Explain Why Plastic Bags Should Be Banned In Australia

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Why Plastic Bags Should be Banned Nationally
By Joseph Klotz
Freelance Journalist

Single use plastic shopping bags litter our environment, harm wildlife and require valuable resources to manufacture. According to data from Cleanup Australia, Australians use an estimated 5 billion plastic bags a year, that's just over 13 million new bags being used every day and approximately 170 plastic bags per person. If you tied all of them together, it would create a chain long enough to go around the world 25 times! What do you think happens to these bags? Very few are reused or recycled. One of our most useful modern-day conveniences has become a threat. Plastic bags are environmentally unfriendly in so many ways. They are causing serious issues like soil infertility, environmental pollution and energy consumption. A simple plastic shopping bag carries a very high cost to the environment which is the reason many cities and countries from around the world have already put plastic bag bans in place. In Australia there are growing calls for a national ban on single-use plastic bags, after major supermarkets announced they would phase out the environmental hazards by June 2018. Their decision will …show more content…

It is predicted that 30 – 50 million plastic bags end up as litter on our beaches, streets and parks. It costs the Australian government, businesses and community groups more than $4 million a year to clean up plastic bag litter. Currently only 3% of plastic bags used in Australia are recycled. That’s a lot going to landfill and littering our environment! Non-biodegradable, petroleum-based plastic bags truly do not degrade. What really occurs when a plastic bag ends up in the environment? Every bit of plastic ever made is still out there somewhere and it takes thousands of years to degrade down to smaller particles. It’s estimated that 3.76 billion bags end up in Australian landfill, taking about 1,000 years to

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