Plastic Bags

Hello all,
So recently in some of my classes we have been talking about different ways to go green and help the environment. One of the issues we talked about was the dangers of plastic bags. Here's what I learned:

Somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide each year and less than 1% of bags are recycled. It costs more to recycle a bag than to produce a new one.

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.


Plastic bags have been found floating north of the Arctic Circle near Spitzbergen, and as far south as the Falkland Islands.

Plastic bags account for over 10 percent of the debris washed up on the U.S. coastline.

Nearly 200 different species of sea life including whales, dolphins, seals and turtles die due to plastic bags. They die after ingesting plastic bags which the mistake for food.



If we use a cloth bag, we can save 6 bags a week, 24 bags a month, 288 bags a year, thats 22,176 bags in an average life time. If 1 out of 5 people in our country did this we would save 1,330,560,000,000 bags over our lifetime.

Bangladesh, China, Ireland, and Rwanda banned the use of plastic bags. Israel, Canada, western India, Botswana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Taiwan, and Singapore have also banned or are moving towards banning the plastic bag. And in March 2007 San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags.

Plastic shopping bags are made from polyethylene: a thermoplastic made from oil. Reducing plastic bags will decrease foreign oil dependency. China will save 37 million barrels of oil each year due to there ban of free plastic bags.

So next time you go to Walmart, pick up one of those shopping bags that cost $1 .. remember what you will be doing for the environment! If you read this please pass the information on!

"Be the change you want to see in the world" - Gandhi