Plastic Grocery Bags Waste Oil & Damage Environment

by Larry Smith

Plastic shopping bags are "a frivolous emblem of our wasteful society." They are a cost to retailers, to the environment, and to us. And we could easily do without them.

The statistics are staggering. Just 5000 folks will go through a million plastic shopping bags every year At almost one bag per person per day; the 320,000 people on New Providence use 116 million bags every year.

"Not only are plastic shopping bags a needless use of fossil fuels," says plasticshoppingbagfree.org, "they end up as litter and landfill and they can kill wildlife and domestic animals when they are ingested. They are estimated to take 500 years to break down in landfills, and even then, the micro plastic particles remain in the earth and leach out to our waterways and into the foodchain."

Doing away with plastic shopping bags is easier than you think. Use cloth bags, baskets or cardboard boxes when you go shopping. And line trash cans with newspaper or other bags. Keep a resuable bag handy, so there is no need to accept plastic bags from a retailer.

A person's use of a plastic check-out bag can be counted in minutes - however long it takes to get from the shop to their homes. However, they take decades to break down in the environment. In the marine environment plastic bag litter is lethal, killing at least 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. After an animal is killed by plastic bags its body decomposes and the plastic is released back into the environment where it can kill again.

The 6.9 billion plastic check-out bags used every year consumes enough petroleum to drive a car 20,000 times around the world.

Sponsored by the Inner Wheel Club of East Nassau, Go Green Bahamas offers sturdy reusable grocery bags at  $5 each, or 5 for $20. The bags are durable and washable and are designed specifically for transporting groceries ~ they are also recyclable.

The dimensions are 13x8x15, similar to the size of a brown paper grocery bag. They are dark green with the Go Green logo imprinted on the front. For more information contact info@gogreenbahamas.com.

Comments

[Bob Knaus]

Plastic bags use HDPE. It takes 1.75kg petroleum to make 1kg HDPE, considering the entire manufacturing cycle:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HDPE

Plastic shopping bags weigh about 2 grams each:

http://www.teachingk-8.com/archives/online_extras/activity_on_paper_or_plastic_by_john_cowens.html

If you use one plastic bag a day, that is 730 grams HDPE per year, requiring 1.3kg petroleum.

Gasoline weighs 2.8kg per gallon. Let's assume a 50% overall conversion efficency from pertoleum, on par with HDPE. This gives 5.6kg petroleum per gallon of gasoline.

So, the 1.3kg petroleum you saved by not using plastic shopping bags equals 0.2 gallons of gasoline. That's about 6 miles, if your car gets 30mpg.

I sure hope you didn't make a special trip to buy your green re-usable shopping bags!

Math. It's a great tool for determining the relative size of problems :)

[Bob Knaus]

P.S. I walk the beaches of the Bahamas a LOT every year, and I see that plastic is a huge problem in our oceans.

But I hardly ever see a plastic shopping bag. Those aren't the problem.

Walking the ocean beaches off Salt Pond, Long Island, today I was struck by the huge numbers of small clear plastic bags at the storm line, and blown into the sea oats. They are drinking water bags, of several brands, from Haiti. They are the worst kind of ocean plastic trash, the kind that sea turtles swallow because they look like jellyfish. Each one is small, holds maybe 8 ounces of drinking water.

Does anyone here know enough about Haiti to tell me why Haitians consume water this way, by the millions of little bags?

If it's their choice to buy water this way, that seems an odd extravagance for the most impoverished nation in this hemisphere.

If it's the project of the aid agencies, I guess it must have some goal of reducing disease. But wouldn't it be a better strategy to pipe clean drinking water to the slums and villages.

Don't get me wrong. I'm an old-fashioned liberal, meaning that I think people's welfare trumps the environment. But there has to be some way for Haitians to drink clean water that does not foul the oceans.

[Bob Knaus]

P.P.S. Answered my own question. Aid agencies are not to blame. It's entirely due to private enterprise, and it's new in the last decade or so. The revealed preference of the Haitian people, as demonstrated by their actions in the marketplace:

http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/haiti/streetsellers.html

It reminds me of Guatemala when I visited a few years ago. I rode the "chicken buses", the old colorful school buses used by the locals. At every stop (and there were many) we were boarded by vendors selling soda, water, cut-up fruit, tamles, you name it. Everything was sold wrapped in plastic. As we traveled down the road, the locals tossed the plastic wrappers and bottles out the windows. The roadside was a mess.

