Should All Plastics be made to be Biodegradable?
Background Information
Plastic plays a huge role in our lives due to its ability to be functional in all aspects of everyday life. Statistics Canada showed Canadians in average produced 13.4 million tonnes of waste and 73% was sent for disposal. Of the 27% that was recycled 17% of that was plastic, while the rest ended up in landfills. The logical solution for the plastics in landfills unable to degrade is biodegradable plastics. However, are biodegradable plastics the answers to the addiction to plastic people have? Arguments have been made on whether the pro’s of biodegradable plastics outweigh the cons and if biodegradable plastics will truly make a difference in our environment.
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Chemistry Connections
Thermochemistry is the study of the energy changes that accompany physical or chemical changes in matter. Biodegradable plastics can be further studied through how these plastics can be broken down into the environment. Biodegradable plastics in order to properly degrade and fulfil its purpose needs a specific environment, specific environments that can only be met at specific recycling areas. These plastics require heat, moisture and oxygen to be able to break down in an open system, however; often times these biodegradable plastics are sent to landfills which are not able to provide the requirements the plastics need, being an isolated system. Section 6.2 factors affecting reaction can be applied to biodegradable plastics as certain factors will affect the reaction between the microorganisms that help break down the plastics.
Opinions
I do not think all plastics should be made biodegradable, because of the cons which outweigh the pros. Although biodegrad...
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... with many bacteria that can be washed away into the soil, and could be hazardous to the environment, people and wildlife.
Another positive aspect in biodegradable plastics is the economy benefits. Regular plastics use oil for production process and due to the increase in the need for oil bio degradable plastics is a better solution to regular plastics. As the costs of oil increases as the planets natural resources are quickly dwindling down the cost of making regular plastics will increase and by creating plastics with less oil, fewer expenses will have to be used for the production. Furthermore, with biodegradable being recycled in proper facilities will decrease the amount of plastic going in landfills, which can be expensive for maintaining proper care. Therefore, biodegradable plastics will not only be better or our environment but for our economy as well.
Plastics are a product that was intended to stay on land; although they have been entering oceans at a startling rate, affecting the environment dramatically. Pol...
National Center for Manufacturing Sciences. (2004, August 11). Environmental Roadmapping Initiative. Retrieved October 14, 2011, from Plastics Impacts, Risks and Regulations: http://ecm.ncms.org/ERI/new/IRRPlastics.htm
There is also debate on how much better biodegradable plastics are in the first place. This is because as biodegradable plastics break down, they break up into smaller and smaller pieces, but never quite disappear. This leaves the potential that the plastic would continue entering the food chain. But although biodegradable plastics aren’t perfect, they are still much safer than standard plastic and present a much lower risk. In addition, by making the shift to ban single use plastics, research towards better plastic alternatives will speed up and better solutions will become available. Over time, these new alternatives to plastics may spread to other items that aren’t single use, making an even greater impact on the health of humans and the
Landfills are being overrun with more than 15 million tons of discarded plastic a year. What if I told you there was a better way? Currently, many of our plastics such as bottles, packaging, and furniture are petroleum-based plastics. And while we do our best to recycle, this plastic is not completely biodegradable. I think there is a better choice, and that choice being polyhydroxybutyrate also known as PHB. “PHB is a product of bacteria storing carbon and energy in molecules of glycogen, which is polymer of glucose molecules or lipid.” (p.72) With little chemical alteration, PHB can be the “green” plastic that replaces petroleum-based plastics.
One of the most negative impacts that we have created in the ecosystem is the water pollution of plastic. Humans always go to the grocery store and come back with plastic bags of food. What do we do with those plastic bags? Reuse them for doggy bags, we use them as lunch bags, and also trash liners. Everyone just uses them for all sorts of reasons but when they dispose them, they never seem to think about where it might go. Well first of all them...
Plastic is a synthetic (human-made) material and takes much longer to decompose than natural materials. Plastic items take many lifetimes to decompose in landfills.
