Plastic Bags - You should really think twice!

Posted July 2nd, 2008 by Mark

We have always felt strongly about our use of plastic which is one of the reasons we sell our biodegradable garbage bags, flushable dog waste bags and our organic cotton shopping bags. But read some of these facts surrounding the common plastic bag and it may give you pause the next time you are buying groceries.

By using cloth bags, you can save 6 bags a week -- that's 24 bags a month -- 288 bags a year -- 22,176 bags in an average life time.  If 1 out of 5 people in the U.S. did this we would save 1,330,560,000,000 bags.
 
Data released by the United States EPA show that somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion blastic bags are consumed worldwide each year.  
-National Geographic News 9/2/03
 
Less than 1% of bags are recycled. It cost more to recycle a bag than to produce one. 
- Christian Science Monitor News Paper
 
"There's harsh economics behind bag recycling: It costs $4,000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold on the commodities market for $32."
-Jared Blumenfeld (Director of San Francisco's Dept of the Environment)
 
A study in 1975, showed oceangoing vessels together dumped 8 million pounds of plastic annually. The real reason that the world's landfills weren't overflowing with plastic was because most of it ended up in an ocean-fill.
-U.S. National Academy of Sciences
 
Plastic bags have been found floating north of the Arctic Circle near Spitzbergen, and as far south as the Falkland Islands.
-British Antartic Survey
 
Plastic bags account for over 10 percent of the debris washed up on the U.S. coastline.
-National Marine Debris Monitoring Program
 
Plastic bags photodegrade: Over time they break down into smaller, more toxic petro-polymers which eventually contaminate soils and waterways.
-CNN.com/technology, 11/16/07
 
Nearly 200 different species of sea life including whales, dolphins, seals and turtles die due to plastic bags.
-World Wildlife Fund Report 2005
 
Bangladesh has banned plastic bags (2007), China has banned free plastic bags (2008),  Ireland taxes plastic bags and has reduced consumption by 90% since 2002, Rwanda has banned plastic bags (2005), Israel, Canada, western India, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Taiwan and Singapore have also banned or are moving toward banning plastic bags, San Francisco is the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags (2007)
 
China will save 37 million barrels of oil each year due to their ban of free plastic bags.
-CNN.com/asia 1/9/08
 
 

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