Regardless of the material adopted as the best strategy for use in plastic bags, each material has an ideal final disposal, which may be composting, mechanical recycling, energy recycling, sanitary landfills, and others. Therefore, the infrastructure of collection, identification and disposal of post-consumer waste of this material should be tied to the choice made to ensure its socio-economic sustainability. Moreover, solutions that are still controversial in terms of their real environmental impact should be neither condemned nor encouraged - rather, they should be evaluated. In this context, it is up to the scientific community to provide solid and reliable foundations to ensure that such evaluations are based on a global vision of the problem. This was the objective that guided the present work, with an analysis of critical issues and description of the diverse solutions adopted around the world, including environmental impact assessments of the different alternatives to minimize and/or solve the problems pertaining to the use of plastic bags.
Plastic; biopolymer; oxibiodegradable; paper; composting; recycling