The next plastic bag you use WILL kill Ahmedabad...

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Plastic bags consumed this year:

Every week Ahmedabad throws away an estimated 40 lakh plastic bags. Multiply that by 52. The numbers are staggering. Ahmedabad throws away about 200 million (yes MILLION) plastic bags every year.

These plastic bags, once they leave our hands end up filling huge landfills, in the sewers, flying across the roads, in dumps and in the animals of our city.

Have you noticed the bloated stomachs of cows in Ahmedabad? No it doesn’t mean they’re getting food. They’re full of plastic.

I mean there are dogs on the road stuffing their insides with plastic. Since they can't digest the plastic bags, they get stuck in their intestines thereby totally clogging up their digestive systems which just means a slow and painful death for them. I have a little dog of my own and LOVE dogs and it just breaks my heart to see this happening in front of my very own eyes.

The National Geographic Institute estimates that over 100,000 marine animal deaths per year are directly related to ingestion of plastic bags.

Do you remember the floods that hit Gujarat last year? Do you know one reason why the floods were so severe? Because there were hundreds of plastic bags choking the drains of our cities.

But do you also realize one thing? These plastic bags end up in US, us humans.

These innocuous looking plastic bags photodegrade over time. No not biodegrade, photodegrade over time to form a powder. This powder gets mixed with the soil is sucked up by plants eventually ending up in our stomachs.

The toxins released by the plastic bags enter the sea through various sources and again eventually end up in the food cycle and in us leading to obesity, infertility, cancer and God knows what more. Plastic debris acts like a sponge for toxic chemicals, soaking up a million fold greater concentration of such deadly compounds as PCBs and DDE (a breakdown product of the notorious insecticide DDT).

The numbers are staggering. And we don’t even know we’re doing it. Yes, a lot of us realize that plastics are bad. But do we really know how bad they are? You know, lets just take a look at the broader statistics that make up what I like to call the plastic plague:

• The world uses more than 1.2 trillion plastic bags a year - an average of about 300 bags for every adult, or 1m bags used per minute.
  
• On average, we use each plastic bag for 12 minutes before discarding it. It then can last in the environment for decades.
  
• 47% of windborne litter escaping from landfills is plastic - much of it plastic bags.
  
• About 80% of all marine rubbish comes from off the land, and nearly 90% is plastic. In June 2006 the UN environment programme estimated that there were an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic debris floating on or near the surface of every square mile of ocean.
  
• Plastic bag litter is lethal in the marine environment, killing at least 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. After an animal is killed by plastic bags, its body decomposes and the plastic is released back into the environment, where it can kill again.
  
• A report, Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans, by Greenpeace, suggests that at least 267 marine species are known to have suffered from entanglement or ingestion of marine debris. An estimated 1 million seabirds choke or get tangled in plastic nets or other debris every year.
  

And yes, the next plastic bag you use WILL add to this menace.

But then, where is a way out? You can’t just not use plastic bags. You need to carry stuff, don’t you?

Hi, my name is Udit Sood. I’m part of an organization called EcoRight. We’re here to do our bit. After a lot of thought and effort we’ve managed to get a solution to reduce this menace. Click here to know more. Lets save the environment. Lets save our Ahmedabad.

Drop in a mail on info@ecorightbags.com or give me a call on +919879483858 or +919377732800 (my Dad, Sanjiv Sood is handling all this stuff while I'm out of town) for more queries.


(Plastic Bag Counter Courtesy www.reusablebags.com)