Congratulations to the Cabildo, for their new campaign “Adiós, Bolsa, Adiós” to raise the environmental awareness of plastic bags to Lanzarote residents. On Saturday 16th May 2009, there will be two stands in Arrecife, one in Calle Real and the other in the Hipermar at C.C. Arrecife from 9.30 onwards, armed with information and people available to answer any questions.
The surrounding stores in both areas have been asked to support the campaign, by not distributing plastic bags during this promotion, but to use the ' Lanzarote Recicla' replacements. You only need to drive along the road from Tahiche to San Bartolomé to see the damage that these plastic bags can do, they blow around the local fields getting caught on bushes and rocks, leaving a littered landscape for years to come. The bags can also have a serious impact in the sea, many fish die from being caught up in them, but also these fish ingest small pieces of plastic when searching for plankton and therefore the material enters into our food chain.
We don’t really know how long it takes for a plastic bag to break down, many sources quote as much as 500 years, but as the material has only been used for the past 50 years, these are estimates. The problem is that the plastic bag is made from polyethylene and micro organisms don’t recognise this material as food, so when the standard respirometry tests have been performed by our scientists, nothing has happened, there is no CO2production or decomposition. We know that the bags will photodegrade, this is where the polyethlene material is exposed to prolonged ultraviolet radiation from sunlight, it then becomes brittle – but landfill sites don’t have sunlight.
Personally, plastic carrier bags are a pet hate of mine, at the moment they're a necessary evil, as its difficult to transport your goods home without them and even more so, to enter the local shops with your own shopping bags. However, I don’t like the frequency that plastic bags are offered in the shops, so please, for the sake of our environment here in Lanzarote, only take a bag if you have to, and not just for the sake of it – it’s ok to say “No Thanks / No Gracias” when one is offered at the till!
Post to Twitter