Bag Facts


  • Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute.
  • According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year.
  • According to The Wall Street Journal, the U.S. goes through 100 billion plastic shopping bags annually. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion.)
  • Californians throw away 294,000,000 pounds of plastic bags every year, or 147,000 tons - enough waste to circle the planet over 250 times.
  • In the State of California, 600 plastic bags are thrown away every second.
  • Some estimate a plastic bag may take one thousand years to decompose. That means a bag thrown away during the crusades, the birth of Constantine, or at the signing of the Magna Carta would just be finishing its decomposition now.
  • 86% of all known species of sea turtles have had reported problems of entanglement or ingestion of marine debris.
  • In the North Pacific Gyre, the mass of plastic is 6 times greater than the mass of plankton.
  • If Californians cut their plastic bag waste in half, it would save over two thousand barrels of oil a day( over 800,000 barrels a year) and keep 73,000 tons of rubbish out of our landfills.
  • In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans.
  • Only 10 to 15 percent of paper bags and 1 to 3 percent of plastic bags are recycled.
  • Paper bags take up more than twice the landfill space than plastic varietals do. Also, their greater weight and volume requires more trucks and gasoline for hauling than plastic.
  • Tree regrowth cannot keep up with the current logging rate.
  • It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag.
  • Paper sacks generate 70% more air pollutants than plastic bags.
  • It is estimated that between one to three percent of plastic bags produced worldwide end up as litter. Remember, generation numbers are estimated between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags a year.
  • In the 1980s it was estimated that plastic rubbish caused the deaths of over 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles a year in the North Pacific alone.
  • Less than 5 percent of US shoppers use canvas, cotton or mesh bags. Please change that number by choosing reusable when you shop.

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