According to the UK’s DEFRA, the average plastic bag is used for just five minutes yet takes 500 years to decompose.

With billions of plastic bags thrown away each year many of which are used just the once before being sent to landfill – this is a staggering scary statistic. In fact, one survey showed that the average person uses eight plastic bags a week.

So is this something we should be worried about? Plastic bags take up large amounts of space in landfill sites. Plastic bags can also cause problems for the environment – not only are they unsightly when they end up as litter, caught in trees and streets, but they can also kill birds and small mammals if they become caught in them. Plastic bags that make their way into the ocean are sometimes eaten by marine mammals who mistake the bags for jellyfish, and this can kill the animal who eats them.

Plastic bags take a lot of energy to produce. The production and disposal of plastic bags by burning also releases greenhouse gases, something which people around the world are trying to reduce.

Many countries now charge for plastic carrier bags – a charge which acts as a deterrent from using too many and encourages recycling bags. Some countries don’t use low-quality plastic bags at all, and instead charge a small amount for good quality reusable bags. Some supermarkets are also experimenting with degradable plastic bags – whilst this is a step in the right direction, it is not the solution because they still take huge amounts of energy to produce and often still take a long time to decompose.

For those countries who still have extensive use of plastic bags, perhaps the main issue here is that of consumer education – many people don’t think about their use of plastic bags, nor see it as a problem. Many do not feel inclined to re-use their plastic bags for shopping, complaining that the quality of current supermarket bags is not of sufficient quality to allow them to do so without the bags ripping and tearing.

There are no agreements on what can be done to reduce the number of plastic bags being used, although education and small charges per bag appear to be the best way forward. However, most would agree that we definitely should be working towards reducing the number of plastic bags that are currently used each day.

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