Right now everybody it seems is having a go at plastic – Lets ban it !
Why are we talking about plastic, well because we have plastic in our fish, birds, mammals, and we have a plastic island the size of France floating around int the ocean – so let first be clear on that, yes we should stop this from happening !
Also there is the CO2 from the plastic, but we will get back to this.
so right now in Denmark New law on plastic bags or Ministry of Enviroment and Food of Denmark
in my opinion this is totally BS, populism when it is worst. – In Denmark, as in many other Western countries, we have garbage collection, and my guess (yes it is a guess, not a scientific study) is that about 99.999% of all plastic bags that are sold in Denmark, and most other western countries, goes in the incinerator, and do not end up in the nature.
if you want to ban plastic, ban something that people do actual throw in the streets – Like lets say Cigarette buds.
I just walked 1000 meters, and lets bear in mind that in Denmark we have very clean streets, and that very often sweeping machines will clean everything so this is not 14 days worth of trash, but max one week.
I counted 500 cigarette buds – witch is roughly = 500/20 = 25 plastic bags worth of plastic. (the thin once from a pizzeria)
I counted 4 empty cigarette packs
I counted 1 plastic bag for food storage
I counted 0 plastic grocery bags (the kind we are now banning)
I counted 0 one times use items such as spoons, forks, knives food containers (the kind we want to ban)
so lets separate our feelings from our sanity for a moment, and stop banning plastic in country’s where they have good waste collection systems, it does not end up in the oceans, it ends up in the incinerator!
(or it should end up there if we dont try and sell it to imaginary recycling in India, do the math, you will use more energy, water and chemicals to recycle plastic than to just make new, when we talk about plastic bags Danish plastic not reused)
AHHH But that is just as bad that will emit CO2 – well news flash so will your Organic Cotton bag.
in fact if you do not take into account that 0,001% of the plastic bag ends up in the ocean, the impact of your organic cotton bag is 20.000 times larger than your plastic bag. (yes that is twenty-thousands times bigger)
I have a organic cotton bag, because i do not want to pay for the plastic bag, and lets not take into account that i wash that now and again, and uses water and chemicals lets look at pure usage.
I do shopping about every 2. day where i bring my organic cotton bag, because I am to cheap to pay for a plastic bag.
but hmm 365/2 = 183 times a year… witch mean that i would have to use it 20.000/183 109 years before its break even on environmental impact, not only CO2 but also water usage and so on.
and lets talk CO2… we still burn fossil fuel, and for as long as we do that (and i think we should stop NOW ) burning ordinary plastic is not bad, if you burn a normal plastic bag you get CO2+water+heat, if you burn it in an incinerator, at during a controlled burning process – you know like we do in western countries.
do i think India, and Thailand, and China, and about 50-80 other countries should ban plastic bag YES, because they do not have the garbage retrieval systems we have in Denmark
– But even better they should get a good culture about garbage in stead of banning plastic!