Here are some facts about plastic bags:
§ Designed for a useful life of 15 minutes, plastic bags last up to 1,000 years in our landfills and oceans, where they leach out harmful chemicals.
§ The production and transport of plastic bags creates pollution and requires petroleum and natural gas.
The petroleum in 14 plastic bags is enough to drive a car one mile!
§ Hundreds of thousands of animals die every year from eating plastic bags mistaken for food. Plastic litter is clogging our oceans.
§ Cities spend up to 17 cents per bag on landfill, litter and clogged sewer costs. When mistakenly put in Denver's recycling bins they clog the sorters.
§ In the US we use 380 billion plastic bags a year - more than 1 billion a minute!
Paper bags are just as bad, and biodegradable bags not much better:
§ It takes 60% more energy, generates 70% more air pollution and 50 times more water pollutants to make a paper bag than a plastic bag.
§ Millions of trees are cut down to produce the billions of paper bags we use.
§ Denver's landfill is designed to contain refuse only, not decompose it. Paper bags take up far more space there than plastic bags.
§ Biodegradable bags are most often made out of corn, our most oil-intensive crop, which is why they are so expensive. There are better uses for corn than shopping bags.
Recycling can fix all this, right?
§ Plastic bags rarely recycled into more plastic bags. When you accept a new plastic bag you are still creating a demand for the product.
§ The recycling process of both plastic and paper uses chemicals, dyes, water and energy to produce, and petroleum to transport the product back to the stores.
§ Shopping bag plastic is of such low grade that the recycling economics don't work, which is why they are increasingly being shipped off to Asia to be burned for fuel.
But I use my shopping bags to line my trash can! Learn what to do about that trash can liner and learn how you can be involved in promoting the use of reusable bags by visiting our website:
www.BetterBagsColorado.org
"sending the throw-away shopping bag
to the dustbin of history"