| Trend: Say No To Plastic Bags |
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| Written by TJ Seaton | |||||||
| Thursday, 23 October 2008 08:35 | |||||||
 Data released by the United States Environmental Protection Agency shows that somewhere between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are used worldwide each year. Less than 1% of bags are recycled. It cost more to recycle a bag than to produce a new one.“There’s 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 Blumenfield Then – where do they go? 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 Spitsbergen, 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. Plastic bags photodegrade: Over time they break down into smaller, more toxic petro-polymers which eventually contaminate soils and waterways. As a consequence microscopic particles can enter the food chain. The affect on wildlife can be catastrophic, birds become terminally entangled, 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 they mistake for food. So…What do we do? If we use one cloth bag, we can save 6 plastic bags a week, that’s 24 bags a month, that’s 288 bags a year and 22,176 bags in an average life time. If just 1 out of 5 people in the USA alone did this we would save 1,330,560,000,000 bags over our life time. That is One Trillion Three Hundred and Thirty Billion Five Hundred and Sixty Million plastic bags. Can you even wrap your mind around this large number of waste and death of animals from just plain plastic bags? Bangladesh has banned plastic bags. China has banned plastic bags. Ireland took the lead in Europe, taxing plastic bags in 2002 and have now reduced plastic bag usage by 90%. In Europe having your own shopping bags your take to the store with you has already been the case for many decades. You cannot get plastic bags or even paper bags in grocery stores etc. In 2005 Rwanda banned plastic bags. Israel, Canada, western India, Botswana. Kenya, South Africa, Taiwan and Singapore have also banned or are moving toward banning the plastic bag. On March 27th 2007, San Francisco became the first U.S. city to ban plastic bags. Oakland and Boston are “considering” a ban. What are they waiting for? 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 their ban of plastic bags. Of course that only 2 days of our country's oil usw, glutons that we are. It is possible…Say no to plastic!
3.25 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved." |
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