What are the hazards of disposable products

I believe everyone must be very familiar with disposable items. We can see disposable items everywhere in our lives, such as disposable chopsticks, disposable lunch boxes, and disposable plastic bags. These disposable items bring a lot of convenience to our lives, but we must also understand that disposable items have certain hazards. For example, disposable items will pollute the environment and affect our health.

In our lives, many people use disposable items, and it seems that we cannot live without disposable items. Little do people know that disposable consumption is indeed a "double-edged sword" in modern society. It is not only a symbol of material abundance, convenience and speed, but also acts as an "accelerator" that turns resources into garbage. A large amount of energy and resources are wasted "in one go", and environmental pollution is aggravated by one "one-time" after another. But is it really that convenient? Have people ever thought about the harm they bring to us humans? ... Facing the deteriorating living environment, humans are deeply afraid; but in daily life, there are still so many behaviors that destroy the environment at the cost of...

Disposable items are really harmful to us, such as disposable chopsticks; disposable lunch boxes; disposable batteries; disposable plastic bags, etc. Now let me explain some of the hazards of disposable items.

Let’s take an example - the disposable plastic bags we use most often.

Plastic bags have become a global plague, especially in Asia. For example, Taiwan, with a population of 22 million, uses 20 billion plastic bags every year, equivalent to more than 900 bags per person. Plastic bags not only pollute the environment, they are also very harmful! Plastic bags clog sewers, which can lead to floods and the spread of diseases. I have heard about marine life dying from plastic bags, for example, some turtles suffocated after swallowing plastic bags. Plastic bags also spread air pollution because many plastic bags are incinerated with other garbage. Burning plastic bags can spread dioxins into the air, which can be fatal in excess.

The hazards of plastic bags can be summarized into the following four points:

1. Plastic is a high molecular polymer that is not easily degradable and takes hundreds of years to decompose. Therefore, pollution is caused.

2. Damage the city environment. Abandoned plastic products can be seen everywhere, destroying the landscape and affecting the city's image.

3. Harmful to human health. Abandoned plastic products that contain pollutants can be harmful to human health.

4. Affect the growth of crops. After aging, the plastic film used in farmland will break into pieces and remain in the fields without decomposing and rotting, affecting crop yields.

Another example is the harm of disposable wooden chopsticks:

(45,000 pairs of disposable wooden chopsticks = 1 cubic meter of wood) my country's forest coverage rate is only 16.55%, but it is a major exporter of disposable wooden chopsticks. The disposable chopstick industry in northern my country exports 15 billion pairs of wooden chopsticks to Japan and South Korea every year. In addition to wasting wood, disposable chopsticks are not environmentally friendly. Another reason is that they waste water and cause the loss of water resources. There are generally three ways to bleach disposable chopsticks, using sulfur dioxide, hydrogen peroxide or calcium (sodium) hypochlorite for bleaching. All three methods of bleaching require large amounts of water for steaming or rinsing.

But in the actual manufacturing process, no one uses that much water. It is reported that 93% of disposable chopsticks on the market in Taipei are bleached by sulfur dioxide fumigation. The longer the fumigation time, the whiter the chopsticks are and the sourer they smell. Manufacturers often skip the boiling step after bleaching with sulfur dioxide fumigation. The remaining sulfur dioxide combines with other substances to form sulfites, which are considered by the medical community to be possible causes of asthma. However, my country has not yet issued specific hygiene inspection standards for disposable chopsticks.

Some information shows that disposable chopsticks were invented by the Japanese. Japan's forest coverage rate is as high as 65%, but they do not cut down trees on their own land to make disposable chopsticks, but rely entirely on imports. Although my country's forest coverage rate is less than 17%, it is a major exporter of disposable chopsticks. According to relevant materials, the Chinese market consumes 45 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks every year, consuming 1.66 million cubic meters of wood. In Beijing alone, 800,000 sets of disposable lunch boxes and chopsticks are consumed every day; that’s 292 million sets in 365 days a year. A pair of disposable chopsticks weighs 5.5 grams. The total weight of 292 million pairs of chopsticks is 1,606 tons, which is equivalent to 3,212 cubic meters of wood, not including waste materials such as skin, core, edges and sawdust. Experts have long pointed out that for a big country like China with a population of 1.2 billion, the widespread use of disposable chopsticks is a huge waste of forestry resources.

However, it is this kind of food that is eaten and thrown away that accelerates the destruction of forests. Forests are converters of carbon dioxide, generators of rainfall, controllers of floods, and sanctuaries for biodiversity. These functions can never be replaced by the benefits gained from producing disposable chopsticks.

The above information shows that, in fact, disposable items are very harmful to our human life.

To make you more aware of their harmfulness, let me give you another example of a disposable item. Well, it's you - batteries!

Batteries used daily contain a large amount of heavy metal pollutants - cadmium, mercury, manganese, etc. When they rot and are discarded in nature, these toxic substances slowly leak out of the batteries, enter the soil or water sources, and then enter the human food chain through crops. These toxic substances will accumulate in the human body for a long time and are difficult to eliminate, damaging the nervous system, hematopoietic function, kidneys and bones, and some can even cause cancer. The metals contained in discarded batteries may one day be eaten by you.

Therefore, from now on, we humans must reduce pollution in this area and say "no" to them, because they cause too much pollution to people, life, and the environment. They threaten human health. If this continues, our Mother Earth will sooner or later suffer at the hands of us humans. In order to maintain her youthful beauty, we must protect the environment and refuse pollution.

In the above article, we introduced what disposable items are. We can see disposable items everywhere in our lives, but disposable items are harmful, so we must be cautious when using disposable items.