Should schools ban single-use plastic?

Imagine a world if you're walking down through the school hallway and you see trash made of plastic scattered everywhere; plastic bottles, plastic bags, and plastic straw? It would be awful to look at. Whether or not we should ban single-use plastic in school has been a debate for years. What if there was a world where plastic never existed in that world, would that be amazing or horrible? Would it lead to cleaner schools and a great environment to live in the future?

Single-use plastics have contributed to pollution around the world. In school plastic is discarded without a second to think if it would lead to an unpleasant and unhygienic future in the school environment and even the whole earth. These single-use plastics cannot get decomposed naturally until hundreds of years, if there's a way to get plastic decomposed it’s by chemically  decomposing it, but there’s a risk of plastic releasing methane when exposed to sunlight. Methane is a harmful gas where as it traps the light from going out of the atmosphere of earth, and could lead to global warming. If global warming is high it could lead to uncontrolled weather and would make earth hotter. The global warming in earth for the past century has increased rapidly because of pollution from methane from plastic and carbon emissions. I think that single-use plastic is harmful to the earth's environment.

The idea of banning single-use plastic in school could contribute positively
in many different ways to the earth’s environment, but plastic has been a huge part in schools like in canteens where plastic is used to contain food and plastic utensils are used to drink and eat, like straw, plastic fork, plastic spoon. Many argue that reusable plastic items could be inconvenient and expensive. On the other hand, some also think that banning single-use plastic in school and using reusable plastic items could lead to a clean environment and provide students and other people with cleaner air to breathe. My thought is that reusable plastic items could lead to a great change in the earth’s environment.

Big restaurant brands have tried to adopt this method by replacing plastic utensils with wood utensils and have replaced plastic straws with paper straws. It has made great changes to earth's environment by slowing down global warming. From a personal perspective, banning single-use plastic could lead to student’s critical thinking about the huge impact of using single-use plastic.

Written by: Peter Joykarsten

BMS Student

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