Do you care about protecting our earth from plastic bags? Do you know that every year 500 billion to one trillion plastic bags are used worldwide? That means one million a minute! What will happen if we keep this up? The oceans will be overrun in plastic, the animals will die, and the oceans will be polluted too. That is why I say we should ban plastic bags! They should be banned because they unbalance the ocean ecosystem, they can kill animals, most bags are not recycled, and waste our natural resources in the process of making them.

Plastic bags kill animals, but mostly sea animals. The plastic bags from the landfills rolls into the oceans. The sea animals eat them, then die a slow, painful, death. A lot of sea turtles eat it because they like to eat jellyfish so they usually mistake it for jellyfish, eat it,and die. So many  ocean animals die because of plastic bags scattered in the ocean.

Most plastic bags are not recycled and that’s a problem because they are not biodegradable. That means that they cannot become earth material. Because they are not biodegradable, they cause air pollution. That’s a different problem, but a big one. Only 3% of plastic bags get recycled, and the ones that don’t, get put in the landfills. It takes plastic bags 10-20 years to dissolve, and even then they don’t break down completely. After that it takes them 80-120 years to dissolve completely. And California alone throws away 123,000 tons of plastic bags a year. Can you believe that?

Plastic bags waste our natural resources. Mostly our oil, because plastic bags are made of oil. You know how oil is rare right? Well they use a lot of it in plastic bags. And by a lot of it, I mean 123,000 barrels of it!!! And one barrel weighs 300 pounds! We have limited resources, and oil won’t last forever. So we shouldn’t be wasting it on something as stupid as plastic bags.

Plastic bags unbalance the oceans ecosystem because they disrupt the food chain. They small microscopic organisms eat it first. It can get them but not in a large way. Then the plankton and other herbivores eat it and can look weird or die. Then while they have the plastic on or in them, predators can eat them and suffocate because of the plastic they ate that was inside the herbivore, or they can eat their own plastic while mistaking it for food. Then, finally, the top predators of the ocean can eat the smaller predators and herbivores and also suffocate, change in a weird way, and in the end die.

Plastic bags are good in a way too, because one fifth of all reusable bags have bacteria that can make you sick. For example, you have raw meat in your bag then you put apples in your bag too. But still, you can see how plastic bags harm our planet? That’s why I say cities should ban plastic bags. They can, in the end, harm our earth so much we will be sorry we ever got into the habit of using plastic bags.

These are some websites I used to get my information http://www.dogonews.com/2012/5/14/how-the-increasing-plastic-debris-in-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch-may-alter-the-oceans-ecosystem and http://www.environmentcalifornia.org/programs/keep-plastic-out-pacific

and  my picture is from QUICK FACTS ON PLASTIC POLLUTION (from greenfeet.