Why We Need Plastic Bags

I walk down the streets of New York City and see plastic bags floating around like birds or scurrying like squirrels. Some are stuck on tree branches and as the new green leaves sprout they move the plastic as though showing the poly bags they are not to be held back. Other times I see plastic bags stuck on barbed wire, ragged and straggled, and I know that unless the barbed wire starts growing, those poly bags aren't going anywhere.

But these plastic bags are kind of pretty - they add another dimension to the urban atmosphere, a transient layer to the shifting nature of the city. Blown about by the wind, urged onwards by sprouting trees, these dead plastic bags are a kind of art, a fusion of nature and mankind.

But to take my aesthetic values and argue that that's why we need plastic bags doesn't hold much water. Plastic bags are valuable because they are lightweight, strong and don't use up natural resources. Recycling them is comparable to recycling the billions of paper bags we use annually. And as we get better at learning about recycling, we are better able to use plastics in different ways.

People are generally environmentally conscious these days - roughly three-quarters of the population recycles. Compared to recycling rates twenty or thirty years ago, the trend is to be more conscious about what we do with our garbage. As a result, you can expect more innovation in recycling and waste treatment in the years to come.

Many new plastics are made naturally to better allow for biological breakdown and greater recycling ease. This is yet another way technology and attention paid to the needs of the global community are changing details such as the kind of plastic water bottles you purchase. And in the meanwhile, plastics remain as diverse as ever: from header bags and plastic resealable bags to newspaper bags and tape bags. So go ahead and use plastic bags. Recycle them, reuse them, do whatever you want with them. It seems clear that plastic bags aren't going anywhere - though the ways we make them will. In the future, we may not have as many poly bags floating around our urbanscapes, or if we do, we simply may not see them last: they may like the rest of us return to the earth.


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