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Our holiday gift to the environment! Join thousands of shoppers in L.A. County in giving up disposable bags in favor of reusable totes for 24 hours.
A Day Without a Bag is an education and grassroots event coordinated by Heal the Bay that involves businesses and individuals throughout Los Angeles County. Held the third Thursday in December, we ask holiday shoppers and retailers to forgo single-use, plastic shopping bags in favor of reusable bags.
By raising consumer awareness about personal choices, A Day Without a Bag focuses on education, rather than advocacy. The event’s short-term goal is to educate Southland shoppers to adopt more sustainable practices during the holidays and coming year. The event’s long-term goal is to reduce the use of single-use plastic bags throughout California by empowering shoppers, and the community at large, to take simple and direct actions to eliminate unsightly debris and save taxpayer dollars.
The Plastic Bag Problem
More than 6 billion plastic bags are used in L.A. County each year. Disposable bags cost our fiscally strained cities up to 17 cents per bag for disposal (this does not even include the environmental costs). Plastic bags are made from fossil fuels. Americans use over 380 billion bags every year, throwing away this precious, non-renewable resource.
Even though plastic bags and food containers are designed to be “disposable,” and used for seconds or minutes, plastic lasts hundreds of years or longer in the environment without biodegrading. Much of the plastic that ever was…is still here.
Recycling cannot fix the problem: Plastic is often not economically efficient to recycle, and this toxic trash is mostly shipped to third world countries (for example, only 1-4% of plastic bags are recycled.)
Almost all of the 600 bags used in California per second are discarded. Once discarded, they either enter our landfills or our marine ecosystem.
In distinction to plastic bags, each single reusable bag has the potential to eliminate hundreds of plastic bags over its lifetime.
Plastic Is Bad for Health and Wildlife
Production of plastic requires petroleum and natural gas, both non-renewable resources that are environmentally destructive, create more greenhouse gases, and increase our dependency on foreign oil (estimates range upwards of 4,000 barrels of oil utilized per day to create plastic bags).
Additionally, all plastic products that enter our marine environment eventually break down into small fragments. The world’s largest ocean garbage dump in the North Pacific is currently estimated to be 5 million square miles, larger than the entire United States, where densities of bits of plastic trash have tripled during the last decade. In some parts of the North Pacific, there is six times as much plastic by mass as there is plankton.
Plastic additives to toxins have been found to have severe health impacts, even at low exposures. Recent studies indicate that many different plastic additives such as PCBs, DDT and nonylphenols can in turn can seep into marine animals that inadvertently ingest them, which endanger their health. Even in the ocean, plastic can chemically attract other harmful compounds at concentrations over a million times that in ambient sea water.
Styrofoam and plastic bags (which resemble jelly fish or sponges) are mistaken for food or prey by seabirds, marine mammals, fish, and sea turtles. In general, plastic harms hundreds of wildlife species, some of which are threatened or endangered species. Currently, 86% of all known species of sea turtles have had reported problems of entanglement or ingestion of marine debris.
Plastic Costs Us
Plastic litters our beaches, exacts a toll on our environment, and costs cities money to clean up. It is a threat to all ocean-dependent, tourism-oriented economies. Even the seemingly “free” bag cost is actually passed onto consumers. In 2004, the City of Los Angeles waste characterization study demonstrated that in only 30 storm drain catch basins, plastic bags were 25 percent by weight and 19 percent by volume.
In San Francisco alone, where a plastic bag ban ordinance has been adopted, City officials estimate that they spend $8.5 million annually to deal with plastic bag litter—that equates to roughly 17 cents for every bag distributed in the city. Additionally:
It costs the state $25 million annually to landfill discarded plastic bags.
Public agencies in California spend in excess of $303 annually in litter abatement.
Southern California cities have spent in excess of $1.7 billion in meeting Total Maximum Daily Loads for trashed in impaired waterways
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