The Northern Michigan Environmental Action Council (NMEAC) is the Grand Traverse region's oldest and best-known grassroots environmental advocacy organization. Meetings are the 2nd. Tuesday each month—the public is invited.

Many Facts ... One Conclusion (reuse)

The True Cost of Free
Well over a billion single-use plastic bags are given out for free each day. But as the old adage says, nothing comes for free. Here are some facts to illustrate the actual costs paid by our environment and society for the fleeting convenience of unlimited, free, single-use plastic bags. To see the real costs, we must look at the "cradle to grave" multiple impacts and the effects of each phase of a bag's life.

Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute. More reason to consider reusable shopping bags.

• According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year.



• According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion.)



• Californians throw away 294,000,000 pounds of plastic bags every year, or 147,000 tons - enough waste to circle the planet over 250 times.



• In the State of California, 600 plastic bags are thrown away every second.



• Some estimate a plastic bag may take one thousand years to decompose. That means a bag thrown away during the crusades, the birth of Constantine, or at the signing of the Magna Carta would just be finishing its decomposition now.



• 86% of all known species of sea turtles have had reported problems of entanglement or ingestion of marine debris.



• In the North Pacific Gyre, the mass of plastic is 6 times greater than the mass of plankton.



• If Californians cut their plastic bag waste in half, it would save over two thousand barrels of oil a day( over 800,000 barrels a year) and keep 73,000 tons of rubbish out of our landfills.



• In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans.



• Only 10 to 15 percent of paper bags and 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags are recycled. More reason to consider reusable shopping bags.



• Paper bags take up more than twice the landfill space than plastic varietals do. Also, their greater weight and volume requires more trucks and gasoline for hauling than plastic.



• Tree regrowth cannot keep up with the current logging rate. More reason to consider reusable shopping bags.



• It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag.



• Paper sacks generate 70% more air pollutants than plastic bags.



• It is estimated that between one to three percent of plastic bags produced worldwide end up as litter. Remember, generation numbers are estimated between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags a year.



• In the 1980s it was estimated that plastic rubbish caused the deaths of over 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles a year in the North Pacific alone.



• Less than 5 percent of US shoppers use canvas, cotton or mesh reusable shopping bags. Please change that number by choosing reusable when you shop.

Bag Bans