In what year did Plastic Bags become a severe problem to the environment?
why do you think they're a problem? They're convenient, light weight, clean, and strong. 100 of them take up less space in a landfill than a milk carton/jug. They are NOT the problem in the oceans. The problem there is plastic fishnets that have been lost by fishing boats. The nets ARE a problem, since they float and continue to catch and trap anything that goes into them. Testing has found that reusuable environmentally friendly cloth bags, used as replacements for plastic bags, soon build up high levels of bacteria as they are reused, so they need to be washed frequently which requires lots of water and detergent. In addition, at a cost of up to $5 each, buying and storing enough of them at home to handle a single trip to the grocery store can get prohibitively expensive for poor families who may use up to 20 plastic bags each trip to market to haul their groceries home. As for a year that plastic bags became a problem....it was the year immediately after plastic was touted as the salvation of the trees chopped down to create paper bags for grocery stores. Never let an environmentalist tell you what to switch to. It'll never be good enough. Just like all the environmental lawsuits now showing up in courts to stop clean energy projects (dams, windmills, solar arrays, geothermal, etc). All they want is for everyone to die and leave the planet to the frickin animals, because surely everyone can see that humans are a blight on the planet and should never have evolved.
