Nguyen Hang
Topic: Plastic shopping bags are used widely and cause many environmental problems.
Therefore, it is said that they should be banned. To what extent do you agree or disagree?
The use of plastic bags has been commonly associated with negative connotations for
its adverse impact on the environment. This leads some to believe that there should be
a prescription on plastic consumption. I personally wholeheartedly disagree with this
suggestion for its questionable effectiveness and the unfair depiction of plastic bags
nowadays.
In the first place, such a ban on plastic shopping bags is far from justifiable given the
worse alternative that consumers may switch to. In other words, more environmental
harm is bound to be caused should the public turn to other materials with even larger
carbon footprint. For instance, paper bags, a widely popularized replacement, can
require, according to statistics, four times more energy to make compared with the
plastic counterparts, not to mention the extensive harvesting of trees and manipulation
of noxious chemicals during production. Also, the impracticality of replacing plastic
consumption can also be explained by the fact that plastic bags were actually invented
to alleviate the downsides in terms of usability in paper bags. Therefore, returning to the
inconvenient paper ones almost constitutes violating the rule of social development
while simultaneously wreaking more havoc onto the environment.
The suggested prohibition of plastic carry-out bags may stem out of concerns about
their ramifications on marine life. Nonetheless, I would argue that such a belief is
somewhat nonsense given the propagation of misinformation on the media. Their use
has been typically assumed to have resulted in the death of millions of marine mammals
and seabirds as a result of entanglement or non-selective ingestion of microplastic.
However, the allegation has been demonstrated to be mostly untrue and was in fact
based on a study that claimed the deaths were more the consequence of discarded
fishing nets and fishing tackles rather than plastic debris. For this reason, to put all the
blame on plastic use is nothing but unreasonable. Another reason often cited by ban
proponents is that single-use plastic bags take hundreds, if not thousands of years to
decompose in landfills. Nevertheless, a study of landfills has pointed out that the tightly
compacted contents of landfills actually create low-oxygen environments that inhibit
decomposition of any kind, not just plastics. Hence, this argument is not the valid reason
to ban consumption of plastics.
In conclusion, given its infeasibility and partial representation of plastics, it is my firm
belief that the forbiddance of plastic shopping bags is nowhere near warranted. Instead,
a positive change in shopping behavior of consumers and technological advances are
likely to yield more tangible benefits.