It is going to take a lot of changes from a lot of people to create long term sustainability for life on this planet. If you feel like you can only do one thing right now, consider bringing your own bag to the store. Here is a convincing list of statistics taken from the Bring Your Own Bag campaign:
- 100 million plastic bags a week go to landfill.
- Plastic bags can take between 15 and 1000 years to break down in the environment.
- Each year, an estimated 500 billion – 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That translates to over one million per minute.
- North America goes through 110 billion plastic shopping bags annually.
- Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways polluting our soil, rivers, lakes and oceans.
- Production of plastic bags requires vast amounts of oil.
- Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.
I just learned about Bring Your Own Bag today. I really like the fact that their message is aimed at average consumers. When I am promoting my website on social media, I sometimes get a bit disheartened by the fact that I preach to the choir a lot. The environmentally responsible people are all following each other and friending each other and they already take a cloth bag to the grocery store. They already bring their travel mug to the cafe.
If you have somehow landed on my blog and you have never thought about reducing you plastic consumption, get yourself a nice reusable shopping bag from wherever is most convenient. I got one for free at a mall one weekend from some non-profit group. I bought some really cheap woven bags from a hawker who stands in front of the vegetable market here. Bring Your Own Bag has a page showing all their participating retailers. If I still lived with my mom, Pete’s Frootique would be my local retailer. Their bags look really good as in good enough to take on casual shopping trips rather than just the weekly grocery run. Drivers will like the flat bottoms.
The change to reusable grocery bags is easy and it is conspicuous. Once you get used to it you will take it for granted and you will start looking for another positive change.