Most of the necessities humans need are provided in supermarkets, in fact supermarkets have become a necessity for our everyday life. They are now the main source of water, food, clothes and everyday tools. Therefore, the plastic bags demanded and supplied in this industry increase every day. In the past decade, we produced as much plastic as we did in the whole twentieth century (Freinkel, 2011). This exponential increase of a non-biodegradable material has negatively impacted our environment immensely. Plastic production requires our dwindling fossil fuel resources, robs away animal lives, litters our beautiful landscapes and even affects our very own well-being. Hence, if plastic production doesn’t diminish immediately, we will suffer great
The documentary Addicted To Plastic mainly portrays the harmful effects of the non-recyclable plastics to marine lives, human beings and the environment. It also suggests that plastic pollution, as an on-growing problem around the world may be avoided as there has been certain new technologies which could help human beings to reproduce useful products from the plastics. In the documentary, the audiences follow the narrator, who is also the filmmaker, along his journey of investigating plastic issue and how five different countries manage their extremely large amount of plastic with their own solutions. He starts from America, where he investigates the “Jalor” in the middle pacific ocean and demonstrates how the plastics decompose for hundreds
In addition, the plastics have shown to generate more damage to the environment in the long-term than any other sources of energy. So, it becomes our responsibility to preserve the environment creating mass awareness. The practice of bio-plastics are an environment friendly method, which doesn’t use the landfills while recycling and deposition, but it is also not that convenient method because the cost of manufacturing bio-plastics are much higher than ordinary method. This directly indicates that the cost of minimizing the waste, the cost of human health and environmental pollution is much higher than the production of
In today’s world, there is enough plastic thrown away each year to circle the world around four times. This is a major global problem that all countries have. Plastic is something we use for a few minutes and throw away. What most people don’t know is these simple plastics actually take centuries to degrade. Take for example a simple plastic bottle, this innocent looking plastic bottle that everyone uses take about 450 years to degrade. As said by Jeb Berrier in the movie BagIT, "Think about it. Why would you make something that you're going to use for a few minutes out of a material that's basically going to last forever, and you're just going to throw it away. What's up with that?".
Since the 1960s when plastic bottles were widely distributed, there have been several negative externalities resulting from their consumption and disposal. Flooding landfills and leaking into water supplies, debris fortified with chemicals that are often ingested by marine life, harmful emissions caused by its incineration, and the difficulty of recycling are just a few of the negative externalities that costs millions in. About 4 percent of the world’s oil production is used as raw materials to fuel the machines that make plastics, and people all over the world are exposed to chemicals from plastic several times each day through the air, dust, water, food and use of consumer
... converting plastic waste into useful products are being affected by pollution; this contamination is found within containers where plastics are collected. But the same risk of pollution carries downside consequences in which workers and people responsible for cleaning and disinfecting the plastic materials are not doing the best to eliminate plastic waste, and to disinfect the infected bacteria and microorganisms from the atmosphere and environment. Organizations from China and India are the largest in the world, they collect and purchase used plastic from United States, Europe, Asia and Latin America (Minguez 2013). These companies do not bother to sanitize the products before the recycling process; for this reason the planet earth is getting a worse environmental condition, and it is destroying lives of living beings, and natural resources as well (Uddin 2014).
Millions of plastic bags are given out to consumers by supermarkets and stores to carry their goods in. They are also cheap, light, durable, easy to carry and in many cases, free. The most commonly used shopping bag is made of High Density Polyethylene (HDPE). This type is used in the majority of supermarkets and stores. After these bags are used, they often end up in landfills or as litter, roughly only three percent of plastic bags is actually recycled per year (Planet Ark, 2011). The materials used in making plastic bags make them non-biodegradable. According to the science dictionary, 2011 refers to “these materials cannot be decomposed into environmentally safe waste materials by the action of soil bacteria.” These harmful substances are toxic and take approximately four hundred years to break down, or in this case photo-degrade; which is how plastics made from (HDPE) break down. Since they are not biodegradable, they remain in the environment and are absorbed in soil or water (Indian Centre for Plastics in the Environment, 2010). This essay will discuss the various harmful effects of plastic bags, and demonstrate the risks that these bags impose on humans, animals and the environment. It will also discuss a series of suggested solutions that could help reduce plastic bag usage.
...t. This cycle is very important in reducing the production of natural resources, which are, can be leading to the environmental degradation. It also helps to reduce the number of plastic bottles wasted which will undoubtedly pollute the environment and our lives. All in all, recycling plastic can help in maintaining the conservation and preservation of nature towards the better life for the future if we know the benefits is.
One huge aspect of recycling is that it gives the recycler the fulfillment of helping the environment. W. Kip Viscusi a professor at Vanderbilt University said, “The warm glow environmental benefit that a person receives from recycling will be greater for those who place a higher value on the environment .” Therefore, the benefit of helping our environment is the greatest benefit of all. Although it might seem as if plastic is thrown away than it can not harm the environment, however, that is incorrect. Plastic is not biodegradable, therefore, it will never be able to completely decompose into the earth. With plastic not being able to decompose it takes up a large amount of space while also being capable of traveling through the air. Sati Manrich, the author of Plastic Recycling said, “The mounting volume of plastic residues, coupled with their extremely low biodegradability, generated a serious problem regarding the amount of space they took up.” Therefore, when plastic is thrown away it will last for at least four-hundred and fifty years before degrading in the landfills; thus allowing all the plastic that was thrown away in the last four-hundred and fifty years to start a stockpile in the landfills or even travel somewhere else.(Manrich