Making Changes

Change.org is a website for people to make changes. You can petition for anything. If you want to make a change go here and type in plastic bags into the search engine. Make a change where you live, where you're going to college, or just about anywhere! I even attached a specific petition below that is in need of signatures.

Petition on $.20 fee on plastic bags 

Week 1-2 Comparison

Week 2 Photos

Week 2 Bags 

Week 2 amount of water bottles 

Week 2

So after a week of using no plastic bags or disposable water bottles, I have learned a lot about myself, my family, and the environment. I realized that it is not that hard to make a little change like that in your household. After seeing how many plastic bags and water bottles my family used in just one week I couldn't even imagine what that would be like in a year. I realized that we can throw stuff away so easily because we don't have to deal with it once it leaves our house, but somebody does and it harms someone else. After doing this project and seeing how difficult it is to dispose of plastic bags, and how much damage plastic does to our surrounding environment, I am very happy I chose this topic to do my project on and that my family made this small change. I know that it doesn't seem like just you can make a difference, but by making such a tiny change in your house can truly make a huge difference. If everyone made this change, think about how many animals would be saved, how much space we could preserve in our landfill, and how many less chemicals will be near your family. Stop the trillion bags worldwide and become a plastic free household!

Plastic Bags

Instead of using a plastic grocery bag every time you go food shopping, why not use reusable bags? They're cheap & very easy to find. You can find them at the checkout of almost every grocery store, and even at some shopping stores. This website is one where you can get different types of bags for extremely cheap prices. CLICK HERE!!!!!!!!!!

Water Bottles

Life Factory Glass Bottle $26.99

Brita Jug $32.99

For your fridge... Bobble jug 19.99

Bobble $9.99

Polar Bottle Insulated Bottle $4.90

Klean Kanteen $19.95

Camelbak $14.00

Nalgene $9.00

Solutions

There are many different ways you can reduce your plastic waste! Many different water bottles and bags are available at an inexpensive price.

Week 1 Photos

1 week of plastic bags could stretch from one tree to another!

1 week of disposable water bottles 

Week 1

For the first week of my project I used disposable plastics and kept them just to get the full effect of how much we as humans really use. Over the week, I collected an immense number of plastic bags and plastic water bottles. Although it may seem like the easier way of drinking water and carrying groceries etc, I now have plastic bags that I don't know what to do with. I realized how many plastic bags my family throws out every week just because we didn't use reusable bags. Through this week, I learned that having all the plastic bags is a waste and I don't need them past bringing the stuff that I buy home.  Normally, I use reusable water bottles because they are easier to fill up and you then do not need to buy a new water bottle everywhere you go. Since this week I used only non reusable plastics, I learned that it is much harder to use the non reusable water bottles than reusable ones. And it is also much more expensive. I found myself buying a new water bottle two or three times a day instead of just being able to refill my reusable bottle. So why don't people use reusable ones? I think that people think it is easier to just be able to buy another water bottle from the vending machine than going and filling it up. But take my word for it, it is much cheaper and easier to refill a reusable one than have to go buy another one every other hour.
So this brings me into week #2. What am I going to do?
Week two is going to be all reusable all the time! Reusable bags & reusable water bottles.

Harm to Nature

The Harm to Nature 

Plastic not only harms animals & humans but it harms our natural settings. It harms our ecosystem. Around 4 percent of world oil production is used as a feed stock to make plastics, and a similar amount is consumed as energy in the process. This causes more pollution than humans already do to the air just to be able to have disposable plastic bags and bottles. Plastic buried deep in landfills can leach harmful chemicals that spread into groundwater. This affects the water people drink. Drinking contaminated water can cause many illnesses or having to filter more water can be very expensive. It also ruins the aesthetics of an area. No one wants to see trees lines with plastic bags or garbage's overflowing. 

Harm to Marine Life

Marine Life 

As plastics enter the ocean or other waterways, there is a chance that marine organisms will ingest them. These plastics can be laced with chemicals that will poison organisms, floating waste can be used as a transportation way for invasive species, & plastics can choke and otherwise harm animals. Since pictures are worth more than words...

Harm to Marine Life

The great pacific garbage patch, (Pacific Trash Vortex) located in central north pacific ocean is bigger than the size of texas.

Harm to Humans

Human Harm

Although it may seem weird that plastics can be detrimental to humans, they definitely can be! Plastics already have toxins in them that are dangerous, but when they end up in oceans they act like sponges and absorb other chemicals. When fish eat them, they eat all the chemicals which then stay in and build up in them. If they survive, and humans eat them, those chemicals are now in humans. Direct toxicity from plastics comes from lead, cadmium, and mercury.  Diethylhexyl phthalate (DEHP) contained in some plastics, is a toxic carcinogen. Other toxins in plastics are directly linked to cancers, birth defects, immune system problems, and childhood developmental issues.  BPA is used in many things including plastic bottles and food packaging materials. Over time the polymer chains of BPA break down, and can enter the human body in many ways from drinking contaminated water to eating a fish that is exposed to the broken down toxins. Specifically, BPA is a known chemical that interferes with human hormonal function.

Water Bottles

Water Bottle Pollution

Plastic bottles use a lot of fossil fuels and pollute the environment. In fact, Americans buy more bottled water than any other nation in the world, adding 29 billion water bottles a year to the problem. In order to make all these bottles, manufacturers use 17 million barrels of crude oil. That’s enough oil to keep a million cars going for twelve months. Imagine a water bottle filled a quarter of the way up with oil. That’s about how much oil was needed to produce the bottle. Unfortunately, for every six water bottles we use, only one makes it to the recycling bin. The rest are sent to landfills. Or, even worse, they end up as trash on the land and in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. Plastic bottles take many hundreds of years to disintegrate. People drink bottled water because they think it is cleaner than water from the tap, but that isn't true at all! Government makes sure that tap water is safe to drink.

Platic Bags

Plastic Bags Pollution


The first type of plastic that I will be focusing on is plastic bags. It was said that in California, 400 plastic bags are used per second. That is 24,000 per minute, 1,440,000 per hour, and a whopping 34,560,000 per day. Think about that number, & think about how many the country as a whole uses every day, every year. People use plastic bags for food shopping, when they go shopping, and for many other reasons.  What happens to these plastic bags? Mostly only plastics with high density polyethylene are recycled so that means the rest end up in landfills or littered in various areas of our ecosystem. That is a lot of plastic bags! You may ask why we don't just recycle these bags.. Well the cost to recycle them outweighs there value tremendously so most recycling plants will not take them. Plastic bags take anywhere from 15 to 1000 years to decompose.

The Big Problem

 The Big Picture

Plastic debris affects wildlife, human health, and the environment. The millions of tons of plastic bottles. bags, and garbage in the world's oceans are breaking down and leaching toxins posing a threat to marine life and humans. People are exposed to chemicals from plastic multiple times per day through the air, dust, water, food and use of consumer products. More than one-third of all plastic is disposable packaging like bottles and bags, many of which end up littering the environment.Floating waste, which can survive for thousands of years in water, serves as mini transportation devices for invasive species, disrupting habitats. This is just an overview of all the different types of problems. In each ecosystem, there is extensive damage that plastic does. Today Americans discard about 33.6 million tons of plastic each year, but only 6.5 percent of it is recycled and 7.7 percent is combusted in waste-to-energy facilities, which create electricity or heat from garbage.The rest ends up in landfills where it may take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and potentially leak pollutants into the soil and water. It’s estimated that there are also 100 millions tons of plastic debris floating around the ocean  threatening the health and safety of marine life.