Plastic+bags

The reason why people in Peru throw or leave plastic bags on the ground or in rivers and ocean, is because they do not need it anymore and just leave it on he ground. Another reason is that people are not educated to recycle plastic bags or they don’t care about the environment. Another reason is that there isn’t a recycling truck or organization picking up recycled plastic bags and just put it in trash bags. They also don’t know that when the landfills and when people burn plastic bags petroleum and natural gas and those gases come out and pollute the ozone layer that keeps us from the earth not to burn up. Also people don’t have any room to store the recycling bins or put them somewhere and that why some people don’t recycle. ** Are Plastic Bags connected to other problems? ** Plastic Bags are connected to water pollution because when people go in the water to fish they don’t only fish fishes but they catch a lot of trash. In that trash Plastic Bags are found. In the water there are many different types of trash. Some of the trash is Plastic Bottles, Plastic Bags, Oil, food and many more. The problem there is that all that trash many times contains infectious, and diseases. Our responsibility is to pick up after our own trash. And I think that we are responsible enough to take care of our environment. Plastic Bags are related to Lack of education and poverty at the same time because when people don’t have the opportunity to go to school they do not learn to take care of our environment. They are also not thought ways to help the environment. Imagine schools were free, and poor kids had the opportunity to go to school. They would learn to take care of our environment they would know how to do it but because they being poor they wont be able to buy cotton bags which are more expensive.
 * Why do people do it / or what are the causes of the problem? **

** How do plastic bags affect the environment and people? **

In Peru, 200 thousand animals (sea and land) annually are killed. Sea animals mostly consume plastic bags because they think its food. According to my source 162 animal species died globally because of trash in their environment. One of the trash that most killed animals was plastics and one of plastics trash that killed of a lot was plastic bags. In streets and in societies plastic bags block drains pipes, which make water don’t come through and that makes us as people stop our use of water that is a very important resource. Also it makes streets dirty (with germs). So people who are in streets need to be careful with what they touch because the bags may have been in unclean places. Plastic bags are dangerous for little kids, they can swallow pieces, munch it, etc. In our environment plastic bags harms the quality of soil because plastic bags have toxic chemicals and gases ( petroleum,etc) which gets in the soil and contaminates it when people burn plastic bags. It uses part of natural resources because plastic bags uses crude soil and natural gas to be made. Also 12 million petroleum barrels are needed to produce 100,000 millions of plastic bags. The plastic bag production, per year can fill the Empire State building 2 times and a half. Every year between 500,000 millions and 1 billion of plastic bags are consumed. Plastic bags can take between 400 and 1,000 years to decompose; meanwhile their chemicals take longer time to decompose. (That are the ones which most contaminate.) An extra information is that every minute 1 million plastic bags are consumed. All this information comes from Peru (lima, etc).

** What is the situation now?what is the problem? **  In Lima 1% of the plastic bags are recycled and 1% of it is thrown into rivers, lakes and oceans, 67% thrown into landfills and the rest is put into trash cans. In Lima about 3.65 tonnes of trash like plastic bags are thrown into beaches and streets each day. The problem is that almost everybody doesn’t taking action in Lima because most of them arent educated to know whats recycling so they don’t really know what to do. Most people in Lima arent aware that this big hazard is happening and they don’t care. ** Program or government trying to solve this problem in Lima? **   · Unicef because they walked around Lima and cleaned streets to make it cleaner in La Molina. · Ministerio del Medio Ambiente because they are trying to ban plastic bags in stores all around Lima.