You would have heard a lot about how bad plastic is for the environment and how using plastic bags can be very damaging. At Bag It Don’t Bin It, we thought we would go one more step ahead in educating you on the ill effects of the plastic bag and plastic bottles. Here are ten revealing and some very shocking facts about plastic that you should know.
These facts will surely help strengthen your resolve to go against plastic and opt for environment friendly reusable bags. Here they go:
1. 3,600,000,000 plastic bags are being consumed per hour out of which only 1% is recycled.
2. Marine mammals often mistake plastic bags for food and ingest them, causing 100,000 deaths in a year.
3. An average of 300 plastic bags is consumed by a single adult in the UK every year.
4. 45% of shoppers in the UK have bought a bag for life, but only 12% use them!
5. Each year USA recycles more steel than aluminum, glass, paper and plastic combined.
6. In the USA itself, Americans use 2.5 million plastic bottles every hour
7. Even if photo-degradation takes place, the plastic from the bags never really degrades and since the time plastic bags have been used, none of it has degraded, which means every piece of the plastic ever made still exists.
8. Bottled water bottles if reused can leach a substance called DEHA, which is a carcinogen
9. Close to 90% of the marine litter floating is plastic, making it a major environmental hazard
10. Last year, 16 million gallons of oil was used in order to make plastic bottles for bottled water in the USA alone