The Bay vs. The Bag

3.8 million plastic bags are used in the San Francisco Bay Area every year, and over a million of those end up in the Bay itself. San Francisco organization Save the Bay works to keep the bay clean, launching “The Bay vs. The Bag” campaign to raise awareness about pervasive plastic bag pollution.

“The plastics industry is putting profits over the health of San Francisco Bay,” said David Lewis, Executive Director of Save The Bay.  “Plastic bag pollution is unnecessary, preventable and costly.  Bags clog storm drains and recycling equipment, costing cities millions of dollars, and bag litter lowers property values and degrades recreational areas.”

This awesome stop-animation movie by Save the Bay envisions a world in which the San Francisco Bay was made up entirely of plastic bags. Check it out:

Save the Bay wants to prevent plastic from ending up in the Bay by stopping the plastic bag industry in their tracks. The environmental organization is encouraging local governments to ban disposable bags, or at least charge a fee for their use – a tactic that has been proven effective in places like Ireland, where plastic bag litter was reduced by 93 percent within a year of imposing a 33 cent fee per bag.

Wanna know how you can help? Visit SaveSFBay.org for details, along with more info about the problem of plastic bag litter.

Link [SaveSFBay]

Make a Messenger Bag Out of Trash Bags!

This video from Make Magazine shows you how to fuse plastic together and then make a bag out of it! All you need is an iron, plastic bags, sewing machine, and some straps and buckles.

Dec. 18th: Day Without a (Disposable) Bag

A Los Angeles county organization called ‘Heal the Bay’, which aims to clean up the Santa Monica Bay in California, has declared tomorrow, December 18th, ‘A Day Without a Bag’. Holiday shoppers and retailers are being asked to forgo single-use, plastic shopping bags in favor of reusable bags to raise awareness about personal choices. Even if you don’t live in LA county, you can participate in ‘A Day Without a Bag’ and help keep disposables to a minimum during the busiest shopping time of the year.

From Heal the Bay, via Fake Plastic Fish:

The event’s short-term goal is to educate Southland shoppers to adopt more sustainable practices during the holidays and coming year. The event’s long-term goal is to reduce the use of single-use plastic bags throughout California by empowering shoppers, and the community at large, to take simple and direct actions to eliminate unsightly debris and save taxpayer dollars.

More than 6 billion plastic bags are used in L.A. County each year. Disposable bags cost our fiscally strained cities up to 17 cents per bag for disposal (this does not even include the environmental costs). Plastic bags are made from fossil fuels. Americans use over 380 billion bags every year, throw-ing away this precious, non-renewable resource.

Why not make this a national – or even better, international thing? Granted, we should be using reusable bags as often as we can, but this is a great opportunity to get more people involved. Buy a set of reusable bags (Delight.com, BrightandBold.com and ReusableBags.com have great selections) and give them away to your friends and family as an early holiday gift. Tell them about the goal to keep plastic bags from littering the environment and ask them to use the bag for their holiday shopping.

Link [Heal the Bay] via [Fake Plastic Fish]

Who’s Behind the ‘Save the Plastic Bag’ Campaign?

The plastic bag industry is nervous, and they have good reason to be. More and more cities are banning plastic bags, or imposing taxes on people who want to use them. It’s all part of an effort to reduce the number of plastic bags that end up littering our streets, floating on the surface of oceans and lakes, clogging storm drains, killing birds and marine life and sitting in landfills all over the world.

Plastic bags are so ubiquitous – you get one nearly any time make a purchase, from your groceries and clothing to medicine and school supplies.  In fact, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation estimates that shoppers worldwide use 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags per year.  That’s a lot of resources – and trash.  Trash that could easily be avoided by choosing reusable bags instead, which many people are now doing.

But the plastic bag industry doesn’t think we need to cut back on plastic. It’s their livelihood, and they’ve enlisted the help of lobbyist Stephen Jones to protect their interests.  One of the ways the industry (including plastic giants Elkay Plastics Co. and Grand Packaging) is ‘fighting back’ is through their website, SavethePlasticBag.com.  Save the Plastic Bag is an attempt to debunk ‘misinformation’ about plastic bags, and Stephen Jones is head of the campaign to bring their protests to the public.

