Plastic Bag Facts
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Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute. More reason to consider reusable shopping bags.
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According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year.
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According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion.)
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Californians throw away 294,000,000 pounds of plastic bags every year, or 147,000 tons - enough waste to circle the planet over 250 times.
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In the State of California, 600 plastic bags are thrown away every second.
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Some estimate a plastic bag may take one thousand years to decompose. That means a bag thrown away during the crusades, the birth of Constantine, or at the signing of the Magna Carta would just be finishing its decomposition now.
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86% of all known species of sea turtles have had reported problems of entanglement or ingestion of marine debris.
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In the North Pacific Gyre, the mass of plastic is 6 times greater than the mass of plankton.
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If Californians cut their plastic bag waste in half, it would save over two thousand barrels of oil a day( over 800,000 barrels a year) and keep 73,000 tons of rubbish out of our landfills.
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In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans.
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Only 10 to 15 percent of paper bags and 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags are recycled. More reason to consider reusable shopping bags.
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Paper bags take up more than twice the landfill space than plastic varietals do. Also, their greater weight and volume requires more trucks and gasoline for hauling than plastic.
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Tree regrowth cannot keep up with the current logging rate. More reason to consider reusable shopping bags.
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It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag.
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Paper sacks generate 70% more air pollutants than plastic bags.
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It is estimated that between one to three percent of plastic bags produced worldwide end up as litter. Remember, generation numbers are estimated between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags a year.
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In the 1980s it was estimated that plastic rubbish caused the deaths of over 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles a year in the North Pacific alone.
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Less than 5 percent of US shoppers use canvas, cotton or mesh reusable shopping bags. Please change that number by choosing reusable when you shop.
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