Trends:
– 1 trillion bags consumed worldwide each year
– 100 billion of which is consumed in U.S. alone
– 2009 Guinness Book of World Records: Most ubiquitous consumer product
Energy Consumption:
– 12 million barrels of oil used annually in U.S. Save
Environmental Impacts:
– Marine Debris – approx. 346 species adversely affected
– High litterability has negative impacts on tourism
– Public health concerns due to soil and water contamination
Disposal:
– Life span of the average single-use plastic bag is 20 minutes
– Inadequate recycling infrastructure and economic incentive for recycled plastics
– Plastics never biodegrade and persist in the environment for many years never breaking down to organic material

• 27,000 trees are cut down each day so we can have Toilet Paper.
• Aluminum can be recycled continuously, as in forever. Recycling 1 aluminum can save enough energy to run our TVs for at least 3 hours. 80 trillion aluminum cans are used by humans every year.
• American companies alone use enough Paper to encircle the Earth 3x! (It’s a good thing that businesses are moving towards going paperless)
• We can save 75,000 trees if we recycled the paper used on the daily run of the New York Times alone.
• When you throw plastic bags and other plastic materials in the ocean, it kills as many as 1 million sea creatures annually.
• A glass bottle made in our time will take more than 4,000 years to decompose.
• Only 1% of our planet’s water supply can be used. 97% is ocean water and 2% is frozen solid in the Arctic, for now.
• Our planet gains inhabitants numbering to 77 million people a year.
• An estimated 50,000 species inhabiting our tropical forests become extinct annually. That’s an average of 137 species a day.
• Rainforests are cut down at a rate of 100 acres per minute.
• The world’s oldest trees are more than 4,600 years old.
• Landfills are composed of 35% packaging materials.