Why Should You Care About Your Plastic Use?Plastic has become a huge part of every persons life. 200 million plastic bags are used per minute. However, plastic has no place to go once your single-use is over. It takes 400 to 1,000 years for plastic to decompose. Because of this, plastics litter our planet. Whales have been found with up to 88 pounds of plastic in their stomach. Sea turtles think that plastic bags are food, and kill themselves trying to eat. Though you may be thinking that you yourself cannot make a change, you can join the bigger global movement to rid our world of single use plastics
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Mission StatementOur goal is to minimize our local town of Durango, Colorado's impact on the climate by removing as many plastic bags as we can from the community and turning them into reusable grocery bags.
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Plastic's carbon footprint.
Objects like your water bottle, or the trays you get at the food court took a lot of energy to make while emitting Co2 into the atmosphere and warming up the planet. You may think, wow, a cozy blanket wrapping around the Earth! That sounds nice! But the gases being released from the creation of plastic trap all of the heat that was already here and the energy from the Sun, melting polar ice caps and making Climate Change a bigger problem than it was before.
Sources
http://www.earth-policy.org/images/uploads/press_room/Plastic_Bags.pdf
https://www.unenvironment.org/news-and-stories/story/birth-ban-history-plastic-shopping-bag
https://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/waste_pollution_facts/plastic_bags_used_per_year
https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/sustainability/plastic_bag_facts.html
http://plastic-pollution.org/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills
https://www.earthday.org/fact-sheet-end-plastic-pollution/
https://www.yaleclimateconnections.org/2019/08/how-plastics-contribute-to-climate-change/
https://spark.greenpeace.org.au/efforts/ban-the-bag-1
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/world/asia/whale-plastics-philippines.html
https://faces2hearts.eu/get-inspired/2018-highlights/climate-change-guilty-bags/
climate.nasa.gov