“The plastic bag is an recognized element of Canada’s shopping culture, but it should not be. Each yr we use more than nine billion plastic searching luggage in Canada. That is 17,000 luggage a moment.”

– Greener Footprints

Canadians use nine-15 billion plastic buying baggage each calendar year

To get a really feel for just how several baggage that in fact is, image this: if we tied 9 billion bags with each other, they would circle the earth 55 times (Greener Footprints).

Holy Dinah!

Every single year it is believed between five hundred billion and 1 trillion plastic bags are employed across the globe. Though they weren’t widely employed until the nineteen eighties, their affect has previously been felt about the globe.

A fast stroll via your neighbourhood can often reveal how pervasive plastic bags are when it will come to the difficulty of litter. Hanging from tree branches or tangled in hedges, plastic baggage have turn into a depressing fixture in urban green areas like parks, schoolyards, and sporting activities fields. This kind of litter is not only unattractive it can also lead to main environmental issues.

Large buildups of discarded plastic luggage can clog drainage systems and contribute to key floods. This sort of flooding induced prevalent destruction in Bangladesh in 1988 and 1998. Manila has also been susceptible to flooding as a consequence of plastic-bag clogged sewers. In 2009, much more than eighty% of the Philippines’ money was submerged. Hundreds were killed and 1000’s a lot more have been left homeless when total neighbourhoods have been swept absent.

Other aquatic chaos produced by plastic bags has proven deadly to these who stay in the drinking water as nicely.

Around one hundred,000 whales, seals, turtles and other maritime animals are killed every 12 months by plastic luggage, which can strangle their victims or result in them to starve to loss of life, in accordance to Earth Ark, an worldwide environmental team. A useless gray whale that washed ashore in Seattle in 2010 was located to have more than twenty plastic baggage in its stomach.

non woven bag supplier singapore of British Columbia examine located that 93 for each cent of beached northern fulmars (migratory seabirds related to the albatross) experienced bellies complete of plastic – a sizeable improve from the very last time they had been tested, in 1980.

In simple fact, plastic packaging is accumulating so quickly, it really is anticipated to outnumber fish in the sea by 2050, according to a latest report by the Entire world Financial Discussion board.

Yikes.

According to the David Suzuki Foundation, “Couple of plastic bags are recycled. Most are used for a short time to have groceries, and then maybe re-utilized as rubbish bags or to wrap puppy poop ahead of ending up in the landfill or the ocean. Some people argue that, since they make up about one for every cent of the volume of squander in landfills, we shouldn’t fear. But 1 for each cent of the huge quantities of what is in landfills is a good deal, especially since plastic doesn’t biodegrade.”

Most plastic bags are produced from polyethylene and can consider hundreds of many years to decompose.

But steps are becoming taken to minimize the environmental footprint of plastic luggage. Use of plastic luggage is both restricted or totally banned in above a quarter of the world’s countries.

China, Italy, Bangladesh, South Africa, and areas of Australia have banned plastic luggage outright, although municipal bans exist in components of India, Mexico, Britain, the U.S., and Canada.

Plastaxes – taxes on plastic bags compensated by consumers – and new recycling rules have also been brought in to assist handle the problem.

In February 2016, Walmart Canada commenced phasing out one particular-use shopping luggage at Canadian Walmart retailers. In area of these, consumers will be supplied discounted reusable luggage for 25 cents. But plastic baggage will nonetheless be provided for 5 cents in an work to decrease the number of solitary-use luggage they distribute.

In my neck of the woods (Sidney, British Columbia), the grocery shop I recurrent does not have plastic grocery bags but they do offer you one-use brown paper baggage – or, of training course, you can use reusable grocery luggage or a reusable cardboard box, especially designed to maintain the bodyweight of groceries. My individual choice is a box and several reusable luggage.

Despite the fact that my neighborhood is supposedly extremely environmentally-friendly, I would have to say that, primarily based on my individual observations, the bulk of the grocery shop customers nevertheless choose the single-use brown paper bag in excess of the reusable bag and/or box. And I am not certain why. Comfort, perhaps?