"The Florida Sierra Club Waste Minimization Committee wishes you a Happy Holiday season. Please remember to Bring Your Own Bags every time you shop as your gift to the Earth. Be an environmental trendsetter - the more places you use your own bag and the more people who see, the more acceptable it will become!"

Thanks, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. I'd appreciate a reply with what you are able to do.
It is a first step to hopefully a much larger campaign to get people to Bring Your Own Bags when they shop.

Thanks again,
Lisa Hinton
hintonla@mac.com

The Problem with Plastic Bags

The ubiquitous plastic shopping bag, often used once & thrown away, uses up natural resources, consumes energy to manufacture, creates litter, endangers wildlife, adds to landfill waste, impacts human health and takes forever to disappear.

Plastic is accumulating at an alarming rate in our oceans - wreaking havoc on wildlife, polluting our beaches and entering our food chain.  Our addiction to use-and-toss items such as plastic bags and plastic bottles are a significant contributor to this growing problem.  Of the 43 items tracked during Ocean Conservancy’s 2008 International Coastal Cleanup, the top three items of trash found were cigarette butts, plastic bags, and food wrappers/containers.

The cost of manufacturing, transporting, dispensing & disposing of plastic bags is not apparent to the public who think they are getting something for free, and when something is free we tend to take it whether we need it or not.

The Problem:

• According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually at an estimated cost to retailers of $4 billion.
• The production of plastic bags requires petroleum and often natural gas, both non-renewable resources that increase our dependency on foreign suppliers.  Prospecting and drilling for these resources contributes to the destruction of fragile habitats and ecosystems around the world.  The energy needed to manufacture and transport disposable bags eats up more resources and creates global warming emissions.
• An estimated 8 billion pounds of plastic bags, wraps and sacks enter the waste stream every year in the US, putting an unnecessary burden on our diminishing landfill space and causing air pollution if incinerated.
• Plastic bags take up to 1,000 years to decompose in a landfill.  In fact, nothing completely degrades in modern landfills because of the lack of water, light, oxygen and other important elements that are necessary for the degradation process to be completed.
• An estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year.  Billions end up as litter.
• As litter, plastic bags do not biodegrade, they photodegrade-breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food chain when animals accidentally ingest.  Since water keeps plastic cool and algae blocks ultraviolet rays, “every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere.”
• Approximately 500 nautical miles off the California coast sits a growing “plastic island”, a gargantuan patch of floating plastic trash held together by currents stretching across the northern Pacific almost as far as Japan.  This "plastic island" is made up of about 7 billion pounds of plastic garbage and measures about twice the size of Texas.
• Phthalates, the chemicals used to make plastic bags soft and flexible, are banned in many European countries due to health risks.
• Plastic bags wrap around living corals "suffocating" and killing them.
• Sea turtles often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and ingest them.  Hundreds of thousands of marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food.
• In the marine environment, plastic debris acts like a sponge for toxic chemicals, soaking up a million fold greater concentration of such deadly compounds as PCBs and DDE (a breakdown product of DDT), than the surrounding seawater.

Recycling Plastic Bags Does Not Work:

• Only 1 to 3% of plastic bags are recycled.
• Many bags collected for recycling never get recycled.  A growing trend is to ship them to Third world countries like India and China which are rapidly becoming the dumping grounds for the Western world's glut of recyclables.  Rather than being recycled they are cheaply incinerated under more lax environmental laws.
• It costs $4,000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold on the commodities market for $32.

Paper Is Not The Answer:

• It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag.
• In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year alone.

There Are Solutions:

• A plastic bag tax introduced in Ireland in 2002 reduced consumption by 90% (individuals pay a tax of $.15 per plastic bag consumed at check out).  Approximately 18,000,000 liters of oil have been saved due to this reduced production.
• Whole Foods eliminated disposable plastic bags in all of its 270 stores in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. in 2008.  They sell several reusable bags, some very economically priced and made of recycled material, and encourage their customers to bring their own bags by giving a .10 grocery bill credit for each reusable bag a customer brings.  They also offer an environmentally sensitive option when needed–paper bags made with 100 percent recycled fiber content, which are completely recyclable. 
• IKEA became one of the first major US retailers to charge customers for plastic bags in March 2007, projecting at least a 50% reduction from 70 million to 35 million plastic bags in the first year.

Be Part of the Solution:

• BYOB – Bring your own bag!
• Encourage your local stores to sell reusable shopping bags, to only hand out plastic bags on request, and to offer alternatives that are compostable or made of recycled materials.
• Be aware of the packaging on products you purchase; opt for products with less packaging. Write letters to companies that use excessive packaging, asking them to change their approach.
• Post comments on the DEP web site http://www.dep.state.fl.us/waste/retailbags/default.htm.  Make it known that you want plastic bags drastically reduced. 

Sources: www.reusablebags.com and Sierra Magazine May/June 2009

Sierra Club Florida

Waste Minimization Campaign

Linda.Demler@sierraclub.org

(727) 824-8813 ext 301