PLASTIC BAGS, PLASTIC BAGS

Plastic bags plastic bags. They are easy to make and easy to sell, but aren't so easy to get rid of. Plastic bags have many uses: carrying the shopping, carrying clothes and transporting food. They can be used over and over again, but once the are broken, they become dangerous.

Now for some facts:

Australians use 3.92 billion plastic bags a year, that's over 10 million new bags being used every day. An estimated 3.76 billion bags or 20,700 tonnes of plastic are disposed of in landfill sites throughout Australia every year. Australians dump 7,150 recyclable plastic bags into landfills every minute or 429,000 bags every hour.

It is estimated that around 50 million bags enter the Australian litter stream every year. Unless they are collected, they remain in the environment and accumulate at a staggering rate. If these 50 million plastic bags were made into a single plastic sheet, it would be big enough to cover the Melbourne CBD.

a lot of big numbers there, pretty scary really. whats more scary is that plastic bags can last up to 1,000 years and they can be hard to contain, because they float easily in air and water, travelling long distances.