General Information
To a sea turtle, a plastic bag may look like a jellyfish. It is an estimated 300 million plastic bags that end up in the Atlantic Ocean alone. These bags are very dangerous for the ocean creatures in the aquatic. To a sea creature, a plastic bag might seem like a meal, but actually it is very deadly. Porpoises are the most common aquatic victim of the plastic bags. Because they eat sea nettles and jellyfish, they can mistake a plastic bag for food. They can die from just swallowing the bag, but if they survive, then it is unlikely that they will continue with normal digestion and thus eventually die a slow and painful death from toxicity or intestinal blockage. As many species are being affected with the plastic bags finding their way to their mouths, the environmental balance of the sea mammals are thrown off. This causes the other species to be affected or in other words, impacted. This is how much plastic bags are harmful to our oceanic environment. Believe it or not, in some parts of the ocean, there are more than 6 times as much more plastic than plankton.
Facts
- Americans only use more than 100 billion plastic bags each year, which equals 300 bags per person per year.
- People use plastic bags for an average of 12 minutes, however, the life of a single plastic bag is up to 1,000 years.
- In the ocean, the plastic from the plastic bags break down into small, plankton - sized particles that can outnumber plankton six to one.
- Some of the marine wildlife have been affected by the plastic bags such as whales, dolphins, seals, puffins, and turtles.
- In the middle of the Atlantic, there is an area that spans the distance between Virginia to Cuba called the Great Atlantic Garbage Patch: a soup of plastic with up to 26 million plastic particles per square kilometer.
- 85 percent of all sea turtles will be injured or killed by plastics in their lifetimes
- 80 percent of marine debris comes from land-based waste, and the most direct route to the Great Atlantic Garbage patch is from the east coast of the US.
- Retail businesses spend more than $4 billion per year to provide plastic bags.
- More than 1 billion single use plastic bags are given out free of charge every day and that number is increasing.
- In the Pacific Ocean, a mass of plastic waste the size of Europe is present because of the particular currents of the ocean.
- More than a hundred million tons of plastic waste is in the ocean.
Using Reusable Bags
Some estimates suggest that purchasing a single set of reusable grocery bags and using them every time you go grocery shopping could eliminate the disposal of as many as 20,000 disposable plastic bags. If you get quality cloth shopping bags, you'll be able to reuse them for years to come. The making of plastic shopping bags requires the burning of fossil fuels, the cutting down of trees, and in some cases, the use of unfair labor practices. It is a win win situation if we start to use reusable bags. Moreover, you can start saving money, as some grocery stores charge 10 cents for a plastic bag. Even though the reusable grocery bags are sometimes expensive, it is worth the money because you can not only use it for grocery shopping, you can use it to carry around other belongings like frames, cooking items, decorations, etc. However, the most important part is to save the marine life and decrease the greenhouse gases in our atmosphere.