From putting your lunch in it when you go to school to putting it in use inside the trash bins around your house, plastic bags are more useful than ever. As of last year, it has been rumored that plastic bags will be banned. We are now almost done with 2009 and bags have yet to be out of the grocery store.
We have been using plastic bags for years, so why decide to put a stop to them now? If they are so harmful to Earth and animals, then the ban should have been right then and there when the issue was first noticed.
Many people use the bags for things other than grocery shopping. Walking a dog and having to pick up its remains is a huge plus for plastic bags; people are not seen with a reusable cloth bag following after their dog.
With the ban, people who actually recycle and reuse their bags are being punished for what they did not do. It is true there are people not recycling and even leaving their trash on the ground, but that is only so many out of an entire population.
If we ban plastic bags we may as well get rid of aluminum cans. They end up in the ocean and do not disintegrate. Just like not everyone recycles bags, not everyone recycles can.
Not only cans and bags are littered; as one drives along the freeway and sees the shoreline at the beach, garbage is clearly visible everywhere. In that case, all containers, bottles, plastic and glass should be outlawed for the sake of Earth.
A solution shouldn’t be to ban these items, it should perhaps be to better teach people the best ways of recycle or better yet, have labeled recycling bins conviniently placed where the most garbage is littered around.
As for the bags, people can reuse them, they just choose not to. Some are fortunate enough to be able to afford a roll of trash bags at $7 when a plastic bag is in fact needed or are able to buy a $5 pack of paper bags for their lunches.
Grocery stores even offer a bin for customers to throw out their bags. From there, the market takes and recycles them. Again, people just choose to avoid it.
Not only are plastic bags handy, they keep the line at the market fast-paced. When a customer has a $200 order and reusable bags, it takes twice as long for the courtesy clerk to bag the items versus plastic.
Not only have we become lazy, we simply have stopped caring about the planet we live on. If people actually cared that we live in garbage, the topic of having to ban our bags would not be in the news.