How green is a plastic carrier bag?

What goes into a plastic carrier bag

It takes around 60 million - 120 million barrels of oil a year to produce the 500 - 1 trilloin plastic bags used worldwide.

Chemical contamination

Plastic bags break down with exposure to sunlight into more toxic petro-polymers, which can contaminate waterways and soil.

Lifetime embodied energy

The useful lifespan of a carrier bag can be as little as 20 minutes and seldom reaches more than a week or two, the recycle rate is less than 5% so most bags end up in landfill where they will stay for many hundreds of years.

Recycling and material recovery

Of the roughly 1 million plastic bags a minute being consumed less than 1% are recycled. It costs £2,000 to process and recycle 1 ton of plastic bags which have a market value of £16.

Factoids [6]

The manufacturing of plastic bags makes up 4 percent of the worlds total oil consumption.

One polyethylene plastic bag requires 0.133 kwh energy for its manufacture.

The manufacturing of two plastic bags produces 1.1 kg of atmospheric pollution.

A car can travel 1 kilometer in the energy required to manufacture 9 plastic bags.

In this century, an estimated 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating in every square kilometer of ocean worldwide.

96 percent of all grocery bags are thrown into landfills.

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