

Plastic bags are trashing the world

Feb. 5, 2013  |  Comments
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I saw the first plastic shopping bags I'd ever seen in London in 1982. I was over there visiting some friends who worked for the same major oil company I did.

I had stopped off on my way to work down in the Middle East in the Kingdom of Bahrain.

Plastic bags were all over England. Every store in my friend's neighborhood gave them out. They had handles on them, were light in weight, very strong and a whole bunch of them could be squashed up in a ball and stuck in your pocket. I thought they were really cool.

And I thought that Styrofoam cups were bad for the environment! Little did I know plastic bags and cups were literally going to trash the world.

Since that day in 1982, I've seen plastic bags blowing along the ground on the remote deserts of the Middle East to the high mountain back country of the Rocky Mountains. I've seen them in the swamps and bayou country of south Louisiana to the historic battlefields of Virginia.

Each year, 380 billion plastic bags are used in America. Worldwide usage is near a trillion bags.

The bags are banned in San Francisco and several other cities in America. They are completely banned in China, Italy and Australia. China figures it saved one million tons of oil a year by banning the bags.

Ireland cut usage by 90 percent by imposing a 37-cent-a-bag tax.

Plastic bags are made from oil and are recyclable. A friend's home has a deck made from boards made from plastic bags. The list of uses is long.

Join the movement. Please recycle plastic bags.

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