The Impact of Plastic Bags

Imagine your favorite place: the beach, the mountains, a local park, or your own backyard. Now picture the animals there dying as they are entangled in plastic bags, mistake plastic bags for food, or eat and drink from contaminated sources. Imagine plastic bags clinging to tree branches and tumbling across lawns. It shouldn’t be hard to envision these awful scenes; this is the reality of our environment.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. uses 100 billion plastic shopping bags every year, if you add to that the plastic wrapping and packaging, Americans are the largest consumer of plastic in the world. Every minute one million bags are consumed worldwide. Billions of these bags end up as litter each year and only 1% of plastic bags are ever recycled.

Plastic bags don’t bio-degrade, they photo-degrade (break down into smaller toxic fragments) which causes toxins to enter animals’ nutritional sources, as well as contaminating water and soil that humans use everyday. Plastic bags are made from polyethylene, which is a petroleum product, and this makes the toxins even more dangerous. The fact that these bags are a made from petroleum means that the production of these bags are wasting oil and energy that could be used more wisely.

Countries around the world are implementing innovative new laws and taxes to reduce the use and impact of plastic bags. In 2002, Ireland introduced a plastic bag consumption tax, PlasTax, which has reduced consumption by 90%. Because plastic bags are made from polyethylene, this move by Ireland has saved approximately 18,000,000 liters of oil. In Australia, about 90% of retailers have signed up with the government's voluntary program to reduce plastic bag use. Other countries who have banned the bags or taken steps to reducing their use include: Bangladesh, Italy, South Africa, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), and India.
Companies who are making an effort to reduce the use of plastic bags here in the United States include: Ikea (they now charge customers who use plastic bags) and Whole Foods (the company will take off 5 cents for each reusable bag a customer brings in).
With so many options for reusable bags why not stop using plastic bags? You could save animals, oil, and our environment. Let’s leave our earth green for the next generation!

Sources:
Environmental Protection Agency
The Seattle Times
PlusTax
The Washington Post