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The Problems with Plastic Bags

If you are still taking home your new purchases in single-use polyethelene plastic bags, it's time to reconsider your habit - and build a new one.

While the US Environmental Protection Agency argues that the common plastic shopping bag take less energy to manufacture, recycle and ship than the traditional paper bag, an environmental disaster is afoot. Those same plastic bags are made of a substance that is virtually indestructable. Although the bags may no longer serve a useful purpose because of rips and tears - and are thrown out or abandoned by the millions across the globe every year - the plastic itself persists.

While plastic bags are not the only cause of pollution, they are perhaps the most evident of our plastic garbage. Some even refer to them as urban tumbleweeds, after the familiar site of a plastic bag, caught by the wind and tumbling end over end down the street.

They travel great distances and many end up in our oceans in alarming quantities.

One of these regions is the Pacific Gyre. The Gyre is created by a combination of large-scale wind . and ocean currents that create an immense, swirling formation of air and ocean. The gyre effectively traps what lands within it - which is one reason that ancient sea mariners avoided them. They were difficult to navigate.

Plastic on the surface of the ocean "photodegrades", leaving plastic molecules suspended in the water to be fed on by microscopic sea life. Larger pieces are often eaten by sea birds and turtles (who mistake them for jellyfish), killing them through slow starvation or blockage of their digestive tracts.

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Thousands of sea birds and turtles are killed every year by mistakenly eating plastic bags.