Plastic Bags Kill
Whales, Birds, Fish & Turtles
We use shopping bags for a few hours, but they can take lifetimes to decompose. Cloth versions make it easy to BYOB wherever you go - whether it's clothes shopping, grocery shopping, or a drugstore impulse buy.
- Oil and tree savings. In the United States, 12 million barrels of oil and 14 million trees go to producing plastic and paper bags each year.
- Discounts. Stores like Safeway and Whole Foods offer a five-penny discount if you bring your own.
- Being a role model. Other shoppers will watch and learn.
- Safety for sea creatures. Plastic bags are the fifth most commonly found item in coastal cleanups.
- If you must use a plastic bag, reuse it as long as you can, then tie it into knots before you toss it to keep it from ballooning up into the air and ending up as litter.
Animals which ingest plastic bags actually die and decompose much quicker than the plastic itself. The plastic is then released back into the environment more or less intact, ready for the next unsuspecting organism to ingest it.
There are approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic floating in each square mile of our oceans.
Plastic kills up to 1 million sea birds, 100,000 sea mammals and countless fish each year.
Turtles, dolphins and killer whales mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and die of intestinal blockage.
Pictured above, the tallest man in the world, Bao Xishun of China, reaches into the abdomen of a dolphin that had consumed plastic.
Let’s do something positive to reduce the hideous number of plastic bags being used - 1 million are consumed per minute globally - of which hundreds of thousands end up in the oceans. I