Plastic Bag Facts
I know it’s been said a million times…”take your own cloth bag to the grocery store”. We all need to reduce our dependence on plastic bags, that’s a fact, but I don’t think I truly understood the devastation that plastic bags have on our environment until I read the following statistics:
- somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year- I know i’m having a difficult time wrapping by brain around that number!
- it costs $4000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags which can then be turned around and sold for $32
- plastic bags photo degrade and break down into smaller, more toxic petro-polymers-here I thought photo degradable bags were a good thing! These polymers then get into our soil and water supply
- nearly 200 different species of sea life (whales, dolphins, seals, turtles etc…) die because of our plastic addiction. They mistake it for food and die as a consequence.
Enough of the bad news…what can I do to help?
- by simply switching to cloth bags we can save 6 bags a week = 24 bags a month = 288 bags per year = 22,176 bags saved in a life time- now that’s something each of us can do!
If you do happen to find yourself at the grocery store sans your reusable sacs and are asked if you prefer paper or plastic, the correct answer probably isn’t what you would think. Paper isn’t the way to go. According to treehugger: Paper bags come from trees. The trees are removed and heavily processed using machines, therefore using fossil fuels and polluting. The pulp is washed and bleached (using lots of water) then transported. Plastic although synthetic, is apparently least damaging on our environment to produce.
Some countries like Bangladesh and Rwanda have banned plastic bags, while others like China have banned free plastic bags. In the US, San Francisco has become the first US city to ban plastic bags and others are considering it.
After a while, using cloth bags have become second nature. I now have a collection of what I call ‘cute’ enviro bags that come with me everywhere.
4 Comments
Leah,
Comment by sharon on November 18, 2008 at 7:12 amIt is so great to see you and so many other bloggers really talking about the plastic bag industry. IIt’s really about the single use bags — We at ECOBAGS.COM have been talking about this since 1989 when we personally decided to stop using single - use throwaway bags. Now it’s a movement. Thanks for keeping the conversation alive -
Sharon
CEO, Founder
http://www.ecobags.com
the original reusable bag company
http://www.ncga.coop/newsroom/paper-or-plastic
Comment by sarah on June 10, 2009 at 12:55 pmI grew up in England in the days before plastic bags (I was born in 1951) and I remember ladies always took their own bags to the grocery store, usually a nice straw or hard plastic and inside that were “string bags” which could be carried in the hard bad and used for groceries and other purchases. Ladies NEVER left the house without these bags, it was just habit, we now have to re-learn that habit but in time todays children will be telling of the time when their parents used plastic bags to bring home the groceries and then just toss them into the garbage, can you imagine!
Comment by Susan Averiss on July 28, 2009 at 11:21 pmThanks so much for sharing Susan! I find it really interesting that society as of late is going back its roots. We’ve switched back to prefering to buy our bread from a bakery instead of the supermarket, meat from the butcher, and even our cooking is going back to our more natural roots. I think everyone now understands the importance of reducing our waste vis-a-vis plastic bag consumption for one, and it is becoming more of the ‘norm’ to bring our own bags to the supermarket once again.
Comment by lea on July 29, 2009 at 12:10 pm