Just a few bags from my collection.....
I’ve been a bag lady for quite a while now.
Switching to a handful of re-useable bags is something I did years back. It took a few months to anchor the habit: to remember to put them into my car, to remember to bring them into the store. It’s easy to get into the habit considering re-usable bags hold more stuff, look less trashy than plastic and generally do a better job.
In case you need more reasons than that, I’ve collected a handful of stats about paper and plastic bags that may just cause you to re-think the use of plastic & paper bags.
Plastic bags are ugly.....
1. Plastic never really goes away. Plastic bags can take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years to break down, but the environmental impact can be even worse. Here where I live, our garbage is incinerated. When plastic bags burn, the composition of the bag mixed with the heat produces,dioxins, a highly toxic chemical. Other chemicals released while burning plastics include benzo(a)pyrene (BAP) and other polyaromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which have both been shown to cause cancer. Residue from burning contaminates the soil and groundwater and can enter the human food chain through crops and livestock. I’m not convinced that the incinerator in our county has the appropriate scrubbers on their smokestacks to remove these contaminants.
2. Plastic bags utilize nonrenewable resources, that’s a fancy word for petroleum and natural gas. Plastic comes from OIL. If you think about it plastic bags play a role in helping to drive up fuel prices.It takes 12 million barrels of oil to produce the amount of plastic bags the US uses per year. Only 1% of plastic bags are recycled world-wide, the cost to recycle plastic bags so outweighs their value that most recycling facilities will not take them, leading more and more to just be thrown out with the rest of the trash.
Killing trees for paper....there's gotta be a better way
3. Think paper bags are better? I wish I could tell you that they were, but they’re not. We cut down 14 million trees per year simply to supply the demand for paper shopping bags. It requires more energy to produce one single paper bag than to produce two plastic bags. Only 20% of paper bags end up recycled, the rest end up in landfills decomposing and polluting the air or being burnt in incinerators polluting the air. Because paper is ten times heavier than plastic, it uses more fuel in transportation.
Tonight, our school PTA is screening Bag It!, a movie about plastic. Check it out and bring this movie and become a Bag It town!
Here’s the trailer:
