Plastic Ain't so Fantastic

 

  • Australia uses 6.9 billion plastic bags a year of which 3.6 billion are plastic shopping bags.
  • If you tied 6.9 billion plastic bags together end on end they would travel around the world 42.5 times.
  • Australians dump 36,700 tonnes of plastic bags into our landfill every year. That equates to 4,000 bags a minute or 230,000 per hour
  • Only 10% of Australians take their plastic bags for recycling
  • 100,000 marine creatures a year die from plastic entanglement and these are the ones found.
  • Approximately 1 million sea birds also die from plastic.
  • A plastic bag can kill numerous animals because they take so long to disintegrate. An animal that dies from the bag will decompose and the bag will be released, another animal could harmlessly fall victim and once again eat the same bag.
  • It costs the Australian government in excess of $4 million to clean up plastic bag litter each year.
  • The floods in Bangladesh in 1988 & 1998 were made more severe because plastic bags clogged drains. The government has now banned plastic bags.
  • In Ireland they introduced a 15c plastic bag tax and reduced their usage by 90% in one year. It is now 22 cents.
  • If each Australian family used 1 less plastic bag each week that would be 253 million bags less a year.
  • The #1 man made thing that sailors see in our ocean are plastic bags.
  • There are believed to be 46,000 pieces of plastic in every square mile of ocean.
  • There are 5 ocean gyres in the world where plastic gathers due to current circulation. These gyres contain millions of pieces of plastic and our wildlife feed in these grounds.
  • It can take anything between 20-1000 years for a plastic bag to break up. I mean break up as they break up into smaller pieces. They don't break down and those that do break down into polymers and toxic chemicals.
  • It costs $4,000 to recycle 1 tonne of plastic bags and you get a product that can be sold on the commodities market for $32. We must stop them because recycling is not viable.
  • Less than 1% of plastic bags in Australia are reused.
  • It takes just 4 family shopping trips to accumulate 60 shopping bags.
  • If you imagine a piece of plastic 1m wide. As a conservative guestimate, a length of this plastic 40km long is produced each day and this is for one brand of toilet paper packaging. For bread you can triple the length (120km long)
  • World wide, 13-15,000 pieces of plastic are dumped into the ocean every day.
  • Every year, 6.4 million tonnes are dumped into the ocean. This is the same as 3,200 kilometres of trucks each loaded with garbage.
  • At least two thirds of the world's fish stocks are suffering from plastic ingestion.
  • Ocean acidification is a growing problem
  • Scientists have identified 200 areas declared as 'dead zones' where no life organisms can now grow.

Prevention is better than a cure!