The Life and times of plastic bags

               ဒီေန.ကမ ၻာႀကီးမွာရင္ဆုိင္ေနရတဲ.သဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္အႏ ၱာရယ္ေတြထဲမွာပလတ္
စတစ္ေႀကာင္.ၿဖစ္တဲ.ေဘးဒုကၡလဲၿပႆနာအႀကီးစားတစ္ခုၿဖစ္ေနပါတယ္။တစ္ခါကဘုိကေလးဘက္
ကေမြးရပ္ဇာတိရြာကုိသြားၿဖစ္ေတာ.ေခ်င္းေသးေသးေလးထဲမွာဓါတ္ေၿမႀသဇာအိတ္ခြံေတြပစ္ထားလုိ.
ေမာ္ေတာ္ပန္ကာနဲ.ညိွၿပီးခဏခဏဆင္းဖယ္ရတာႀကဳံခဲ.ရဘူးပါတယ္။အဲဒီကတည္းကဒုိ.နုိင္ငံမွာသ
ဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ထိန္းသိမ္းေရးအသိအၿမင္ပြင္.လင္းေအာင္ေတာ္ေတာ္ႀကဳိးစားႀကရဦးမယ္လုိ.သ
ေဘာေပါက္မိတယ္။
                အခုလည္းဒူဘုိင္းမွာအစုိးရကေတာ.ပလတ္စတစ္အစားထုိးသံုုးစြဲေရးကိုစီမံကိန္းတစ္ရပ္
အေနနဲ.သတ္မွတ္ၿပီးလုပ္ေဆာင္ေနလုိ.ပလတ္စတစ္အေႀကာင္းသိေကာင္းစရာေလးကုိၿပန္လည္မွ်
ေ၀ခ်င္ပါတယ္။အထူးသၿဖင္.ၿမစ္ေခ်ာင္းအင္းအုိင္ပင္လယ္ထဲေ၇ာက္သြားလုိ.ေရသတၱ၀ါေတြအစာအ
ၿဖစ္စားမိလုိ.အစာမေႀကပဲေသဆံုးတာၿမင္သိရတုိင္းစိတ္မေကာင္းၿဖစ္ရတယ္။ဒါ.အၿပင္ထုိပလတ္စတစ္
အစအနေတြဗုိက္ထဲမွာရွိတဲ.ငါးနဲ.ပင္လယ္သတၱ၀ါေတြကိုစားသံုးမိတဲ.လူေတြကိုလည္းအႀကီးအႀကယ္
ထိခုိ္က္ေစနုိင္တာကုိပါသတိၿပဳစရာေကာင္းလွပါတယ္။ဆက္ၿပီးေတြးမိယင္ေတာ.အရွည္ႀကီးေပါ.ေလ။
                  ပလတ္စတစ္ကင္းတဲ.ကမ ၻာႀကီးၿဖစ္ပါေစ။

We track its journey that starts with plastic nurdles to a bag that takes nearly forever to completely break down. All plastics are made from petroleum or natural gas. About 3 per cent of all oil ends up as plastic every year. To make shopping bags, first nurdles (plastic pellets) or flakes are melted. The melted plastic is pushed through a ring-shaped hole, which creates a thin, hollow tube of hot plastic. Air is blown into the tube and the film is then cooled and cut.

Retail bags (made of High Density Polyethylene) are easy to spot. They are usually opaque and make a distinct rustling sound. In the UAE, 1 billion bags are handed out every year. Around the world, nearly 1 trillion plastic bags are used every year. No one ever said plastic bags aren't useful. They are light in weight and waterproof. But they have a short, useful life in the hands of the consumer and a long, destructive life after. 

 

Plastic comprises between 60 and 80 per cent of the trash in the oceans. No one is sure how much comes from bags, but the plastic starting materials, nurdles, are commonly found in the marine environment. Once bits of plastic start swimming, they accumulate toxic chemicals on their surfaces. Ocean dwellers scoop them up while feeding. The plastic doesn't break down inside the fish and the toxic-coated material works its way up the food chain.   

 

Plastic bags are one way to carry purchases but other methods are more environmentally friendly. The use of reusable bags is that it saves energy because they don't have to be recycled or recreated for every use. They also save space in the landfill, if one could remember to take them along when shopping.