I hate plastic grocery bags.....

What’s Wrong with Plastic Bags?

“The most ubiquitous consumer item on Earth, the lowly plastic bag is an environmental scourge like none other, sapping the life out of our oceans and thwarting our attempts to recycle it.” – Slate Magazine, August 10, 2007

"All the plastic that has been made is still around in smaller and smaller pieces.” – Stephanie Barger, executive director of the Earth Resource Foundation

• Plastic bags are a petroleum product, the use of which contributes to our dependence on foreign oil
  
  
• Plastic bag production creates greenhouse gases, which contribute to global warming
  
  
• 500 Billion to 1 Trillion plastic bags consumed worldwide annually [1]
  
  
• 100 Billion plastic bags consumed in the United States alone [2]
  
  
• Throwing away 100 billion plastic bags is equivalent to dumping 12 million barrels of oil [3]
  
  
• 9% of waste in landfills is plastic [4]
  
  
• 4.5% of waste in landfills is plastic bags and films *
  
  
• It takes 430,000 gallons of oil to manufacture 100 million bags [5]
  
  
• Only about 2% of plastic bags are recycled in the US, and only 1% worldwide [6]
  
  
• To clean up plastic bag litter, it costs 17 cents per bag in San Francisco [7]
  
  
• More than a million birds and 100,000 marine mammals and sea turtles die every year from eating or getting entangled in plastic [8]
  
  
• There are 46,000 pieces of plastic litter floating in every square mile of ocean [9]