“The plastic bag is an acknowledged element of Canada’s shopping lifestyle, but it should not be. Every single 12 months we use in excess of nine billion plastic buying luggage in Canada. That is 17,000 baggage a moment.”

– Greener Footprints

Canadians use nine-15 billion plastic shopping baggage each year

To get a truly feel for just how many baggage that actually is, photo this: if we tied nine billion baggage together, they would circle the earth 55 times (Greener Footprints).

Holy Dinah!

Each calendar year it’s approximated between 500 billion and 1 trillion plastic luggage are utilised across the world. Despite the fact that they were not extensively utilised till the 1980s, their influence has presently been felt all around the world.

A quick stroll through your neighbourhood can typically reveal how pervasive plastic bags are when it arrives to the problem of litter. Hanging from tree branches or tangled in hedges, plastic luggage have turn out to be a depressing fixture in urban eco-friendly areas like parks, schoolyards, and sports activities fields. This kind of litter is not only unsightly it can also contribute to key environmental concerns.

Huge buildups of discarded plastic baggage can clog drainage systems and add to main floods. This kind of flooding triggered widespread destruction in Bangladesh in 1988 and 1998. Manila has also been susceptible to flooding as a outcome of plastic-bag clogged sewers. In Western Purse , a lot more than eighty% of the Philippines’ money was submerged. Hundreds have been killed and hundreds far more ended up still left homeless when whole neighbourhoods were swept away.

Other aquatic chaos developed by plastic luggage has proven fatal to people who live in the water as well.

Approximately 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine animals are killed each and every year by plastic bags, which can strangle their victims or result in them to starve to loss of life, according to Planet Ark, an international environmental group. A useless gray whale that washed ashore in Seattle in 2010 was located to have more than 20 plastic bags in its abdomen.

A 2012 College of British Columbia research identified that 93 for every cent of beached northern fulmars (migratory seabirds relevant to the albatross) experienced bellies full of plastic – a sizeable boost from the last time they ended up analyzed, in 1980.

In simple fact, plastic packaging is accumulating so quickly, it truly is predicted to outnumber fish in the sea by 2050, in accordance to a modern report by the Globe Economic Discussion board.

Yikes.

In accordance to the David Suzuki Basis, “Couple of plastic luggage are recycled. Most are employed for a brief time to have groceries, and then probably re-utilized as garbage baggage or to wrap pet poop prior to ending up in the landfill or the ocean. Some folks argue that, simply because they make up about 1 per cent of the quantity of squander in landfills, we shouldn’t be concerned. But one particular for every cent of the huge quantities of what is actually in landfills is a whole lot, especially since plastic will not biodegrade.”

Most plastic bags are manufactured from polyethylene and can get hundreds of a long time to decompose.

But steps are getting taken to reduce the environmental footprint of plastic bags. Use of plastic luggage is either restricted or fully banned in above a quarter of the world’s countries.

China, Italy, Bangladesh, South Africa, and elements of Australia have banned plastic bags outright, even though municipal bans exist in components of India, Mexico, Britain, the U.S., and Canada.

Plastaxes – taxes on plastic baggage paid out by buyers – and new recycling laws have also been introduced in to aid address the concern.

In February 2016, Walmart Canada commenced phasing out 1-use purchasing baggage at Canadian Walmart stores. In location of these, customers will be provided discounted reusable baggage for 25 cents. But plastic luggage will nevertheless be presented for 5 cents in an energy to reduce the variety of solitary-use baggage they distribute.

In my neck of the woods (Sidney, British Columbia), the grocery shop I repeated isn’t going to have plastic grocery baggage but they do supply single-use brown paper luggage – or, of program, you can use reusable grocery luggage or a reusable cardboard box, exclusively developed to keep the excess weight of groceries. My individual desire is a box and a number of reusable bags.

Despite the fact that my neighborhood is supposedly extremely environmentally-helpful, I would have to say that, dependent on my personalized observations, the bulk of the grocery keep customers still choose the single-use brown paper bag more than the reusable bag and/or box. And I’m not confident why. Convenience, possibly?