The petroleum in 14 plastic bags could drive a car a mile.
Plastic bags are made from petroleum, a finite resource. About 2.5 billion plastic shopping bags are used every year. That’s about 2,500 bags used per family per year.
It takes .48 MJ to produce a bag. (MJ stands for megajoule, the amount of energy it takes to heat 3 liters of water to boiling. Three liters is enough to make 12 cups of coffee or tea.) That .48 MJ includes the petroleum that the plastic itself is made from, as well as the petroleum burned as energy in the manufacturing process to make the bag. An average car consumes 4.18 MJ in driving 1 km, or the equivalent of 7 plastic bags. Convert this to miles and you get the equivalent of 14 bags per mile driven.
Think! How many barrels of oil are we throwing away?
Plastic bags are very bad litter.
Plastic bags thrown away as litter, dirty our public places, rivers and canals, and may even clog up drains, and this would lead to stagnant water and mosquito breeding. Plastic bags litter despoils nature trails, beaches and even chokes up mangroves and poses a threat to marine lives.
Just a tiny part from you.
If each family uses one less plastic bag a week, Singapore could save more than 50 million bags each year. By using reusable bags during our shopping trips, we will use fewer plastic bags and help to conserve earth’s resources.
We incinerate plastic bags in Singapore.
Plastic bags are not disposed of at Semakau Landfill. They are incinerated, along with other domestic wastes. Hence, unlike countries that landfill their waste, the non-biodegradability of plastic bags is not a problem in Singapore.
That does not mean that we should use plastic bag excessively! It is a waste of resources.
TAKE ONLY WHAT YOU NEED!
Source: National Environment Agency & Australian Government
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