26 Jun 09 Go Green At The Grocery Store

We’ve all seen how common reusable grocery bags have become as adjusting your lifestyle to be more environmentally friendly has come to the forefront in recent years, more so than ever before. Although still not many people use reusable grocery bags, and that’s a bigger problem than you may think. You don’t often consider just how harmful those plastic grocery bags can be to the environment. But consider a few facts about how harmful those plastic bags can be:

The nonrenewable fossil fuels used to create just 14 plastic bags is enough to drive the average car a mile. Factor that in with the knowledge that in America on average 380 billion plastic bags are used and disposed of every year.
Plastic bags don’t biodegrade in garbage dumps.
On average plastic bags contribute to the deaths of 100,000 marine animals a year.
On average it costs a city about 17 cents per plastic bag to properly dispose of the materials. In an economic recession, that really, really starts to add up very quickly.

Those are just a very few of the negative factors resulting from overuse of plastic bags. Our society has become so dependant on them, and yet it’s such an easy problem to combat, or erase through the use of the affordable reusable bags that basically every grocery store sells nowadays. That’s a huge carbon footprint that could easily be swept aside if only more people would take action to go green with their shopping lifestyle.

And just in case you’re thinking, well I use recyclable paper bags, and so I’m not contributing to the problem, keep in mind:

On average a paper bag produces 60-70% more harmful gasses that contribute to global warming during production, than plastic bags.
Though the bags are recyclable, around 80% of all paper bags end up in landfills where they do not biodegrade.
Paper bags also require 3 times the energy of a plastic bag, to produce one paper bag.

So remember these facts the next time you’re at the grocery store, watching how many resources are lost that don’t have to be, and choose to lead by example with your reusable shopping bags.

Share and Enjoy:

Tags: Biodegrade, Carbon Footprint, Deaths, Economic Recession, Forefront, Fossil Fuels, Garbage Dumps, Gasses, Global Warming, Grocery Store, Landfills, Marine Animals, Negative Factors, Paper Bags, Plastic Bags, Plastic Grocery Bags, Recyclable Paper, Reusable Bags, Reusable Grocery Bags, Shopping Lifestyle

Filed in Go Green

26 Jun 09 Go Green At The Grocery Store

Leave a Comment

Translator

Recent Posts

Blogroll

Categories

Gossimer Press Releases

Gossimer News