Did you know that North America is well behind the rest of the world in its recycling and use of plastic bags in the retail industry? Many countries around the world have all but eliminated plastic bag use in specific cities, with Ireland, Australia, South Africa and Austria leading the way as countries who have set the reusable bag bar for us to follow.
Statistics
Since March 2002, Ireland has reduced its plastic check-out bag usage by more than 90%.
In April 2003 Coles Bay in Tasmania, Australia successfully banned plastic check-out bags in all their retail stores. In the first twelve months, Coles Bay stopped the use of 350,000 plastic check-out bags.
Over 12 towns in Australia are now plastic-bag free.
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.