Some of the points disputed on the Save the Plastic Bag website include the idea that plastic bags are made from oil, that paper bags are better for the environment, that landfills are full of plastic bags and that plastic bags aren’t recyclable.  The site alleges that a ‘global campaign of misinformation’ is targeting their industry. You can read the site’s claims and the data they use to back them up for the details.

Believe it or not, it’s true that there’s a lot of misinformation about plastic bags out there.  For example, paper bags aren’t necessarily a better choice.  Trees are cut down to create them in many cases, and they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, as they decompose.  It’s also true that there are recycling facilities for plastic bags, though Salon notes that plastic bags are usually downcycled into other products that can’t be recycled – plus, less than 1% of all plastic bags end up being recycled.

Do any of the campaign’s points make plastic bags good for the environment? The answer is a resounding NO.  First of all, since plastic bags don’t decompose and very few of them end up recycled, they all have to end up somewhere.  That means they either take up space in landfills (which, despite the plastic campaign’s insistence that 0.4% of the total trash in landfills is a small amount, is actually millions and millions of bags) or litter the earth.  Why should we just continue adding to trash dumps when there are alternatives out there? And, regardless of the pro-plastic campaign’s insistence that the numbers are wrong when it comes to the animals killed by plastic bags, animals are still being killed needlessly.

The simple truth is, plastic bags aren’t good for the earth.  Reusable is always better.  Taxing people who choose to use plastic bags may not be the answer, and the fight against plastic bags is only a small facet of the efforts we need to make to clean up the only planet we have to live on.  But it’s still important, and reducing the number of plastic bags we use is absolutely worth doing.

To their credit, the ‘Save the Plastic Bag’ campaign advocates reusing plastic bags as many times as possible, recycling them when you’re done and even using reusable bags.  Consumers definitely need to take responsibility for their own actions and return plastic shopping bags to the store (most stores have recycling bins out front). Plastic bags aren’t likely to completely go away any time soon, so if you’ve got to use them, use them again, and again, and again – and then recycle them.  But you should also carry reusable bags with you on every single shopping excursion, because less trash on the earth is always a good thing.

Link [Save the Plastic Bag] + [Algalita]

Photo credit: PlasticBagFree.com + GreenerImpact

The Secret Culprit of Oil Consumption: Plastic Bags & Bottles

If you’re upset about the price of oil, your first instinct might be to point your finger at the usual suspects: the war, suburban housewives driving Hummers to the grocery store and oil companies that are taking the record profits and laughing all the way to the bank. While they’re definitely culpable, one thing you may not have thought of is your own contribution, even if you don’t own a car. Water bottles and plastic bags are a surprising culprit.

The Business Shrink has it:

The most reliable statistics from the Pacific Institute put America’s love affair with water bottles at 31.2 billion liters of water in 2006. Due to negative press on the possible health effects of the use, most people are aware water bottles are sold in polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles. In order to manufacture these bottles over 900,000 tons of plastic is needed. The mainstream manufacturing process that produces PET bottles requires a combination of natural gas and petroleum. The petroleum requirement is where the statistics show that America’s obsession could be hurting their wallets at the gas pump.

Bottom line, the production of 31.2 billion liters of water for the U.S. bottled water market took roughly 17.6 million barrels of oil.

America also uses an astounding 100 billion plastic bags per year, and it takes 12 million barrels of oil to produce them. When you add in worldwide consumption, we could save 120 million barrels of oil annually by switching to reusable bags.

Bottled water and all of these mountains of plastic bags are easy addictions to kick. Faucet-mounted filters, reusable bottles and reusable bags make it really easy to avoid consumption of so much petroleum. Honestly, what’s the problem here? Why do people have such a hard time making such a simple switch?

I’ve been carrying a set of cute little reusable bags to the grocery store for years now, and when I first started, the baggers would look at me like I was out of my mind and then acted like filling my bags instead of the plastic ones was some kind of insurmountable chore. Now they’re used to it though, and the more people start doing it, the more expected it will be.

Link [Business Shrink]

Photo credit: Flickr user klynslis