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Plastic Bags Blow.Everywhere.
"We are using a limited, non-renewable resource to create a non-biodegradable, limited use product and giving millions of them away for free everyday. Whose bright idea was this?"
-Ryan Bauer, SustainableAnswers.
Experts estimate that 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed and discarded annually worldwide, more than a million per minute. Designed for single use, plastic bags are notorious for becoming litter that fouls the landscape in nearly every geographic region from deep ocean waters to remote Antarctica. According to David Barnes, a marine scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, plastic bags have gone from being rare in the late 1980s and early 1990s to being almost everywhere in Antarctica. More than just unsightly, they are a death trap for tens of thousands of marine mammals every year that mistake the floating bags for food. The World Wildlife Fund gives us some insight stating, "more than 100,000 whales, seals, turtles, and birds die every year as a result of plastic bags."
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, more than 380 billion plastic bags are used in the United States every year. Of those, approximately 100 billion are plastic shopping bags, which cost retailers about $4 billion annually. Of those 100 billion shopping bags Americans throw away nearly every single one of them. Worldwide, only 0.6 percent of plastic bags are recycled. In the United States the percentage is even lower. Plastic bags take up less space in a landfill then traditional paper bags, however, many of these bags never make it to landfills; instead, they go airborne after they are discarded,getting caught in fences, trees, even the throats of birds, and clogging gutters, sewers, and waterways. Plastic bags aren't biodegradable. Instead they undergo through a process called photodegradation breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic particles. Other types of plastic bags include UV-degradable bags that are easy to design and produce. Manufacturers have also made biodegradable (also called oxo-degradable) versions, many using a TDPA additive to speed up the breakdown of plastic into small parts. This is not a solution, however, because these small particles of oil based plastic are toxic to animal populations that confuse them for food -- especially marine life. Breaking the bags into small parts only makes the problem less visible, since these small parts still take upwards of an additional 1,000 years to biodegrade.
There is no shortage of research linking plastic bags and global warming as the bags release carbon dioxide and methane in landfills. Oxo-degradable (biodegradable) bags are also problematic as they release their carbon more quickly into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming at a faster rate than normal plastic bags. The production of plastic bags consume millions of gallons of oil that could be used for fuel and heating.
Paper bags, which many people consider a better alternative to plastic bags, carry their own set of environmental problems. But if you decline to use both paper and plastic bags, then how do you get your groceries/shopping home? The answer, according to many environmentalists, is high-quality reusable shopping bags made of materials that don't harm the environment during production and don't need to be discarded after each use.