My first reaction was "What a trashy society!"

And then I started thinking a little more. 20 years ago, the sodas were in glass bottles which you saved for the deposit, the tamales were in corn husks, and the fruit likely was in wax paper sleeves. Whatever you threw out the window was biodegradable.

What was missing, of course, were a few trash containers inside the chicken buses. And, the cultural shift of no longer tossing things out the window.

Culture does count. If the Haitians now get their water from boys with plastic bags instead of women with gourd dippers... then they need to adjust their culture to include public wastecans. And they need to start using them. Otherwise they end up on Bahamian beaches.

[Sam Wells]

SAVE THE TURTLES. CERTAIN KINDS THINK THEY ARE JELLYFISH. THANK YOU.

[Charlotte Dunn]

Incase you were wondering, for those people in places where they get the option, paper or plastic, it takes one 20 year old tree to make only 700 paper bags, so reusable canvas bags are definitely the only way to go!

[Laila Horton]

I do not think it is enough to appeal to people's sense of environmental responsibility and provide reusable bags alone. There is nothing like having to pay more for creating plastic waste. Why not make supermarkets charge for each plastic bag? They did this in South Africa where I lived the last few years and it reduced plastic bag waste at landfills by 40%!! The money that was collected (I think it was 5 cents per plastic bag) was used to fund recycling facilities.

[Y Treco]

Hand up!! I'm guilty of using PLASTIC Bags, Baggies, etc. simply because growing up all the ads on the telly said that plastic was OUR "friend." Plastic was promoted as a means to do away with paper bags, to save trees. Yup I was once a tree hugger!! Using plastic to save trees.

Asking Bahamians to stop using plastic bags is like beating a dead horse. Sure I've gone green, but do I remember to take my canvas bags to the store each time I go? NO! Maybe if the Bahamas become like some European countries where they charge .10-.15 cents per bag that would encourage people, like myself, to walk with their canvas bags whenever they go to the store.

Bob you're right about the baggies littering our beaches, I use to see the same thing in Andros, dozens of bags on the storm line.

We as inhabitants on this third rock from the sun, need to step up to the plate and become MORE environmentally conscious and more energy efficient. Like with everything else, EDUCATION is key.

[H Russell]

Reading the comments posted above upset me. Haiti is THE poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Yes, education is the key to changing their ways and stop "littering your beaches with garbage" but until that time, how about we take a good look at The Bahamas and start making changes at home before we take on the rest of the world. When a country is that poor, it takes a lot more than just words to fix the problem. If there is no money for food or education, how do you educate?

I come from Canada and cannot stand to see how easy it is for people to double bag EVERYTHING, throw out cardboard, paper, cans, bottles, metal, and even plastic. All of these products are recycled in Canada - and in Vancouver, you're almost glared at if you use plastic - and if you do forget your bags at home, you're charged for plastic ones. Plastic is one of the worst inventions humans have ever come up with.

I doubt any Bahamian uses 1 bag/day. I get a loaf of bread and not only is it packed in it's own bag, it gets 2 bags. It's not about the "math" of petroleum. It's the aftermath of your beloved plastic bags. Where do they end up? Landfills. "Green" doesn't always mean using less gas. A person buys 10 bags and they're good for many many years. You don't need many more than that because they're larger and more durable than plastic bags. So you buy them once and they don't end up in the landfills. You also fail to realize that just because sea turtles don't swallow plastic bags, many other animals do - bears, birds, and small animals that eat through them end up eating them as well. This type of "plastic is better" mentality is what got us into the situation we're now in. Ever seen the Pacific Plastic "dump?" It's a section of ocean in the pacific where garbage from all over the world pools in the currents. Birds are dying, fish are dying, animals are dying because they're eating plastic instead of food. We may not be able to change that but we can start by limiting the amount of plastic we use and throw away.

Yes, it's terrible that garbage from Haiti ends up on Bahamian beaches, but have you ever though about where the garbage from the Bahamas ends up? We really can't get mad at another county if the one we live in is really no better.