Be Part of the Solution. Take the Pledge to Cut Plastic Bags Out of Your Life.

Solutions

Paper or Plastic?
In 1977, supermarkets began to offer plastic grocery bags as an alternative to paper bags. By 1996, four out of every five grocery bags used were plastic.

Paper

• 1 ton of bags = 17 trees

• 20% get recycled

• Ingredients: wood, petroleum and coal

• Could biodegrade in as little as a month, but due to poor landfill design actually biodegrade at about the same rate as plastic

• Each bag leads to 5.75 lbs of air pollution

• Generates five times as much solid waste as plastic

• Because of its heft and bulk, uses more fuel getting trucked to the store

• Its manufacturing process produces more than 50 times more water pollution than plastic

Plastic

• 1 ton of bags = 11 barrels of crude oil

• 1% get recycled
  

• Ingredients: natural gas and petroleum

• Decompose in 5 to 1,000 years

• Each bag results in almost 80% more air pollution than paper

• 40% less energy to manufacture and 91% less energy to recycle than paper

• Up to 4% of the world's plastic bags end up as free-floating litter

• Easily washes out to sea where it clogs in the stomachs of whales, turtles and other marine life

Plastic is everywhere and cutting it out of our lives completely would be a nearly impossible task. But, there are solutions to the plastic bag epidemic.