Conclusion

You know, I'm hoping a lot of you already knew about plastic bags being all nasty, a real scar on the face of the earth; but now I'm hoping that you learned a bit more about where they come from. Where they go. But most importantly, how many plastic bags humans use each year. Since they were introduced in the 1980's, plastic bag numbers have probably raised into the 17 trillion mark. It's an absolutely absurd number. How we've gotten away with it so far is beyond me. But what isn't beyond me is that if we don't pull up our socks and do something about them soon, we could be living on one big garbage dump.

A Solution

There's a solution? This is madness... Madness? This is reasonable!

But in all seriousness, to solve our plastic bag situation we would to start to have to take some pretty drastic steps. I, sadly, do not see it being solved within 10 years. As many countries have been shooting for. But, I do see the end of the tunnel somewhere in the future. What it would require is a switch to the reusable bags that Safeway and Sobey's are now offering. We could also start to go back to the paper bags we used a lot before. But the catch to using paper and not wrecking the environment would be to only use 100% recycled paper. I actually believe that recycled paper is stronger anyways so it would be beneficial both ways. When it comes to food that have to be put in plastic packaging we'd have to get into some heavy scientific research for a substance that is renewable and can keep food from going off. One day we'll find it out.

Equitability Rating

We'll have a 1 to 3 scale for equitability, with 1 being awful and 3 being awesome!

3- All the workers are treated fairly. They are made sure to have a decent standard of living and the employer takes care of their workplace needs. Like working at Ikea or somewhere progressive like that.

2- A grey area between the black and white of 3 and 1. Number 2 would be like working at the hockey puck factory in Slovakia. You get okay wages. Your employer is doing what is required. But nobody is going above and beyond the call of duty to make your life improved.

1- So this is really bad. this rating is like the coltan miners in the DRC/ruby miners in Myanmar. OR some Nike sweatshop kid making shoe soles. It's just bad!

For this I would give plastic bags a 2.5. Because really the only labour required takes place on the oil rigs. And from what I've heard you get treated pretty good on a big operation like that. Not quite a three because the people who work in the oil business in third world countries don't get amazing treatment. But still, it's better than being a ruby miner.

Sustainability Rating

In this sustainability chart we're going with 5 being the best and 1 being "Oh my god. How are we doing this to our planet." Hopefully by now you already have a good guess in your head as to what plastic bags rank as from the information from this presentation. But I'm required to show you the chart anyways.

5- This product uses lots of renewable resources as well as renewable energy in production. The disposal process is 100% legit recycling and reusing.

4- So close to the top! Only a few mistakes and maybe your machines aren't running at full efficiency when creating the product.

3- There are some flaws in the lifeline of this product. Excess packaging, only usable for a few times. Maybe only lasts a few years. Not much effort for recycling.

2- There are some obvious errors in the way this product is fabricated, distributed, and disposed of.

1- There has been little or no effort at all towards creating a green product. The only way to solve this crisis is to phase it out ASAP! (Jeez, only a plastic bag would get a rating this bad.)

I gave plastics bags a 1 for their sustainability rating. An HUGE amount ends up in landfills where they will never decompose. Or in the ocean, where they contribute to many birth defects in humans because of bio magnification. Plastic bags are not a sustainable product :(

Disposal

Sadly, only 1 in every 500 bags is recycled. In theory, this is what that would look like

When you take 1trillion and divide by 500 you get 2 000 000 000. Subtract 2 000 000 000 from 1 000 000 000 000 and you're left with 980 000 000 000 bags being thrown into landfills every-single-year. Imagine how much plastic that is. We have so much potential to do so many great things with that plastic but instead we throw it away and let is sit in our landfills for 500-1000 years before it photo degrades. This is not bio degrading when the material is eventually converted back into something useful for the earth. Photo degrading is when the bag breaks up into smaller pieces spreading itself across an even farther area.

A lot of human's plastic waste ends up in the Pacific Garbage Patch, which is a larger area than Texas, the toxins from the plastics are absorbed by plankton, which is eaten by fish, whom are eaten by whales. Then we hunt the whales or harvest the fish and by the time the plastic toxins have reached humans they are at an extremely dangerous level of lethality. This is known as bio-magnification.

Distribution/Consumption

There are a few major bag making companies who sell their bags to companies like Safeway, Wal-Mart, Home Depot, and also many other small businesses like Rusticana. It is estimated that humans use 500,000,000,000-1,000,000,000,000 plastic bags per year. In other words, that’s almost 1 million plastic bags used per minute. It's extremely difficult to find out how many bags one company uses in a month so I made a realistic estimate. Safeway has 1700 different locations. Lets say each store uses 250 000 bags a year. That tallies up to around 50-80 million bags that Safeway uses a year. When you combine other corporations like Sobey's, Canadian Superstore etc.. it isn't hard to believe that amount, especially when that's just shopping bags. Consider how many Zip-Lock or garbage bags we use. Or the plastic bags that cover your new furniture. The numbers start to get ridiculous.

