7 REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD STOP USING PLASTIC BAGS & MOVE TO PAPER BAGS MADE FROM RECYCLED PAPER (It would be even better if you can carry your own reusable shopping bag) 1 DEPLETION OF NATURAL RESOURCES Generally consisting of polyethylene, a synthetic substance produced from natural gas and petroleum, plastic bags lead to the depletion of these non-renewable natural resources. It takes 12 million barrels of oil to produce the amount of plastic bags the US uses per year. You can imagine what it takes to produce all the plastic bags used across the world! Whereas paper bags made from recycled paper, help in reducing the burden on natural resources and would also put to better use the waste paper produced from multiple other industries. 2 ENVIRONMENTAL HAZARDS Unlike paper bags which are bio-degradable, most plastic bags do not break down or disintegrate easily. A plastic bag can take up to 1,000 years to decompose on land and 450 years in water, while a paper bag decomposes in 3-6 weeks time. 3 LESS THAN 1% OF PLASTIC BAGS ARE RECYCLED A vast majority of the plastic bags are not recycled, as it's cheaper to produce a new bag than recycle a used plastic bag. An average person uses about 350 to 400 plastic bags per year. The United States alone uses approximately 100 billion new plastic bags each year. According to the Wall Street Journal, only 1% of plastic bags are recycled worldwide. You can imagine where all this used plastic goes!!!TheY generally wind up sitting in landfills or tossed aside only to blow through the air or accumulate in water bodies. In South Africa, plastic bags have been dubbed ‘national flowers’, because so many can be seen flapping from fences and caught in bushes. 4 DANGER TO OUR ANIMAL AND MARINE LIFE Countless plastic bags end up in oceans and harm our marine life. Many marine animals and birds mistakenly ingest plastic bags or get entangled and choke in bags floating around. Environmentalists pointed out that turtles often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and swallow them. It is estimated 100,000 marine animals die each year because of plastic litter ending up in the North Pacific. Terrestrial animals too die from eating plastic. The plastic stays in their digestive system for a longer time, due to which they stop eating food and die of starvation.