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By Stuart Carlton
PhD Candidate, SNRE
The photo above depicts 60,000 plastic bags, the number used in the U.S. every five seconds.
Photo by Chris Jordan.
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*This article appeared in the Gainesville Sun on October 8, 2007.
By the time you've finished reading this sentence, Americans will have thrown away over 15,000 plastic bags. They will have recycled about 150.
The simple plastic grocery bag is an amazing invention. Plastic bags are strong, inexpensive, and durable. They can be used to hold groceries, lunches, clothes (dirty or clean!), prescriptions, trash, and more. As a child in New Orleans I used them to hold the beads I caught at Mardi Gras parades. One of the most popular things to hold in a plastic grocery bag is more plastic grocery bags, lying ready, awaiting deployment.
But there's a problem with plastic grocery bags. Once they're made, they basically never go away. In a landfill, a bag may take over 1000 years to break down. In other words, the bag you carried home from the store yesterday might still be there for your great great great grandchildren's great great great grandchildren to enjoy. What an heirloom!
Of course, many grocery bags don't go to a landfill. They end up polluting rivers, oceans, beaches, forests, parks, streets, parking lots, schoolyards, backyards, and athletic fields.
This pollution is deadly. Californians Against Waste claim that 100,000 turtles and marine mammals are killed each year by plastic marine debris. That's approximately one every five minutes. A cow in New Delhi died after ingesting 35,000 plastic bags, according to Indian media reports.
While yesterday's plastic bags sully the landscape and kill wildlife, more and more plastic bags are being manufactured today. According to Salon.com, Americans use over 100 billion plastic bags each year. That's 274 million plastic bags a day, or over 3100 per second.
Reuseablebags.com estimates that about 12 million barrels of oil are used annually to manufacture the plastic bags used in the United States. That's enough oil to create about 240 million gallons of gas, which could fuel over 500,000 cars with gas for an entire year.
A turtle ingesting a plastic bag. Californians Against Waste claim that 100,000 turtles and marine mammals are killed each year by plastic marine debris. That's approximately one every five minutes. Photo by The Age.
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We're swimming in a sea of plastic bags. If we don't act fast, we may drown.
Fortunately, there are several easy steps you can take to help reduce the plastic bag waste you produce. First, stop using plastic bags in the grocery store. Don't replace them with paper bags, which require more petroleum to manufacture than do plastic bags. Instead, replace them with reusable shopping bags. Reusable bags, often made of cloth or recycled plastic, are inexpensive, large, and sturdy. If each American household brought one cloth bag per trip to the grocery store, we would throw away 10 billion fewer plastic bags per year.
Reuseable bags come in all different kinds. You can get designer bags, such as the ones offered by Hermes for $960. Publix offers a less chic model for under $2. Better yet, look around your house and you may find a variety of cloth bags, backpacks, or other suitable totes lying around. Stick them in your car so you don't forget them.
If you do forget your reusable bags, then make sure you bag your groceries carefully. Grocery baggers seem to operate on a per-bag commission, double bagging anything heavier than a loaf of bread. Ask the bagger to fill your bags up, and only double bag when absolutely necessary.
When you get home, don't throw the bags away. Bring them back to the store and drop them in the recycling bin. Experts estimate that only 1–2% of plastic bags used in the US are recycled.
These simple steps alone could cut America's plastic bag waste by tens of billions of bags per year, saving millions of barrels of oil, thousands of turtles and marine mammals, and preventing countless instances of unsightly litter and dangerous pollution.
Unfortunately, not enough Americans are taking these easy steps. If we don't clean up our act, then government may have to step in. In some places, it already has.
Several countries, including Taiwan, Thailand, and South Africa, have banned plastic grocery bags. San Francisco recently followed suit, and other American cities are considering similar legislation. Such legislation is expensive, time-consuming and should be unnecessary. Citizens need to stand up and act on their own to eliminate needless plastic bag waste.
In the time you took to read this column, Americans threw away over 900,000 plastic bags. Whether by legislation, innovation, or individual action, we must eliminate our dependence on plastic bags. Do your part today. Reach under your sink, grab the grocery bag filled with other grocery bags, and bring it to the store to recycle. Don't forget to pick up a reusable bag while you're out. We must eliminate our plastic bag addiction, one step at a time.
Stuart Carlton is a first year Ph.D. student in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. He earned a B.A. in English from Tulane University, an M.S. in Fisheries Biology from the University of Georgia, and has spent time working as a biologist for the Fish and Wildlife Research Institute and as a middle school science teacher. His research focuses on the role of information flow and communication in stakeholder conflicts.
Visit the Gainesville Sun to read Stuart's article as it appeared in the paper.
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