More Reasons to Avoid Plastic Bags

In case you didn't have enough...

Here's a photo that Beth at Fake Plastic Fish snapped from Spirit Air's in-flight magazine:



You can click to read the text. The most shocking thing to me was the headline: "We use 2 million barrels of oil every day to make plastic." I don't know about you, but that sure sounds like a lot to me.

The article also claims that "72% of Americans don't know that plastic comes from oil." Maybe we can get the people from These Come From Trees to make some "These Come From Oil" stickers.

Reusablebags.com lists "Facts and figures regarding the true cost of plastic bags" in terms of both consumption and environmental impact. Be sure to check the "Other Facts" sidebar - tons more info there, including why paper bags and recycling aren't the answer.

Bean Sprouts recently wrote Ten Things You Didn't Know About Plastic. Did you know that "About 100,000 tonnes of plastic bags are thrown away in Britain annually. That's the same weight as 70,000 cars"? I didn't. And that's just Britain! How many cars' worth of plastic bags do we toss out in the US?

If you want to figure that out, you can start by visiting Worldwatch Institute. "Each year, Americans throw away some 100 billion polyethylene plastic bags. (Only 0.6 percent of plastic bags are recycled.)" Lots of plastic bag info at that link. In the interest of hope, I liked this point: "If every shopper took just one less bag each month, this could eliminate the waste of hundreds of millions of bags each year."

Back in March, No Impact Man wrote about the effect plastic bags have on wildlife in Plastic Bags Are the Devil.

And there's always this photo:


That's enough reason for me.