How do you deal with plastic bags from the supermarket? Throw them away or recycle them? How about eating them?
Some of the bags are not harmful to the environment. Humans and animals can safely eat them. Indian company EnviGreen has made a bag with natural materials. It looks and feels just like plastic, but can break down (降解) easily.
Ashwath Hedge who set up the EnviGreen company spent four years doing experiments with 12 natural materials. They include potatoes, corn, vegetable oil and bananas. He made the materials into liquid (液体) and used the liquid to make the bag.
Although the EnviGreen bag is more expensive than a common plastic bag, it has many advantages. According to the Wall Street Journal it takes 1,00 years for common plastic bags to break down. But an EnviGreen bag can naturally break down in less than 180 days. It also breaks down in less than a day in water, and in less than a minute in boiling water. Hedge was happy to show it in his interview with The Better India. In the interview, he put an EnviGreen bag in water and ate it with a smile.
There are more than 15,000 tons of plastic waste every day. But only 9,000 tons are processed. In China, 3 billion plastic bags are used every day. Maybe the EnviGreen bag could be a solution to the world problem of plastic pollution.
