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The world’s toughest law against plastic carrier bags has taken effect in Kenya as the government seeks to crackdown on pollution.

The East African country has had been plagued by a constant environmental damage caused by the bags, a fact that is well evident in the capital, Nairobi.

While the law banning the plastic bags was drafted years back, it initially failed to take effect due to court injunctions sought mostly by manufacturers of the bags.

Another injunction sought by the manufacturers was thrown out last week, allowing the ban on the bags to take effect.

While most of the bags cost approximately under Ksh 5 (US$ 0.05), anyone found to be using them will be slapped with a Kshs 4 million ($40,000) fine, or face up to four years in prison.

Kenya now joins 11 other African countries in banning the bags, including Mauritania, Rwanda and Morocco.

Environmental conservation activists have lauded the ban, saying it is in the right direction towards protecting the country’s environment.

In light of this ban, we sought to look at the dangers that the plastic bags pose to the environment. Here are some that stand out;

Decomposition?

Shocking as this may sound, virtually every piece of plastic that was ever made still exists in some shape or form (with the exception of the small amount that has been incinerated). This means that even those bags that were used before Kenya got its independence are still lying somewhere. Seeing as the use of the plastic bags increased tremendously in post-independence Kenya, one can only imagine how much damage the bags have caused the country’s environment.

Also worth noting, it takes 500-1,000 years for plastic to degrade.

 

Magnitude of damage?

Analysts have it that enough plastic is thrown away each year to circle the entire earth four times. Now, if one were to analyze the impact of this, they would realize that since the first plastic was manufactured tens of years ago, we could literally completely cover our earth in plastic. Remember they do not decompose.

 

Health Effects?

Some of these compounds found in plastic have been found to alter hormones or have other potential human health effects.

During the manufacture of plastic, toxic chemicals are released onto the environment. A whole host of carcinogenic, neurotoxic, and hormone-disruptive chemicals are standard ingredients and waste products of plastic production, and they inevitably find their way into our ecology through water, land, and air pollution. Some of the more familiar compounds include vinyl chloride (in PVC), dioxins (in PVC), benzene (in polystyrene), phthalates and other plasticizers (in PVC and others), formaldehyde, and bisphenol-A, or BPA (in polycarbonate). Many of these are persistent organic pollutants (POPs)—some of the most damaging toxins on the planet, owing to a combination of their persistence in the environment and their high levels of toxicity.

 

Also,

Studies conducted to find out more about plastic pollution have shown that bisphenol A (BPA) – which is widely used in plastics manufacturing is readily absorbed through the skin, and that people who routinely touch BPA-laden till receipts have higher than average levels of the chemical in their bodies. Taken together, the findings strengthen calls for tougher regulation of the chemical.

 

Oil usage

The production of plastic uses around eight percent of the world’s oil production (bioplastics are not a good solution as they require food source crops). Now this means that the production of plastics worsens environmental pollution by increasing oil production which has been found to be a major destroyer of the ozone layer.

 

Deaths?

Yes, plastic does kill. The movies might proven that to you already. You must have also heard of numerous cases of animals – mostly sea creatures – that have been killed by consuming plastic or getting suffocated by them. Records have it that more than one million sea birds and 100,000 marine mammals are killed annually from plastic in the world’s oceans. Well, so plastic does affect wildlife conservation too.

And..

Lastly, plastic constitutes approximately 90 percent of all trash floating on the ocean’s surface, with 46,000 pieces of plastic per square mile. From the earlier note of animals killed by plastic, you do know this should worry everyone.