It seems that a good way to motivate myself for my weekly challenges is to research why I should be concerned with the topic at hand. This week’s challenge is to eliminate plastic bag usage and I thought it would be good to take a look at some statistics surrounding plastic bags. What I found will make me think twice before I take another plastic bag.
- Worldwide, we consume about 500,000,000,000 plastic bags per year
- Of the 100 Billion polyethylene plastic bags thrown away by Americans, only .6 percent are recycled.
- Approximately 60 – 100 million barrels of oil are required to make the world’s plastic bags each year.
- Plastic entanglement is responsible for 100,000 marine animal deaths every year.
- Sea Turtles apparently mistake plastic bags for food, ingest them and die.
- The cost of plastic bags to US retailers is $4 Billion per year. Guess who this gets passed on to?
- Most plastic bags take over 400 years to biodegrade, while some figures indicate it could take up to 1000 years for bags to break down.
- If the US throws away 99 Billion (non recycling) bags every year and it takes up to 150,000 bags to create a ton of waste… the United States throws away 660,000 TONS of just bags every year.
- If there are about 300 million people in the US and as a whole we throw away 99 billion bags per year, that means that every man, woman and child is responsible for throwing away 330 bags every year. If each bag is 5g (just an estimate), that equates to about 3.5 pounds per person. Over a lifetime, we use over 250 pounds of plastic bags that will not break down for several hundred years.
To me, this seems like a no brainer for making decisions in my daily life. I often have a choice as to whether I need a bag and most often I do not. If I am at a store where I know I am going, I can choose to bring my own bags. Obviously, paper is not a good choice either, but BYOB (Bring Your Own Bag) is the way to go. I am learning that the small daily decisions I make every day can have a huge impact on the environment. Often, it is just as easy to NOT take a plastic bag as it is to take one. It almost goes beyond mere convenience and borders on gluttony to take a plastic bag.
I hope these statistics I found are interesting to you and please let me know any of your plastic bag stories in the comments area below.
