Plastic Bags PollutionThe 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.
