The effect of cellophane bags, commonly known as plastic bags, on the environment has always remained a matter of concern for environmentalists. Prepared from waste plastic material and coloured in different shades including black, green, red and yellow are available on the market as cheap packing material.
Plastic is a synthetic material. It is extremely versatile material made from the polymerisation of organic compounds. It can be moulded into shapes or fabricated in many different forms for use in commerce and industry. The coloured bags are said to contain carcinogenic substance.
Experts in the plastic industry themselves advise against its use as packing material for carrying milk and milk products, meat, vegetable, fruits, cereals and wheat flour.
Usually the black colour of a plastic bag leaves its surface after remaining in contact for sometime with the stuff stored in it. The colouring is a kind of black quoting and is inexpensive to apply. It is not an indispensable or inseparable component of plastic used for making bags. The colour after leaving its contact with the bags sticks to whatever is in its contact.
Milk and milk products get influenced quickly and even after boiling at a very high temperature continues to contain basic ingredients that go into the making of plastic colours.
People in Pakistan are already getting bad quality of milk even if it is taken direct from the udder.
Animals are administered hormones to force them give more milk. It is usually oxytocin, which is in common use. It induces labour. It is a hormone released by the pituitary gland that stimulates contractions of the womb during childbirth and triggers the secretion of milk from the breast during nursing. It may be given to women during childbirth to assist labour.
But it's uncontrolled use in the milch animals has already created stir in the medical circles but neither the federal nor the provincial governments have taken notice of this unhealthy practice in the dairy. In view of doctors, growth of hair on the faces of young girls can be attributed to hormonal disturbances caused by external factors. Use of commercially marketed milk may be one of them.
Milk purchases and taken home in plastic bags becomes injurious to health before it reaches it final destination and placed on a burner for boiling. No amount of heat destroys effect of plastic colouring material mixed with the milk and the oxytocin already present in the milk.
Other colours such as red, blue and green are equally harmful and should be avoided. To an extent transparent plastic bags and properly manufactured bags to be used as packing material can be used as shopping bags but better these are replaced by paper bags.
Plastic materials do not destroy and may live buried under the earth for more than 1000 years and even more. Similarly plastic bags do not disintegrate and continue to remain a constant source of annoyance.
Apart from being health hazard plastic bags are the main cause of civic problems. Sewers in Karachi are choked, rainwater drains are full to the brim with waste plastic bags thrown and deposited by the people living near it and twigs and treetops lined on both sides of some of the roads are covered with it. These bags hampering growth of trees that are still to expand its reach is a constant to danger to efforts that are being made to make environment better.
Mangrove forest in the coastal belt is another place where plastic bags have played havoc with the forest. In a way plastic bag used in cities and thrown in the open fly to these forests and deposit on top of mangrove plant and suffocate its breathing system. It is the first destroyer of this forest and the local population cutting it for fuel purposes comes next.
There have been decisions to ban the production of plastic bags but it has not been implemented so far. The argument that most frequently put forward against closure of plastic bags production units is the fear of unemployment of a large number of people.
But the political will to close down plastic bag industry and to provide alternate employment or income generating activities to those who are in this sector has not been there. The half-hearted decision and a careless attitude of the government toward the use and misuse of plastic bags will continue to hurt the popular demand of the environmentalists who want cleaner atmosphere for the people, including those who are polluting it despite repeated warnings.
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