The experts tell us that it will take plastic bags a thousand years to decompose. How do the experts know this? Plastic bags have not been around for a thousand years. Yet we are told that these bags are bad for the environment because they take too long to decompose.
This plastic bag was once in good condition. It contained a folded wool sweater.
In July 2018, I put this bag, with the sweater inside it, in a cardboard box. I placed the box in my storage unit. For over a year, the box sat undisturbed in my storage unit. No wind. No rain. No weather whatsoever. Just the darkness of an inside climate-controlled storage unit.
When I went to get the sweater, last week, the bottom of the plastic bag was missing. The bag had started to decompose. And this was only after 14 months of it sitting in a cardboard box.
Perhaps every other plastic bag takes a thousand years to decompose, and I happened to use one that was defective.
