1. Canadians use nine to 15 billion plastic bags a year.
2. The energy used to make 8.7 plastic shopping bags can drive a car one km.
3. Animals often mistake the plastic bags as food and when eaten, they clog the animals’ intestines. Loons and ducks can also become tangled up in the plastic bags and drown, or lose their abilities to fly.
4. Plastic bags have caused severe flooding in places such as India and in Bangladesh by clogging drains and sewers.
5. Approximately 46,000 pieces of plastic are floating per square mile in the world’s oceans.
6. In a landfill, the toxic particles from plastic bags can enter the food chain when animals eat them.
7. If you placed one year’s worth of plastic bags end to end, they would go around the earth almost 36,000 times.
8. A family of four uses approximately 1,500 single use plastic bags a year.
9. Plastic bags are made from oil. It takes about 430,000 gallons of oil to make 100 million plastic bags. That’s pretty bad when we are using 500 billion to 1 trillion bags each year worldwide. No wonder our gas prices are so high.
10. If we could use 1,000 sets of reusable bags regularly in our community, we could save one million plastic bags each year.