Quite simply we use too much plastic but today I am blogging about plastic bags. According to the EPA between 500 Billion and a Trillion plastic bags are consumed every year and less than 1% of plastic bags are recycled (at a cost of 125% of their retail worth).
Did you know that the US dumps millions of pounds of plastic in the ocean every year? Plastic bags alone account for 10% of the debris that washes up on our coastline hurts our scenery, contaminates our food sources, pollutes our soil and kills our wildlife? I know many of you simply do not buy in to the plastic problems and dozens of scientist could show you how it degrades and if they convinced you, your response would simply be how can little ole me help?
Well for a minimal cost (@$.75-$2 per bag) you can buy or make reusable shopping bags. I use Harris Teeter and Trader Joe bags that cost less than $1. This very small investment will save an average of over 26 plastic bags a month. That is over 300 bags a year. If 1/10 of the people that have read my blog this year did this simple thing then we would consume 960,000 less bags this year.
Or look at it like this... minimizing plastic use by using cloth bags would significantly reduce our dependence on the foreign oil. Yes OIL is used to make plastic. Studies estimate that China will conserve over 37,000,000 barrels of oil each year due to their ban on plastic bags.
So next time you are having a discussion about gas prices or the enviroment tell your friends how you do your part and use reuseable bags!
Want to make your own?
If you sew check out this blog for instructions on how to make reusable shopping bags or this one on how to recycle your old things into reusable bags
Or perhaps you dont sew but you do crochet? (I wish!!this is my new FAVE) then you can make the ULTIMATE reusable shopping bag (seen at left) and save the landfills and ocean from your recent shopping faux paus check this out I think I NEED to do my part and buy one what do you think?
