Plastic Bag Facts:
If you placed one year’s worth of plastic bags end to end, they would go around the Earth almost 36,000 times.
Every year, Americans use approximately 380 billion shopping bags, creating 300,000 tons of landfill waste. An estimated 8 billion plastic bags enter the US waste stream per year, and worldwide over 200,000 plastic bags are dumped into landfills every hour. Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute. Billions end up as litter each year. A typical landfill costs over $20 million to build and millions of dollars per year to maintain. Nearly all of this money comes from taxpayers—over $750 million per year in California alone. Less than 1 percent of plastic bags are recycled each year. Recycling one ton of plastic bags costs $4,000. The recycled product can be sold for $32.6 In the US alone, it takes 12 million barrels of oil to produce one years worth of plastic bags (380 billion plastic bags) in the United States every year. That’s more than 1,200 bags per US resident, per year. Numbers were kept on 43 different types of refuse. Cigarette butts were the most common. Plastic bags came in second. (Ocean Conservency, 2008) The extremely slow decomposition rate of plastic bags leaves them to drift on the ocean for untold years. According to Algalita Marine Research Foundation, these plastic bags cause the death of many marine animals (fish, sea turtles, etc.), every year when animals mistake them for food. Every square mile of ocean has about 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in it. |
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