Plastic Bag Waste Statistics

Australia alone uses 6 9 billion plastic bags a year of which 3 6 billion are plastic shopping bags.
Plastic bag waste statistics. This recognition is a testament to the troubling plastic shopping bag waste statistics. Hong kong looks to install reverse vending machines to help curb plastic waste. Every year about 8 million tons of plastic waste escapes into the oceans from coastal nations. Plastic is one of the most widely used and cheapest materials in the world today.
We use around 5 trillion plastic bags a year worldwide. Plastic resins are also used in a variety of container and packaging products such as pet beverage bottles hdpe bottles for milk and water and a wide variety of other resin types used in other plastic containers bags sacks wraps and lids. Municipal solid waste stream is recycled. Yep that s right they re used for an average of 12 minutes and then take up to a thousand years to decompose.
In the los angeles area alone 10 metric tons of plastic fragments like grocery bags straws and soda bottles are carried into the pacific ocean every day. This web page is a brief summary of plastic materials specific data. How to fight our plastic problem. The us alone throws away enough plastic bottles in a week to encircle the world 5 times.
If it s not made from plastic it s wrapped in plastic. According to waste management only 1 percent of plastic bags are returned. That s the equivalent of setting five garbage bags full of trash on every foot of coastline around. Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year which require 12 million barrels of oil to manufacture.
If you tied 6 9 billion plastic bags together end on end they would travel around the world 42 5 times. You can find it anywhere. Over the last ten years we have produced more plastic than during the whole of the last century. The average american family takes home almost 1 500 plastic shopping bags a year.
Australians dump 36 700 tonnes of plastic bags into our landfill every year. That equates to 4 000 bags a minute or 230 000 per hour. 10 facts about single use plastic bags. The average time that a plastic bag is used for is 12 minutes.
A piece of plastic as small and lightweight as a plastic bag can take 100 300 years to degrade. To put this into perspective for you about 2 million plastic bags are used every minute which puts us at an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags being used each year. Plastic recycling has become an increasingly important sector of recycling but it would be hard to declare it a great success story from an environmental perspective less than 10 of plastic generation from the u s. Here are 22 preposterous facts about plastic pollution.
It only takes about 14 plastic bags for the equivalent of the gas required to drive one mile.