Green Info

Green and Environmental Awareness Information 
Following are articles and statements that have been written by various people to help bring awareness to how we can cut down or help eliminate waste.
We welcome any information you find and wish to include here

SHOULD PLASTIC SHOPPING BAGS BE BANNED?
It often amazes us how "little" things can make such a huge difference in the world. A case in point is the lowly shopping bag. Not something most us pay much attention to - we do our shopping, the clerk places our garments or hardware or food items into a bag, which is convenient with its built-in handle, we go home and we're done.
The problem is that most of these shopping bags are made of plastic. We've learned that it can take 1000 years for such plastic to degrade in landfills and that the bags are loaded with toxic chemicals, many of them carcinogens.
And people worldwide use and throw away BILLIONS of these things every week. It's an environmental nightmare so huge that many countries are now beginning to BAN the plastic shopping bags.
Here's an excerpt from an article in the Online Journal: First introduced in U.S. grocery stores in 1977, over 380 billion plastic shopping bags are used in the U.S. annually, according to the EPA. By 1996 four out of five grocery bags were plastic. Only a fraction of the plastic bags are recycled (0.6 percent), but about 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away by Americans. It takes a 1,000 years for plastic bags to degrade. It is estimated that 500 trillion to 1 trillion plastic bags are used globally, or one million bags per minute.
Almost 80 percent of plastic bag use is by North American and Western Europe. Asian countries produce a quarter of the plastic bags used in Western countries. Plastic bags contain chemical additives which can be harmful to human health and the environment. Among the chemicals contained in plastic bags are lead, cadmium, mercury, and the carcinogen diethylhexyl phthalate.
Producing plastic bags requires petroleum and sometimes natural gas.
The environmental organization, Californians Against Waste says that if the state of California alone cut out half of the plastic bag use over 2,000 barrels of oil would be saved, and 73,000 tons of garbage would be eliminated from landfills. According to the Worldwatch Institute, it takes 430,000 gallons of oil to produce 100 million plastic bags.
The World Watch Institute estimates that plastic bags cost U.S. retailers $4 billion annually. Retailers in turn pass the cost of the "free" plastic bags on to consumers in the form of higher product prices. WSJ Target, the second largest retailer in the U.S., purchases 1.8 billion bags per year.
Plastic bags are toxic to animals. An estimated 100,000 birds, marine mammals, whales, and sea turtles die from eating plastic bags every year. The animals either choke on the bags or suffer from intestinal blockages.
We hope our readers will do their part and ask retailers to replace their plastic bags with safer, biodegradable paper products. Better yet - save a tree! - take a cloth shopping bag or a basket with you when you go shopping.
Gina-Marie Cheeseman, Online Journal
http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2127.shtml