How Long Does It Take for Various Packaging Bags to Degrade?

Did you know? A banana peel can take over a month to fully decompose, and an orange peel may take as long as two years. As many people may know, scientists point out that plastic bags and plastic bottles can remain undegraded for hundreds of years, thousands of years, or even millions of years. So let us take a look at how long it takes for various packaging bags to degrade.

About one month

Tissues, paper packaging, newspapers, etc. The degradation speed of these items depends largely on how they degrade. For example, tissues buried in soil take much longer to decompose than tissues exposed to the air.

Cereal boxes, paper bags, banana peels, etc. In addition, in colder weather, banana peels may take even longer to degrade.

The role of the peel is to protect the flesh inside, so peels are rich in cellulose, which is also the main component of cellophane packaging.

Environmentalists have warned that peels discarded by people have caused serious pollution on Ben Nevis in Scotland, because such waste takes months to fully degrade. Although peels are natural products, that does not mean they are not waste.

Two to three months

Wax-coated milk and juice cartons, cardboard, etc. The degradation speed of these items depends on the thickness of the cardboard. Garden enthusiasts should remember that cardboard can be used to make compost, so there is no need to simply throw it away.

75 to 80 years

Crisp packets. In fact, the crisp packet recently found in the Forest of Dean is not even the oldest. In 2012, Neil Phillips found a 'Golden Wonder' crisp packet on a beach in Devon. The packet was produced in 1967, yet it looked as if it had been dropped just last week. Many food packaging bags are made from 'metallised' plastic film, and compared with the food inside them, these bags last an alarmingly long time.

Six-pack plastic ring carriers — they can last up to 450 years. These carriers are extremely harmful to animals, because they may get stuck in animals' throats, causing suffocation, or cut animals' limbs.

Around 200 years

Aluminium beverage cans. These items can actually last half a century. They are also very dangerous to small animals, because small animals may crawl inside and become trapped.

Recycling aluminium is undoubtedly a better approach. In this way, we can use these resources continuously, at a much lower cost than producing new aluminium products.

The energy required to produce one new aluminium can is enough to make 20 recycled aluminium cans. Moreover, the energy saved by a single aluminium can alone can power a television for 3 hours.

Plastic bottles. In fact, these petrochemical products may never be biodegradable, and the chemicals they contain remain in the soil unchanged.

Many plastic bottles are made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) and take an extremely long time to degrade. Therefore, PET products must be recycled. More and more PET plastic bottles are recycled and made into synthetic carpet fibres.

One to two million years

Glass jars and glass bottle packaging. These items may last forever, because we can see that glass formed in magma hundreds of years ago still exists today.

Glass is mainly made from silica, one of the most stable and durable minerals on Earth.

In addition, apart from being unpleasant to look at, the biggest problem with glass is that it breaks easily. If an organism tries to swallow or lick the food or drink remaining on glass shards, it may suffer serious injuries.