Shopping Bag Etiquitte
Still using plastic bags? You are out of style my friend! Today's savvy shopper uses reusable shopping bags.
Why? Maybe I don't want to be "trendy."
Trendy isn't the issue. The real issue of using plastic bags is the financial burden, environmental damage and harm they are causing to wildlife.
In California alone, nearly 600 bags are used by consumers EVERY SECOND! What happens to these bags? They are mostly discarded. It costs California tax payers nearly 8.5 million dollars a year to deal with plast bag litter. Another $25 million is spent on landfilling the plastic bags.
Marine life suffers terribly with an estimated 267 different marine species being adversely affected by plastic bag debris. Sea turtles often eat the bags because they look a bit like their favorite food: jelly fish! Others become tangled in the bags. The bits and pieces are altering the ecosystem in that in some areas, the particles actually outnumber plankton 6:1!
Can't they be recycled?
Barely. The cost of recycling plastic bags is enormous. For example, the costs of recycling 1 ton of plastic bags is around $4000. The return on investment? $32 on the commodities market. Quite a loss.
As a matter of fact, a growing trend is to ship the used plastic bags to countries such as India and China where the environmental laws are less stringent and the bags are incinerated.
Moreover, the mere production of plastic bags utilizes precious non-renewable resources as well as dangerous toxic chemicals. We use an estimated 500,000,000,000 (don't bother with the zeros, that's 500 billion!) plastic bags yearly. That amounts to around 1 million per MINUTE!
That's a lot of bags being produced. That's a lot of bags to attempt to recycle. And that's a lot of bags that end up all over the planet mucking up the environment!
The silliest part of all is that it's a super easy thing to fix. Just stop using them! Reuasble bags come in all sorts of colors and patterns. Many stores offer them at a very low cost. They are far sturdier. You can pack more groceries into one reusable bag than you can a plastic bag which means less trips unloading groceries.
It's a trend that's worth following. Do it to be trendy. Do it for the cost effectiveness or practical sense. Do it for the sea turtles and whales. Do it for future generations. I don't care why… just do it!