Few Facts About Environmental Related Issues About Recycling Bags

In the USA, people use almost 400 billion numbers of plastic bags in a year. The number generally increases when people go for shopping spree during weekends or on New year eve. During this time, the waste disposal generally increases by 25% than the normal level.

We must know few facts about them before we use these wholesale reusable wine bags next time –

Globally, people are using about 160,000 number of plastic bags almost every second. Thus, in a year, whole world will use trillion number of plastic bags that end up either in the landfills or inside the ocean.
Every year, to meet the consumption of such plastic bags, various manufacturers produce almost 5 trillion number of plastic bags every year.
Only Americans almost use 102 billion number of such bags each year.
Another interesting fact is that you may circle around the earth at least few numbers of times just by placing each of these bags side by side. In the USA, only 10% of the plastic bags may end up in the recycling plants.
One of the important issues with consumption, production and waste of these plastic bags is that they also use some of the important resources.
In certain parts of the world, oil is used for manufacturing such bags, while in the USA, natural gas and other chemicals are used. This results in waste of money and energy to produce something that is toxic for our environment.

Few other facts regarding recycling plastic bags

In order to address the problem about plastic bag use, the best approach will be recycling. We in fact, do recycle more plastic bags in general than what we did about a decade back. Following are few things that you must contemplate for restoring your faith:

Recycling of plastic bags is relatively a new industry. Though we know about recycling of plastic caps and lids and many other plastic items, but the recycling of plastic shopping bags started just few years ago.
Many countries have started banning use of plastic bags in stores and supermarkets.
We have necessary technology to help and now we are using robots for sorting plastic items at very high speed. There are scanners used that can recognize logos and images present on plastic pieces that help in sorting them better.
There are machines available to scrape off various labels from the bottles and lasers for identifying different kinds of plastics and also send each one in their specific recycling line.

Therefore, the world is taking essential steps for reducing various plastic pollution which threatens us.

Following are few facts and figures for putting things in more positive perspective:

During the year 2013, as per Plastics-Europe estimates, world could manage to recycle about 7.7 million tons plastics that includes above 3.5 million tons post-industrial and also post-consumer plastic waste that originated in the USA. Now, these numbers have increased exponentially.
Various data are coming from the American Chemistry Council that present estimation is that about 80% American households have access to various plastic recycling programs.

Nowadays, growing number of companies are entertaining the idea of compostable, biodegradable or even edible type of packaging materials for replacing plastic bags.