Reusable Bags Help Aquatic Life

In a Greenpeace report titled "Plastic Debris in the World's Oceans," they estimated that somewhere between 60 and 80 percent of the 6.4 million tons of garbage that makes its way in to our oceans every year consists of plastic. That works out to somewhere between 3.8 and 5.1 million tons of plastic waste that is added to our oceans every year. These plastics pollute the water and kill marine life. Plastic bags are one of the largest contributors to this problem. The Marine Pollution Bulletin published a study in the early 1990s which showed that 92.8% of the plastic debris found on the ocean floor around southern Europe was from plastic bags. If only everyone used reusable bags instead of plastic!

Plastic Bag in the Ocean

In 2006, the United Nations Environment Programme completed a study that revealed that, on average, each square kilometer of ocean in the world contains around 18,000 pieces of floating garbage, the majority of which is plastic and fishing line.  A portion of that waste resides in the North Pacific Gyre, more commonly referred to as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, where there is more than 300,000 pieces of garbage per square kilometer. Clockwise ocean currents cause a convergence of garbage in the middle of the ocean between California and Hawaii.  These same currents prevent the trash from floating back to the mainland.  The amount of plastic in the Gyre is difficult to image. Greenpeace estimates that some areas of the Garbage Patch have over 1 million pieces of plastic waste per square kilometer and a separate study by the Algalita Marine Research Foundation found that plastic fragments in the North Pacific Gyre are more prevalent than surface plankton - in some areas by a ratio of 6 to 1.

The fact that we have so much garbage floating in the ocean is disgusting enough on its own, but the real problem is the impact that all this trash - especially the plastics - has on marine life.  Plastic bags are notorious for causing thousands of deaths every year in sea turtles, birds, and other marine life. The most common causes of death by plastic are entanglement, starvation, and intoxication from the harmful plastic chemicals.  Plastic bags are particularly destructive to animals because they photo-degrade in the oceans, meaning they break down to microscopic, yet toxic, particles that are so small the animals cannot see them and cannot avoid ingesting them.  Over time they poison and kill the animals.  Greenpeace conducted a study in 2002 on dead sea turtles where they discovered the ingestion of plastic debris in nearly 75% of them.  Ingested plastic, such as that from plastic bags, clogs digestion systems, which forces animals to stop eating.  Animals can also absorb some of the toxic chemicals in the plastic when they ingest it, leading to health problems like cancer and reproductive problems.    Further, research shows that these problems can be passed on to humans if humans were to eat the animals that are sick from ingesting plastic.

To summarize, using plastic bags and throwing them away directly contributes to the degradation of our oceans and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of animals every year.  So why use them?  Switch to reusable shopping bags and do your part to help save our oceans and, more importantly, the innocent animals that call those oceans home.