Sunday, October 19, 2008 Sun.Star Essay: Deal with synthetics By Erma M. Cuizon
LOOK around you, start in your room. You have beauty products in all kinds of bottles on your dresser---the bottles and other containers all plastic. Then there are the electric fan, your TV and computer boxes, even the cyber mouse, small cabinets for underwear and hangers. All made of plastic.
Most of all, think of what you have inside your kitchen cupboard---a stock of used plastic bags galore!
You just came in from the mall for groceries, and there are more than just three (the city planning officer says “eight”) plastic bags at the back of your car just before you drive out of the basement parking at the end of the day’s shopping.
There are, of course, all kinds of plastic products, not just bags, whose names, according to how they’re processed and with what, you can’t recall. They’re made of synthetic or semisynthetic organic solid materials, as they put it. From the industry’s view, it’s said there are 50 “different, unique families” of plastic products, each made with variations. So you have thin, or soft, or hard and harder plastics.
But a recent proposal for a banning of the use of plastic bags in the city is in. Made of plastic, they don’t just clog up the waterways but also destroy an environment.
Years ago, we took a quick ride on a boat crossing Mactan which gave visitor passengers a chance to see the bottom of the sea from its base room where there was an undersea window. Like a tourist, we expected beauty in nature’s bed, but no. There were busted plastic bags, even an old lost slipper out of a pair, and other rubbles, while the fishes drifted by as though used to the dirt underneath the Mactan channel.
The recent news on the city’s consideration for a ban on plastic bags in shopping places (and even in “residential houses,” however this can be done), is something, I think, that comes almost like a late hero but is still a measure done just about time.
But even the US acted just recently, and not as an entire nation, being a heavily-consuming country where the plastic industry would be on quick guard against any attempt to ban their products. San Francisco was the first city who dared say people have enough of plastic-filled life, especially of bags, that is.
But banning the use of something that’s now part of our life is difficult to undertake, and how it should be done would be a big question environmentalists might have to face.
In San Francisco, the State gave supermarkets up to six months to ban plastic checkout bags, the large chain of pharmacies up to about a year. That was in 2007 when the law banning plastic shopping bags was passed. The stores and pharmacies can use recyclable or compostable sacks, says the law.
Thus, San Francisco is leading the way. Not only are the other States looking, the rest of the world, too. One simple plastic bag, according to the authorities banning plastics in San Francisco, will take 1,000 years to dissolve. So it’s best to reduce the use of them, said the officials. Paris and London had contacted San Francisco for the same idea.
Australia, India, Taiwan, Italy, Ireland, and flooding Bangladesh have started action on the ban.
Begin with no free plastic bags; this is the first possible action. Outright banning would be difficult to pursue at this stage. Making plastic bags for sale would also work with Cebuanos who’d rather not pay extra. Who knows, this could help makers of the biogradable buri bags step back into the life scene of Filipinos in market places and malls!
There was a time when I’d cut into small pieces plastic bags I didn’t use anymore, before throwing them to the garbage can. In this way, they’d have less chances of clogging up waterways. But I found myself saving for another use more and more plastic bags, especially for their looks and sizes, postponing the cutting for one last use of the bags.
But we can try to do something that would put these long-life materials out of our lives within shorter terms.
