Disposing Large Amounts of Waste

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Recommended: Preliminary essay on waste management

In present-day society，plastic packing are pervasive around the street ,causing a lot of problems . A study from Department of Enviroment,Food and Rural Affairs Annual Report(2008) shown that the amount of packaging waste reached approximately 10.7 million tonnes in the UK ,which has been deal with. It is obvious that the problems of waste are serious. In this essay I will analysis some problems caused by this phenomenon ,then propose some solutions and criticized them as well .

Some problems come out due to people produce a large amounts of waste. I will illustrate three of them . First of all, most of the packaging is made up of plastic which is a non-renewable resource. Specifically, a report of James(2005,p.10) and Grant(2005,p.10) concluded that when people were burning away the refuse, these plastic wastes were hardly to be separated from other trash and that lead to the emissions released the poisonous gas into the air. Secondly, the deterioration of these kinds of pollutions worsens the living condition of not only the humans but also the animals. Looking the word “plastic” up in dictionary, we can found that the plastic consists of chemical materials, which are all having the harmful effects. For instance, one of the materials named polyvinyl chloride, which could cause the cancer ( Hardll, Ohlson and Fredrikson, 1997), and another material called plasticizer, which could lead to the damage to the endocrine system of both human and animals. ( Xu., Li.and Gu, 2004) A report shows that, annually, as many as a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals worldwide die from plastic bags (Cadman, Evans, Holland and Boyd, 2005). The third problem is that there are too much space for landfill and most plastic bags or packaging c...

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...n, it might bury us in an ocean of rubbish then the earth would be a dustbin. To prevent this nightmare from coming true, governments need to work closely with each other and back up their verbal commitment by actions. particularly，there is a good example from Republic of Ireland In 2001, An extremely successful plastic bag consumption tax, or PlasTax, introduced in 2002 reduced consumption by 90%. (Smith , 2004,p.5) . Approximately 18,000,000 liters of oil have been saved due to this reduced production. Base on this successful action, many other countries, such as UK, Australia and New York City. are now considering running a similar tax.(reusablebags.com) However, it is not enough only to ask what governments can do to reduce the packaging waste, we must ask ourselves what we as individuals can do to preserve the environment from the pollution of packaging waste .

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