Good riddance to plastic bags, they do more harm than good

The ban on production of plastic paper bags is no doubt a bold step.

Inevitably, there will be understandable disappointments from various stakeholders.

More challenging is the pollution visited upon communities by these bags and wrappers whose quantity appears to overwhelm as each year progresses.

Decomposable bags

Plastic packaging has its own advantages, nevertheless, compared to the primitive brown, decomposable paper bags that were in the market two decades ago.

A pedestrian caught up in a sudden, heavy downpour would definitely rue the experience without waterproof protection over any other material that could be damaged by water. The idea of recycling plastic so that none of the used bags go to waste would have been great, but the reality all over the world is that recycling does not reach out to all the undesirable waste.

There are the plastic bottles as well. What do we do with such litter that is not supposed to be returned to the source as is the case with glass bottles?

Obviously, recycle bins, or bags, would come in handy and that suggests cooperation between the end-user and the garbage-collector.

Garbage-collection locally, however, is not as orderly as would be found in well-established, eco-friendly settings with stricter rules entrenched. There seems to be no keen interest in the separation of material being disposed of. Batteries mixed up with other inflammable elements suitable for incineration could be dangerous.

On the other hand, landfills are not so successfully managed. Garbage that is light enough to be blown into the air by occasional whirlwinds is easily strewn to other places.

Humans end up unintentionally consuming the same waste that rears up in the food-chain and is trace-able in sea-food, for example.

Contamination has also been reported in beer, honey and table salt according to European Food Safety Authority.

This said, it should be unacceptable in these days of climate change to continuously hew down trees without a corresponding replacement.

Pumping extra gases into the air by burning plastic and other solid refuse on a large scale in order to rid them at dump-sites is an option that contributes and ultimately alters the atmospheric equation.