You can find plastic and disposable shopping bags almost everywhere and on an average every person uses about 6 to 7 shopping bags in a week. With American population of 300 million, you can easily guess that almost 2 billion bags must be in use every day.
Therefore, there are sufficient reasons for using reusable printed grocery bags. Following are few reasons why you must buy such reusable shopping bags.
- It has been estimated that in order to decompose any average plastic bag, it may take anything between 15 to 1,000 years. However, it also depends upon the kind of environment.
Any typical landfill environment will cause these plastic bags to remain for either decades or even centuries with hardly any break down.
- By consuming these plastic bags, almost one million birds, hundred thousand of turtles and also many other kinds of sea animals may die annually.
Often these animals may be confused by looking at floating bags and thinking that they are certain sea life for eating, e.g. jellyfish and plankton. If they eat it, then plastic will clog up their digestive tract.
Typically, all these animals will starve to death. Few animals may get drowned after they get entangled in these plastic bags.
- As per the estimation of EPA, only 2 per cent of all these plastic bags only small percentage gets recycled. The rest of them go to landfills or they are floating all around the ocean or leaching toxic material into the water and soil.
- If you look at the cost of these recycling plastic bags, then you will find that they are a bit high comparatively and hence many recyclers too will not be ready to buy them. Finally, these plastic bags end up being discarded into the landfills.
- In case, you think any paper-bags are a better option, then you must reconsider. In the United States only about 14 million trees are chopped down every year in order to make pulp for producing paper bags.
- Any paper bags can produce double that of atmospheric waste in the form of plastic bags, hence they cannot be really much better option for environment.
- All these thrown away and discarded plastic bags have appeared as far away as Arctic Circle and also in the south like the Falkland Islands, as per the survey reports of British Antarctic.
- These plastic bags cannot remain always in landfills because of their light weight. Often, they are found fluttering away and will get stuck in the trees and also litter our coast.
- In order to make these plastic bags, various petroleum products are generally used which are considered as nonrenewable resources.
- All these plastic bags generally comprise about 10% of washed up garbage which pollutes American coastlines.
On the other hand, reusable shopping bags will be cost effective, stronger, simple to carry and available in many different designs and colors. Hence, it is more preferable to use such reusable bags than plastic bags.