Question

After the ban on plastic bags, students of a school decided to make the people aware of the harmful effects of plastic bags on the environment and Yamuna river. To make the awareness more impactful, they organized rallies by joining hands with other schools and distributed paper bags to vegetable vendors, shopkeepers, and departmental stores. All the students pledge not to use polythene bags in the future to save the Yamuna river.
After reading the passage, answer the following questions:
(i) What values are shown by the students?
(ii) What are biodegradable polymers? Give one example.
(iii) Is polythene a condensation or an additional polymer?

Answer 1

Hint: As we all know that Plastic is a non-biodegradable substance and is one of the major causes of environment pollution as it is non-recyclable and when it is burnt in air, it produces harmful smoke dangerous for any life form. Plastic is a carcinogenic substance and throwing them in water bodies can harm the animals in it.

Complete step by step answer:
We should never use plastic bags or plastic bottles and never ever throw them here and there because as we all know that it is non-biodegradable means that they don't degrade or break down over a period of time under normal conditions and damage the environment as well as water bodies.
After reading the above passage we can say that-
(i) The students have shown an amazing way of spreading awareness about avoiding the usage of plastic bags.
(ii) The biodegradable polymers are those polymers which can be degraded or decomposed over a period of time by various mirco-organisms like bacteria present naturally in the environment and give by-products like carbon dioxide, nitrogen, water etc. thus it barely causes any harm to the environment. They can be natural and synthetic and majorly involved functional groups like ester, amide and ether. A very common example we can provide here is PHBV i.e. poly- hydroxyl butyrate-co-3-hydroxyvalerate. It is a non-toxic, biocompatible and biodegradable polymer which is a very good alternative to the non-biodegradable synthetic plastics and is easily decomposed by the bacteria.
(iii) Polyethylene or what we commonly called it as polythene is a common plastic and highly in use nowadays. Polythene has the chemical formula ${({C_2}{H_4})_n}$ and it is the linear polymer and man-made. As we can see it is linear so we can make out that it is an additional polymer and is simply formed by the addition of molecules together without any loss.

Note: We should know that Environment Day is celebrated on 5th of June every year and we should always use the things which can be recycled and minimize the use of plastic bags and plastic bottles as both are harmful for the environment as well as can cause sterility in humans.