5 Great Reasons to Skip Plastic Bags When Shopping

Green living has come to dominate the corporate landscape, so much so that most grocery stores now offer three options for bagging your purchases. You can choose paper, plastic, or buy reusable cloth bags for a couple of dollars a pop. Unfortunately, most people select plastic in a misguided attempt to stop deforestation, never realizing that the damage wrought by plastic bags is potentially far more detrimental to our environment. So if you haven’t taken the initiative to purchase truly green reusable grocery bags, here are just a few reasons why you should follow suit on your denial of paper with a push towards less plastic. You might not even realize the harm you could be doing to yourself, your family, and the planet when you pick plastic.

1. Half-life of who-the-heck-knows. Paper bags may denude forests, but at least they decompose within your lifetime, unlike their plastic counterparts. The consensus on aging that occurs within the landfill is somewhere in the neighborhood of a thousand years for every plastic bag that finds its way to the trash. Now think about how many plastic bags you’re throwing away every month…every year (not to mention your neighbors and everyone across the globe). It’s a little bit frightening to think of the tons of plastic that are piling up all over the world right now and how long they’re going to be there.

2. Recycling? Yeah, right. It is a sad truth that only about 1% of plastic bags are ever recycled, despite the fact that many grocery stores offer this service to their customers. This means that despite your best intentions, you are a lot more likely to throw away your plastic bags than drop them in the bin at the supermarket. Of course, you might reuse them in a number of capacities in your home, to scoop poop when you walk the dog, or as a portable trash bag in your car, but it all amounts to the same thing in the end: plastic bags in the landfill.

3. Danger to the environment. A lot of plastic bags never actually make it to their intended destination when you throw them away, instead finding their way into natural habitats like wilderness and underwater areas. Here they have the potential to hurt and even kill both animal and marine life. Small animals, fish, and so on can become caught in plastic bags and suffocate or drown while some animals try to eat them, thinking they’re food. Sea turtles, in particular, tend to mistake them for the jellyfish they love to eat. The plastic bags don’t go through the digestive system very well, and can easily cause an animal to become impacted, leading to pain and eventually, death.

4. Danger to your family. Small children and pets, in particular, are susceptible to the dangers posed by plastic bags. The number one concern is suffocation, which can all too easily occur when a toddler stuffs a plastic bag in his mouth or a dog tries to inhale one that has the scent of food on it.

5. The ugly urban tumbleweed. Besides all of the harm these bags can cause, they are also an unsightly blemish on the urban landscape. Rolling down freeways, getting caught on trees or bushes, and sticking out of drainage, plastic bags only serve to remind us that some of our lot are simply incapable of keeping the planet clean, an oversight that unfortunately affects the view for all of us.

Guest post:

Sarah Danielson writes for Converting Tech where you can find an assortment of vacuum packaging machines and custom poly bags along with other superior flexible packaging solutions.