When the word plastic is uttered, the very first thought that comes to mind is pollution. Plastic and pollution have become synonymous but that was never the motive when the plastic bag was created. Plastic bags was made of crude oil which gave these bags the high resistance to wear and tear making it favorable for carrying heavy loads with minimum effort. These bags have been a life saver up until they started becoming a threat to every life form in the planet. This growth of threat gave rise to the need of having custom plastic bags.
Plastic bags were manufactured in the early 1950s where the handle had to be attached by a second process, but it was in Sweden, in 1960, that a single one piece plastic bag with handles attached in the first wielding process was made. Since then plastic bags have made carriage convenient and the low costs made the retailers give them out for free with every shopping item. This attitude gave rise to carelessness on the part of the users who throws away a plastic bag after just one use because there was no cost or limitations to the number of plastic bags one can ask for.
Custom plastic bags were born out from the need to have something eco-friendly yet functions as a plastic bag since plastic bags, aside from its shortcomings, were highly functional and did have an edge over paper bags and cloth bags both in terms of durability and economy.
The composition of the plastic bag:
The key difference between traditional plastic bags and custom plastic bags lies in the material used in the production of these bags. The traditional polyethylene plastic bags are made of a long chain of ethylene molecules which are derived from the crude petroleum and natural gas. This material takes about 1000 years to decay and still it is not fully decomposed and the toxins these plastics emits are the major contributor to the ozone layer depletion, ice caps melting and global warming, and the inevitable entry into the food chain by consuming meat which are affected with the toxin.
Custom plastic bags on the other hand are made of biodegradable material which can be broken down by bacterial activity, like vegetable starch or soy proteins. Even though these bags are less durable than the polyethylene ones, these do not cause any damage to the environment as bacterial activity breaks down these bags for quicker decomposition. Custom plastic bags are compostable since there are made of materials which is made of 100% organic and can undergo complete decay at the rate of organic degradation breaking down into the most basic forms of carbon dioxide and water.
The hazardous side of plastic bags:
The very qualities of the traditional plastic bags are what make it dangerous too. What was once a rare commodity became easily available and hence its value got degraded to just being used once and discarded. If we take a look at the current scenario of the environment, even the supposedly biodegradable plastic bags have caused much damage like the Great Pacific Patch, killing of the turtles, and landfills causing blockages, as the smaller bits of the non-biodegradable bits have accumulated over the water body along with plastic bottles and bags. It is even more important in today’s scenario to switch to custom plastic bags which even being not so resistant does not cause damage to the ecology. But, at the end of the day, it is the responsibility of the humans to keep this pollution in check and to mend their ways of carelessness.
