Every year, an estimated 500-billion plastic bags are used worldwide. That’s an absolutely staggering number. When you take into consideration that just one bag has the potential to damage the environment, the other 499 billion are just overwhelming.

There are around 6-billion people on are planet. So to do the math, each man, woman and child uses around 83 plastic bags per year. Of the 500-billion, 1/5 are used in the United States alone.Plastic bags are difficult and very costly to recycle. For that reason, many end up in landfills where they take more than 300 years on average to photo-degrade.

The bags break down into tiny toxic particles that can easily contaminate the soil and waterways. Once an animal ingests these dangerous toxins, they’re forever integrated into the food chain, damaging animals of all sorts and even eliminating some species before they rise to dominance. These toxins are also very dangerous to humans when ingested in large amounts. All it would take is a few glasses of water per day for a few months for an individual to experience health problems from the poison.

But the problems which accompany wasted plastic bags starts long before they photo-degrade. Our planet is becoming increasingly contaminated by litter. 500 billion plastic bags and only around ¼ are being placed into the proper receptacles. Though these bags are convenient, as evidenced by their sheer number, they are also quite unnecessary. The black bin-liners we know as trash bags, plastic carrier bags, clear sandwich bags, and a variety of other forms of bags are all contributing to the pollution of our environment.

While most of these bags were rarely found as little as four decades ago, today their usage has increased at an alarming rate. All you have to do is take a look around and you could probably spot a dozen bags on your way to work, to the store, taking your kids to school, and countless other places around you. Bags can clog up gutters and drains which then cause the sewage to overflow into the streets and peoples’ yards. This can easily become an instant breeding ground for germs and bacteria which could cause deadly disease.

And it’s not just on land that you can find the billions of discarded plastic bags, the oceans are also a favorite place for these pollutants to end up. Plastic bags are now amongst the top 12 debris items most often found along coastlines. Animals and sea creatures are hurt and killed every single day by discarded bags. Animals like turtles mistake these bags for food and end up suffocating or choking to death as a result. Plastic clogs their intestines and leads to slow starvation in many marine species. And others can easily become entangled in the bags and drown.

Because the plastic takes so long to break down, the bags pile up in the ocean more and more each year. Every bag that’s washed down a drain has the potential to ultimately end up at sea, the same with bags flushed down the toilet, thrown into rivers, etc. And if you add all of this on top of the insane amount of energy expended to produce bags and recycle very few, it’s more than a compelling argument to do away with them all together.

Tags: consumer green, plastic bags, recycling

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 17th, 2008 at 6:42 am and is filed under Consumer, Pollution. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.