Plastic bag. How much you care?

Plastic shopping bags have a surprisingly significant environmental impact for something so seemingly harmless. As well as being a blemish (next time you are outside, have a look around – you’ll be amazed at the number of plastic bags littering our street and waterways), plastic shopping bags kill large number of wildlife each year. In the water, plastic bags can be mistaken for jellyfish by wildlife. This makes plastic bag pollution in marine environments particularly dangerous, as birds, whales, seals and turtles ingest the bags then die from intestinal blockages. Disturbingly, it is claimed that plastic bags are the most common man-made item seen by sailors at sea.

The biggest problem with plastic bags is that they do not readily breakdown in the environment, with estimates for the time it takes them to decompose ranging from 20 to 1000 years.

Since the cost is high and having trouble with recycling and some part of problem in reuse, the most sensible option is to cut down on the number of plastic bags that you use, or stop using them altogether. If we can estimate that everyone accepted one less plastic bag every time they went shopping, the number of bags used would be reduced substantially.