Sacking the Environment

The Plague of Plastic Bags
Home     About Us     The Price of Plastic     Sacking the Environment     Alternatives to Plastic     Links      
Plastic Production
Plastic Bag Use
Plastic is Forever
View the PSA
Plastic is Forever
  
The problems with plastic bags have only just begun.  At a million bags a minute, the pace at which we are contributing to environmental damage is staggering. 

 

Plastic is Forever

 

Plastics do not biodegrade; no naturally occurring organisms can break down the polymers in plastic.  Instead, plastic photodegrades: sunlight breaks the plastic down into smaller and smaller pieces until plastic dust remains. 

 

Bags in Landfills

 

Americans throw away an estimated 100 billion plastic bags each year.  Only 0.6% of plastic bags are recycled. 

 

Bags on Beaches

 

On a Saturday in September 2002, volunteers across the globe (from over a hundred countries) collected 8.22 million pounds of trash from 12,400 miles of shoreline.  Among the trash collected was 1 million plastic bags.

 

Bags in the Ocean

 

Broken down plastic dust may be small, but can still be consumed by birds, fish, and sea turtles, and interferes with natural ecosystems.  In the central North Pacific, researchers have found six pounds of degraded plastic for every one pound of surface zooplankton.

 

Poisonous Prey

 

Floating plastic bags are accidentally consumed by marine life, like sea turtles and seabirds.  Turtles, already endangered, mistake floating bags for jellyfish, their natural prey.  Eating a plastic bag can be fatal to a sea turtle or bird, either by hindering digestion or causing suffocation.  Plastic waste has been found in the stomachs of seabirds from populations across the world's oceans.

 

Blowin' in the Wind… a few facts from Reusablebags.com

  • The term "white pollution" has been coined in China for the tumbleweed of polythene blowing on the streets where according to UK's The Guardian, 2 billion are used each day.
  • In Dhaka, Bangladesh, plastic bags were found to have been the main culprit during the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged two-thirds of the country. The problem was that discarded bags were choking the drainage system.
  • In South Africa, plastic bags have been dubbed the "national flower" because so many can be seen flapping from fences and caught in bushes.
  • Because they tumble all over town and country like little blue bushes tossed here and there by wayward winds, plastic bags bearing the Wal-Mart signature have become known as "Arkansas Tumbleweeds."

 

"Just look around and you'll notice the bags are everywhere," said Sherry Mulhearn, executive director of the Resource Recovery Corp. "They're hanging in trees, floating on the side of the road, in the bay ... everywhere."