Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them.
Matthew 6:26
The problem with plastic bags
Birds often mistake pieces of plastic bags for food, filling their baby chicks with toxic debris. They start out as fossil fuels and end up as deadly waste in landfills and the sea. Turtles main food is jelly fish, so they see the floating plastic bag, swallow it and are unable to spit it out.
Fish eat thousands of tons of plastic , which then goes up the food chain to bigger fish and marine mammals. Tiny particles called microplastics are also consumed by people through fish and other food . Globally, we are each eating the equivalent of a credit card of plastic every week,1 and it’s expected that there will be more plastic than fish in the sea by 2050.2
This bad news is getting worse as the fossil fuel industry – seeing oil sales fall due to electric vehicles is planning to increase plastic production by 40% in the next decade, and are building petrochemical plants to boost production.
Here are a few facts about single- use plastic bags
- The world uses 5 trillion plastic bags a year.3
- South Africans use an average of 365 plastic bags per person per year. People in Denmark use an average of four plastic bags per year.4
- It only takes about 14 plastic bags for the equivalent of the petrol required to drive one mile.5
- More than 87% of plastic bags are never recycled, winding up in landfills and the ocean.6
- About 34% of dead leatherback sea turtles have eaten plastics.7
- It takes 1,000 years for a plastic bag to degrade in a landfill. They break down into microplastics that absorb toxins and continue to pollute the environment.9
The good news
Over one hundred countries now have a total or partial ban on plastic shopping bags, which goes to show we can live without them!
So, let’s take one little step this Lent and give up plastic bags for good! Get yourself a strong shopping bag and off we go! Save a baby bird today!