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.