So who manages all of these bags? Who ships them to the retailers? It isn't just one large company but rather a large amount of semi-large businesses. According to the WSJ Target, the second-largest retailer in the U.S., purchases 1.8 billion bags a year.

http://www.reusablebags.com/facts.php?id=4

Production

Two plastic bags require 990 kJ (kilojoules) of natural gas, 240 kJ of petroleum, and 160 kJ of coal. That is a lot for just two Safeway-sized plastic bags!! That adds up to about 4% of the worlds oil consumption.

Components of oil or natural gas are heated in a cracking process, which creates hydrocarbon monomers. In the manufacturing process, hydrocarbon monomers are biogeochemically manipulated, resulting in the creation of hydrocarbon polymers, which are essentially large molecules made up of repeated units of hydrocarbon monomers. Different groupings of monomers make polymers with different characteristics "http://www.islandnet.com/~vipirg/publications/pubs/student_papers/05_ecofootprint_plastic_bags.pdf"

So what they are doing is heating up/cracking, the petroleum products until the tar-ish stuff in them is all thats left behind. Sounds great for the environment to burn petrol until all you're left with is the dregs of it.

Extraction

Plastics are petroleum based and so when people are drilling for oil, they aren't just doing it for fuel. To locate an oil field geologists use seismic pulses and study the nearby ground for seismic response. When they have located the whereabouts of the oil well the companies insert a drill into the earth. After that a steel pipe is put into the hole to provide structural integrity for the newly drilled well. Holes are then made in the base of the well to enable oil to pass into the bore. Finally a collection of valves called a "Christmas Tree" is fitted to the top, the valves regulating pressures and controlling flows. Here's a picture of a pump jack with the well below.

But this is a perfect scenario oil well. What if you have tar sands like Alberta? Then you have to dig massive pits in the earth, 40-60 meters deep. Then you load up huge dump trucks with oily sand. Then you take this sand and add it to a big mixing pot full of water and NaOH. The ratio of barrels of water to make on barrel of oil is 3water:1oil
The oil sands are leaving a large footprint on the earth in terms of environment. And then you always run the risk of another BP Oil Spill happening when you're shipping the oil to the refineries. This is not sustainable.

What Ever Happened To...?

Plastic bags are bad!
So the whole world is trying to go green right now and I support the 'valiant' effort their giving, but not really. It seems that we can only ever focus on one environmental issue at a time doesn't it? The 90's were all about recycling and re-using, in my opinion at least. Now that seems to have fallen to the background, it's still there but not as predominate as before. Ever since Al Gore's movie all we worry about is our emissions and carbon footprint; in no way am I slagging off the importance of our ozone and how many nasties we dish out. I am getting a little ticked that a few other environmental issues have fallen behind, like saving the Amazon, you know, trees that turn CO2 into oxygen. That's just a little important for everything that lives...The point I'm trying to make is that humans seem to be one trick ponies and every new generation that takes office can only focus on one-little-thing-at-a-time. Our green progress has become painfully slow and has gone in reverse more than once. I say, when an issue comes at hand we accept it, we address it and most importantly we do not forget it until solved. So... whatever happened to recycling?

In a strict sense, recycling of a material would produce a fresh supply of the same material, for example used office paper to more office paper, or used foamed polystyrene to more polystyrene. However, this is often difficult or too expensive (compared with producing the same product from raw materials or other sources.) I'm going to speak about the issue of plastic bags but as you know there are many other items that have become a non-sustainable product. Hopefully this will raise some questions and can get you thinking about all of the unnecessary packaging the world uses.

References/Research

"plstcBAG." Olds. GoDaddy, 02 Sep 2003. Web. 1 Jun 2010. http://www.olds.ca/communty/plstcbag.pdf

Kay, Bushnell. "Plastic Bags: Switching to Reusable Cloth Bags." Sierra Club. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Jun 2010. http://www.sierraclub.org/sustainable_consumption/articles/bags3.asp


sevko, . "Say no to plastic bags ." Sustainability Forum. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Jun 2010. http://www.sustainabilityforum.com/forum/sustainable-lifestyle/2023-say-no-plastic-bags.html


Waste, Management. "Plastic bag reduction." Sobeys. N.p., n.d. Web. 1 Jun 2010. http://www.sobeyscorporate.com/sustainability/retail/plastic_bag_reduction.html


BBC, . "What happens to your rubbish?." BBC Home. BBC, n.d. Web. 1 Jun 2010. http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/citizenx/national/government/lowdown/government_basics_5.shtml


Katharine, Mieszkowski. "Plastic bags are killing us." Salon. GoDaddy, 07 Aug 2007. Web. 2 Jun 2010. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/10/plastic_bags/?source=newsletter

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/1TMavC/blogs.discovermagazine.com/discoblog/2008/05/27/its-in-the-bag-teenager-wins-science-fair-solves-massive-environmental-problem/