It's the weekend in a supermarket
in Mexico City. One minute 23 families came with their carts loaded with
pantry. In all cases, the products were contained in at least 184 plastic bags.
From this moment the future of
each plastic bag is uncertain, but almost always harmful to the environment.
Some will have a dual use. The housewives used to pull and sort the garbage and
the children keep their lunch there. Some will be collected by the garbage
trucks and deposited in landfills.
Others, however, end up in
containers open or on street corners or in parks then they will fly and will
jam the branch of a tree or be torn by a dog or a rodent. There are few who
clog drains and in the rainy season, contribute to waterlogging and flooding in
cities. A more which will not be less, traveling down the drain into a stream.
And others will be shot on the
beaches and washed ashore oceans. There, in the sea, plastic bags endanger the
lives of 260 marine animals that eat or terminate the tangled around their
necks The suffocate. "Sea turtles, for example, mistaken for jellyfish and
they eat them to drown. Plastic bags are a death trap for hundreds of species.
Last in a cleanup campaign we did on the beaches of Cancun in just three hours
we collected 600 kilos of garbage and 90% were various kinds of plastic bags
and bottles as year, "said Beatriz Bujeda, director of the International
Fund for the Protection of the Animal Welfare (IFAW).
Plastic bags have become a source
of alarm for environmental organizations and governments in many countries.
Greenpeace, IFAW and the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States
agree that a plastic bag takes between 400 and a thousand years to decompose,
depending on their size and weight, which means that the first bags that were
manufactured in the 50s, still exist and are scattered, contaminating soil and
seas. Mexico, however, not make decisions about it and so far there is not a
public policy aimed at addressing this type of pollution.
According to estimates by Senator
William Tamborrel Suarez of the Committee on the Environment, Natural Resources
and Fisheries of the Senate, Mexicans use 20 million bags a day.
For its part, the Environmental
Protection Agency in the United States reports that in the world, each person
uses six plastic bags per week, 24 per month and 288 a year. Data IFAW and
Greenpeace say that each person uses the plastic bag an average of 12 minutes
and only 1% is recycled.
Garbage in the city
In the cities the bags create
serious havoc. In Mexico City, Secretary of Civil Protection, said the plastic
bag pollution is the main problem during the rainy season "that are thrown
indiscriminately in the streets and clogged pipes, plumbing and drainage,
leading to severe waterlogging and flooding.”
He explained that in Mexico City
have identified in the risk atlas 322 points floods and 60% of them are located
in areas where flea install "and an impressive amount of trash thrown
away, especially plastic bags" .
He said the problem is becoming
more severe, because every year the accumulation of waste and bags drainage
channels increases.
Bangladesh, bitter memory
In the Asian country of
Bangladesh, villagers have bitter memories of the floods of 1988 and 1998, when
500 drowned and 700 thousand people respectively. After nearly four years of
negotiations, the Government of Bangladesh enacted a ban on the production and
distribution of plastic bags because they blocked the drainage and precluded
the drain during flooding.
Two problems
Alvaro Rodriguez, specialist
Biotechnology Center of the Technological Institute of Superior Studies of
Monterrey, explained that there are two main problems with plastic bags because
"when the life of the product is finished, it is rejected and must be
confined to various dumps of cities but as it degrades very slowly, growing
volumes of bags that are generated in the country. The second problem relates
to the raw material used for these products, it is oil and ultimately increasing
the production price is going higher. “(The Universal)
Given the large number of plastic
bags used in daily activity, lack a culture of recycling, at the end of its
first use, as is to keep the mandate or the trash.