​Do you bring your own shopping bag when you go to the market?
​Nowadays, markets offer paper bags instead of plastic bags to protect the environment.
​This is because plastic does not decompose easily in the soil and cause contamination.​​
​When you go grocery shopping, bring reusable shopping bag.

Plastic Bag Consumption Facts

In The United States

    • According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 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—almost one bag per person each day. (Estimated cost to retailers is $4 billion).
    • Four out of five grocery bags in the U.S. are now plastic.
    • The average family accumulates 60 plastic bags in only four trips to the grocery store.

Worldwide

    • A person uses a plastic carrier bag on average for only 12 minutes.
    • On average we only recycle one plastic bag in every 200 we use.
    • Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute. Billions end up as litter each year.
    • Windblown plastic bags are so prevalent in Africa that a cottage industry has sprung up harvesting bags and using them to weave hats, and even bags. According to the BBC, one group alone harvests 30,000 per month.
    • According to David Barnes, a marine scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, plastic bags have gone “from being rare in the late 80s and early 90s to being almost everywhere. ” Plastic bags have been found floating north of the Arctic Circle near Spitsbergen, and as far south as the Falkland Islands. Source: British Antarctic Survey
    • Plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris most often found in coastal cleanups, according to the nonprofit Center for Marine Conservation.

Sources: International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Environmental Protection Agency and other agencies or persons as cited.

 

How many times must a bag be reused?

Once all of this information has been distilled, scientists can usually offer a fairly straightforward guide: the number of times a given bag should be reused when compared to the standard supermarket plastic bag.

A 2018 Danish study, looking at the number of times a bag should be reused before being used as a bin liner and then discarded, found that:

    • polypropylene bags (most of the green reusable bags found at supermarkets) should be used 37 times
    • paper bags should be used 43 times
    • cotton bags should be used 7,100 times.

Another UK study, which only considered the climate change impact, found that to have lower global warming potential than single-use plastic bags:

    • paper bags should be used three times
    • low-density polyethylene bags (the thicker plastic bags commonly used in supermarkets) should be used four times
    • non-woven polypropylene bags should be used 11 times
    • cotton bags should be used 131 times.

Credit: Jeremy Piehler/Flickr, CC BY-NC