Went to Walmart today and while waiting at the checkout stand, I noticed the carousel filled with plastic gags – tons of them. Seems like every few weeks I hear about how bad plastic bags are for the environment. I’ve heard that the sheer volume of plastic bags will soon completely fill all the landfills and the resources needed to produce and transport them produce emissions that may wipe out humanity. I’ve also heard that practically none of the zillions of plastic bags are ever recycled.
I looked up plastic bag facts on the Internet — according to one site, about 380 billion plastic bags are used in the US every year and approximately 12 million barrels of oil is required to make that many plastic bags. Only 1 to 2 percent of plastic bags in the US end up getting recycled.
Well, these are pretty scary numbers so I thought I’d do a little extensive research. What I found out was there is a group of people that believe plastic bags are the root of all evil and another group that believes the first group are fatalists and making them a much bigger issue than necessary.
I couldn’t find any proof one way or the other that 380 billion bags are used annually in the US, but it appears that most of the raw material used to make plastic bags in the US is produced from natural gas, not oil. I couldn’t find exact numbers, but I did find some statistics that indicated that plastic bag recycling has more than doubled in the past nine years. Additionally, I found that there are growing industries that use recycled plastic bags to make building products like decks, playground equipment and fences.
And I discovered some interesting facts about landfills — according to a study sponsored by the University of Arizona, almost all the organic material from the 1950s in a Phoenix landfill remained readily identifiable. The study concluded that the tightly compacted contents of landfills create low-oxygen environments that inhibit decomposition.
I’m not taking sides — this just seems like yet another subject, similar to gun control, that people become passionately for or against. The real magnitude of the problem probably lies somewhere in the middle — they may not be as harmful as some think, but then again, you probably shouldn’t go stick your head in a plastic bag.
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