Why is Plastic Harmful for Environment?

Why is Plastic Harmful for Environment?

You must have observed that grocery shops these days do not use plastic bags. They hand out all your things in either paper bags or cloth bags. So what happened to the plastic bags that we used? There is a reason plastic is slowly disappearing. In fact, it is a conscious effort by everyone as plastic is very harmful for our environment. Of course, now you would want to know why.

Whenever we throw something like paper, food peels, leaves etc there are small tiny creatures in nature – the bacteria – who eat these things up or turn them into useful products that nature loves.  These things are called ‘Biodegradable’.
‘Non-Biodegradable‘ things, on the other hand, like glass, steel and plastic – can not be turned into useful, nature friendly products. The bacteria just can’t eat them up or break them up.

Plastic is harmful because it is ‘Non-Biodegradable’. When thrown on land it makes the soil less fertile. When thrown in water it chokes our ponds, rivers and oceans and harms the sea life. If animals eat plastic, it gets stuck in their tummy and makes them sick. Why? because the bacteria in their stomach cannot break the plastic up into smaller pieces.

Factories that make plastic have to make tons of them every day because people ask for plastic bags – in shopping malls, grocery stores, everywhere. We can help these factories by giving back the unused plastic bags in our house – this is called “Recycling”. Recycling helps factories make fresh plastic by using the old ones. We can also help by using  cloth bags for shopping instead of plastic bags. Imagine if all of us stop asking for plastic bags the factories will have no reason to make them – they can then start making beautiful cloth bags.

39 comments

    • How is plastic, something that is detremental to the ecosystem, quote, “kool!!!”? Plastic is killing marine life everywhere, starving turtles and killing whales! That is the complete opposite of what I would say.

  1. I am a student of central institute of plastic engineering $ technology.
    I do many experiment with plastic so I say that don’t use plastic it is very harmful & dangerous for human life.
    If u use plastic then don’t through it anywhere;keep it ur charity to recycle it.
    It is my request……..Thanks a lot …….

  2. Really very wonderful helped me in speech writing… We should also not use plastic i promise i will not use it instead i will use paper bag.

  3. Actually, if we all recycled, there would be no need to ban or make more plastic. We wouldn’t have to ban plastic, because if we recycled them properly, it wouldn’t end up in the animals stomach, or other places it wasn’t supposed to be. If we recycled them properly, we wouldn’t have to make more plastic, therefore less materials are used.

    • that’s true Eric Cao people should recycle and the world would be a better place! and u might think this is an adult, but im not I m a kid im 13 and I have to do a report on this so…. ya but this is pretty interesting :) :) :):):(

  4. This helped in my science project. Thanks a lot this was very useful information and from now on I will never use plastics bags.

    • wow and it’s really true that plastic is harmful and this app also tells us in detail that it is harmful for humans , animals and plants

  5. this really helped me with my project. which made me improve a lot in science ^-^ thank you for the information!!!

  6. This was pretty helpful! This is for a book report, and it gave me a lot of facts about the plastic bags! So if I could I would give this Website a THUMBS UP! Yay thank you! :) XD

  7. Plastic can be recycled but not decomposed, so it pollutes the environment. There are few things we can do to prevent this.

    • Nearly all plastic is recycled and turned into diesel which is used to power electric generators, vehicles and farm machinery etc. Plastic bags dry out into a fine dust if left in the hot sun so they do decompose but these can also be melted along with the plastic bottles and refined into oil or fuel.
      Thousands of village recycling centres across Thailand buy all types of plastic among other packaging materials so none is wasted or discarded.
      If you country is failing to do this then it must change.

  8. I’m glad to see more stores charging for plastic bags! We usually shop at Aldi, so we’re used to bringing our own bags, anyway.

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