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| Photo by Stephanie Ho from Pexels |
To produce plastic bags, it requires petroleum and natural gas – both non-renewable resources – and the process produces pollution and creates global warming emissions. (It takes approximately 12 million barrels of oil to produce 100 billion plastic bags.)
Then, when bags are not properly disposed, they could kill animals. In fact, hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine animals die annually from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food (mistaken as jellyfish, the sea turtle’s primary food). Plastic bags choke animals or block their intestines, resulting to an agonizing death. Cows, goats and other land animals also accidentally ingest plastic bags.
And here’s the most alarming thing - a single plastic bag takes 1,000 years to degrade!!! Just imagine, if you’re shopping 3 to 4 bags of groceries every week, this translates up to 208 plastic bags in a year (excluding plastic bags from fastfood and leisure shopping)! In 5 years, that would translate to over 1,000 plastic bags! Whoa…
I haven’t diligently used my eco-friendly bags before (since I normally reuse the plastic bags as trash bags), but after educating myself on this, I realized that helping minimize the plastic bag consumption by using reusable bags can be our own little way of preserving the environment. We may not be able to totally eliminate consumption (for sure, there will be some unavoidable circumstances like when you go impulse buying!), but helping minimize the consumption at the least for planned purchases would be a good start.
