Drowning in plastic bags

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1. Data released by the United States Environmental Protection Agency shows that somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. – National Geographic News September 2, 2003
2. Less than 1% of bags are recycled. It costs more to recycle a bag than to produce a new one. – Christian Science Monitor News Paper
3. There are 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 Department of the Environment)
4. 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
5. Plastic bags have been found floating north of the Arctic Circle near Spitzbergen, and as far south as the Falkland Islands
6. If we use a cloth bag, we can save 6 bags a week, That’s 24 bags a month, That’s 288 bags a year, That’s 22,176 bags in an average life time
7. If just 1 out of 5 people in the US did this we would save 1,330,560,000,000 bags over our life time
8. Plastic shopping bags are made from polyethylene: a thermoplastic made from oil. Reducing plastic bags will decrease foreign oil dependency
9. China will save 37 million barrels of oil each year due to their ban of free plastic bags
10. Many countries/cities have banned or added charges on plastic bags
    • Bangladesh has banned plastic bags
    • China has banned free plastic bags
    • Ireland took the lead in Europe, taxing plastic bags in 2002 and have now reduced plastic bag consumption by 90%
    • In 2005 Rwanda banned plastic bags
    • Israel, Canada, western India, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Taiwan, and Singapore have also banned or are moving toward banning the plastic bag
    • On March 27th 2007, San Francisco becomes first U.S. city to ban plastic bags
    • Oakland and Boston are considering a ban

It is possible…

How difficult is it to buy a few, inexpensive cloth bags for grocery shopping? Not very, pretty much every grocery store sells them now. We have a few in each vehicle.

What about my garbage? Do I really need to carry it out in a bag? Can’t I just take the pail under the sink out and dump it? Is it really so hard to give it a quick rinse?

If we are willing to sacrifice, just a little, I think we can all make a pretty significant difference.

We have become anal enough about our recycling that we actually have reduced our regular garbage to one small bag per week (the equivalent of a grocery bag).

Now I’m excited that I have found compostable bags at Lee Valley! So even the garbage we don’t recycle and that does end up in the dumpster will be in bags made of vegetable oil and cornstarch, apparently they dissolve away in just a few days. Wonderful!