable ones. By 2019, the UE want to decrease the amount of plastic used by one person by 90 bags a year;and then by 2025 the UE wants to decrease the amount of plastic bags to 40 bags per person, per year.

Two students in Bali have been trying to reduce plastic bag use by education, getting people to use reusable bags and have talked to their government about banning plastic bags.  They are aiming for Bali to be plastic bag free by 2019.  They have a website and Ted Talk.

Why do we use plastic bags? Plastic is easy to make, and you don't need very special equipment to make plastic bags. Plastic in most cases is the best, and most-cost effective way to keep food fresh and protect it from damage.  They are easy for supermarkets to use and they are set up to use them.  Advertisers like to put their logo on them. They are lightweight, easy to carry and you can get rid of them easily (or so people think!).  Shoppers use them, because they can get them for free and they don’t have to remember to bring them to the shop.

What could we use instead of plastic bags?

We could use brown paper bags. One of the good things about brown paper bags, is they are cheap for companies to buy in bulk, which if companies are buying in bulk it would be an average $0.22 per bag. A not so good thing about brown paper bags is, if they put in it wet, damp, or heavy things, they will easily break.

We could make bags! You can use clothes and make them into bags, a good thing about this is you can get rid of old clothes, rather than them going to landfill! We could also use environment friendly bags, baskets, boxes and reusable bags. One good thing about this is that we can fit more things in than a plastic bag, and you only need a couple of bags/boxes than heaps. They are easy to just keep in your car. At Pak’n’Save you can have the choice of buying reusable bags, or using boxes;which makes the boxes have more than one use of just packaging groceries to the supermarket.

For your rubbish bins (or wheelie bins), you can put your rubbish in without a plastic liner and once it goes away to the dump, you clean it out with water and soap.  It won't smell too much. You will have way less stinky rubbish if you recycle your cans, bottles and plastic.

When you go into a supermarket what do you see? Plastic. Not just plastic bags, but almost everything else is wrapped or bottled in plastic. At the back of the supermarket there is acres of shrink-wrap, pallet-wrap and bubble-wrap all used to deliver food.

EPTech has made biodegradable bags. EPTech is based in Tauranga.

They only take 6 months to several years disintegrate, compared to the normal plastic bags that take 50 to 500 years to disintegrate. Their bags can disintegrate in water or on land.

One of the shops that use EPTech biodegradable bags is Garden Fresh Oamaru. They were going to use paper bags but the weight of the pumpkins and large veggies, would rip the paper bag. There was two other types of bio-degradable bags. The biodegradable bags have a small logos on them say that they are biodegradable, if the bag does not have the logo it is not biodegradable. “They do cost more but they are better for the environment” said the shop owner.

Next time you go shopping think about all the plastic bags you get, and what you do with your plastic bags afterwards.  Ask yourself how long they will be in the landfill, or think of the plastic bag dump in the sea, think about how many sea animals you will kill. Then think, all the other options instead of plastic bags.  It may cost more initially to get recyclable bags, but in the future you would be thankful. #Save The Earth