Walk down any city street or village road, turn any corner, find a spot at the beach or in a park and you will find mounds and mounds of dirty plastic bags, food wrappings, plastic cups, bottles and cartons lie piled high, or blocking drainage systems and sewers.
Plastic is one of the major toxic pollutants of our time. Being a non-biodegradable substance, composed of toxic chemicals, plastic pollutes earth, air and water. There is no way whatsoever you can safely dispose of plastic waste.

            Plastic bags are difficult and costly to recycle and most end up on landfill sites where they take around 300 years to photo degrade. Even when they photo-degrade in landfill, the plastic from single-use bags never goes away, and toxic particles can enter in food chain through ground water and through plants.
            But can plastic be burned and thus its hazard got rid of? No way. When burned, plastic releases a host of poisonous chemicals into the air, including dioxin, the most toxic substance known to science.
            Plastic thrown on land can enter into drainage lines and chokes them resulting into floods in local areas in cities as experienced in Mumbai. Choked drains provide excellent breeding grounds for disease-causing mosquitoes besides causing flooding during the monsoons.

Plastic bag facts

• Each year the world goes through some 500 Billion plastic bags, of them only 2% are recycled.
• They block the porosity of the soil and cause problems with groundwater recharge.

• disturb the soil microbe activity.
• Thousands of marine animals and more than 1 million birds die each year as a result of plastic pollution.
• The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that there are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean.
• Plastic bags are often mistakenly ingested by animals, clogging their intestines which results in death by starvation. Other animals or birds become entangled in plastic bags and drown or can’t fly as a result.
• Greenpeace says that at least 267 marine species are known to have suffered from getting entangled in or ingesting marine debris. Nearly 90% of that debris is plastic.