Why can't plastic bags be naturally degraded?

Traditional plastic bags cannot be broken down naturally, eco-friendly plastic bags can be degraded by water, air, sunlight and organisms. Usually about a month, it can be decomposed into harmless substances.

Waste plastic with landfill will not only occupy a large amount of land, but also the occupied land will not be restored for a long time, affecting the sustainable use of land. Moreover, plastic bags to oil as raw materials, not only consumes a lot of resources, but also can not be decomposed, buried in the ground will pollute the land, rivers.

Plastic heat resistance and other poor, easy to aging, easy to burn, burning toxic gases. For example, polystyrene combustion produces toluene, a small amount of this material will lead to blindness, inhalation of vomiting and other symptoms, PVC combustion also produces hydrogen chloride toxic gases, in addition to combustion, is a high-temperature environment, which will lead to the decomposition of the plastic toxic components, such as benzene ring, etc., causing pollution to the environment.

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Plastic bags decompose slowly, often piled up in the ditch or river, hindering drainage caused by flooding, damaging the ecological environment of the intertidal zone of the river and the sea, if a large number of them are washed into the ocean, will cause ecological havoc.

Modern plastic products, with a wide range of uses, low prices, easy to obtain, easy to use and other characteristics, so in daily life is a large number of applications. According to the environmental protection department statistics, Taiwan's annual consumption of plastic bags about 10.5 tons, of which about 6.5 tons of shopping with a total of about 20 billion, an average of 2.5 plastic bags per person per day, the majority of people with a time that is thrown away, become environmentally friendly garbage.

In view of the abuse of plastic bags on the environment, the environmental protection department many years ago to implement the policy of restricting the use of plastic bags, shopping plastic bags used to reduce the amount of about 80%, the public's willingness to provide their own shopping bags also increased.

Unfortunately, the lack of consistent implementation of the determination before and after the fall of the "loud thunder, little rain", more than 80,000 snack bars, restaurants, most of the current Taiwan back to the old way of providing free plastic bags, vegetable markets, plastic bags more flooded, so that support for the policy of limiting the use of plastic people and the environmental protection of the people feel very sad.

Plastic bags are difficult to degrade, so why not burn them?

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Walking ah walking

LV.8 2019-08-15

What are plastic bags, go out to buy things empty-handed out, back to buy things all plastic bags to carry back. Convenient is convenient, but other things in the soil for a long time will rot away and melt away, only plastic, it is said to be more than 200 years to rot and decompose. Imagine how many plastic bags we use every day, and look at the truckloads of garbage, most of which is plastic, and it's really scary.

If these plastic bags are burned, it will produce a lot of toxic gases again, polluting the air.

Plastic is a monomer as raw material, through the polymerization or polycondensation reaction polymerization of polymer compounds (macromolecules), its resistance to deformation capacity of the medium, between the fiber and rubber, by the synthetic resins and fillers, plasticizers, stabilizers, lubricants, color and other additives.

The main component of plastic is resin. Resin is a polymer compound that has not yet been mixed with various additives. The term resin was originally named after the lipids secreted by plants and animals, such as rosin and wormwood. Resin accounts for about 40% to 100% of the total weight of plastic. The basic properties of plastics are mainly determined by the nature of the resin, but additives also play an important role. Some plastics are basically composed of synthetic resins, containing no or few additives, such as plexiglass, polystyrene and so on.

"The rapid biodegradation of plastics in the intestines of the yellow mealworm reveals a new fate for plastic waste discarded in the environment." Professor Yang Jun of Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics said.

Plastics are difficult to degrade naturally in the environment, and polystyrene is the most of them, and it is widely believed that microorganisms are unable to degrade polystyrene plastics due to their high molecular weights and high stability.In 2015, Prof. Yang Jun's research group at the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (BUAA) and Dr. Zhao Jiao of the Shenzhen-based company Huada Genetics, among others, published their research results in a leading journal in the field of environmental disciplines, EnvironmentalScience &Technology, a leading journal in the field of environmental disciplines, collaborated to publish two sister research papers, proving that the larvae of yellow mealworms (breadbugs) can degrade polystyrene, one of the most difficult plastics to degrade.

The study showed that yellow mealworm larvae survived for more than a month on polystyrene foam as their sole food source, and eventually developed into adults in which the polystyrene they consumed was completely degraded and mineralized into CO2 or assimilated into body fat. This discovery provides ideas for solving the global problem of plastic pollution.