Here are some ideas to help your kids (and you!) become more aware of your plastic bag usage.  Here are some questions you can ask:

•  How many plastic bags do your family use and discard each month?
•  What are some ways you could reuse the plastic bags you already have?
• How many cloth bags would it take to eliminate the use of plastic bags in your house?
• Which stores in your neighborhood or city now offer reusable shopping bags?
• Does your city have a recylcing program that includes plastic?
• What happens to the plastic bags your family throws away each month?

A few plastic bags in your garbage may seem like a small concern until you realize what is happening to much of the plastic packaging, wrappings and bags we dispose of each day.  A continent sized swath of the Pacific Ocean has now become completely saturated with plastic debris (see map below). 

Like other areas of concentrated marine debris in the world’s oceans, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, as it is called, formed gradually as a result of marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents.  According to the Wikipedia:

The patch’s size is unknown, as large items readily visible from a boat deck are uncommon. Most debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite. Estimates on size range from 700,000 square kilometres (270,000 sq mi) to more than 15,000,000 square kilometres (5,800,000 sq mi) (0.41% to 8.1% of the size of the Pacific Ocean), or “twice the size of the continental United States”.  The area may contain over 100 million tons of debris.  It has also been suggested that the patch may represent two linked areas.

Seeing these pictures made me realize how important it is to get into the habit of recylcing and reusing our plastic bags and replacing them with cloth bags when possible.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch – Good Morning America

Governments, communities and consumers have become increasingly concerned about the impact plastic bags are having on the environment.  According to Worldwatch, each year, Americans throw away some 50-80 billion non-degradable plastic bags, and only 0.6 percent of plastic bags are recycled.

Plastic shopping bags represent a non-essential use of petroleum feedstock. For example, in 2006, the Pacific Institute estimated that producing the billion of plastic bags that year used 17 million barrels of oil, an amount which would otherwise produce 240-million gallons of gasoline.

Plastic bags can also take between 20 and 1,000 years to breakdown in the environment.  As a result, a number of cities and states are considering or enacting bans or imposing fees on the use of plastic bags – e.g. San Francisco. 

Plastic Bag Pollution

But people aren’t waiting for new laws to make their move to reusable bags.  You caan see them popping up in grocery stores, drug stores and other retail outlets.  And they’ve become stylish to boot.  The choices used to be bland (black or white, perhaps with a store logo).  Now you can designer shopping bags to fit any statement you want to make.

Maybe this will make it easier for me to remember to take bags with me to the store.  So, I always keep a couple reusable shopping bags in our car and a couple of more in the house.  That way I never have to experience that ”oops” moment at the checkout counter.