Plastic: Sacking Us All One Bag at a Time

Bag Boy: “Paper or plastic?”
Your Conscience: “Oh crap… I’ve heard bad stuff about plastic, so I’ll get paper. But wait… getting paper causes all those trees to be cut down. Cutting down trees is bad… paper bags are hard to store and plastic scrunches down to nothing…”
You: “Uh, plastic, please.”

Ohh yes… the necessarily evil of the paper/plastic decision getting you down? Here’s a simple solution: get neither! Fabric is the way to go. But before we get into that, let’s take a closer look at our handy little friend, the plastic bag.

These days, it’s actually becoming more and more rare to even have a choice between paper and plastic. With how cheaply plastic bags can be produced, you’re more likely to just have your bananas and soda bagged in plastic without being bothered with the question. These lovely little technological wonders are also sturdy, easy to carry, and very simple to store.

What’s the result of all these positive points? A big negative: these bags are massively produced around the globe and being used and discarded at the rate of over 100 billion per year in the USA alone. Sadly, only two percent of these bags are being recycled. The rest are being shipped to landfills where they will remain for centuries.

These bags are so light, that even if they are thrown in the trash, the bags can easily blow away. I’m sure you’ve all seen a billowing plastic bag blowing around from time-to-time, right? So have birds and sea creatures who mistake them for yummy jellyfish or another food-source. Millions of birds and marine animals eat and are killed by plastic bags each year.

Plastic bags are made from petroleum and natural gas. The environmental impact of these bags is far beyond the evils of littering. There is also the environmental impact of harvesting and producing the materials to create the plastic for the bags. Also, it has been found that many bags with print and pictures on them contain traces of lead in the ink. So, not only are these plastic bags littering our environment, they are also poisoning it.

We stop and pick up a loaf of bread, a pack of eggs, and a candy bar. We get a free bag to go with it. Great! Ten minutes later, we unload our purchases, and dump our bag. The environmental impact of consumers dumping these billions and trillions of bags is the equivalent of dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil each year. It’s a waste and a shame, and our world is suffering because of it.

As the implications of these bags are continuing to come to light, some communities are taking action by banning these bags altogether. The more communities to jump on the anti-plastic bag bandwagon, the closer we’ll get to helping prevent further damage inflicted by these bags.

The alternative? Invest in a sturdy, re-usable fabric-based bag. Bring it with you when you go shopping. These hold up very well, are very portable, and can be used indefinitely. Please decline a plastic bag at the check-out counter. It’s perhaps one of the easiest things we can do to significantly help our environment.

It’s time for us to break the plastic bag addiction. What was once a free and handy marvel is growing into a global problem. Clearly, these plastic bags are not really free. They’re “sacking” us all, one bag at a time.

For more information, check out http://www.earthresource.org/campaigns/capp/capp-goals.html.

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