I truly believe in the enormous environmental impact if all of us
Refuse one Bag per Day
When we buy food, shop for a new dress, grab a pain killer at the drugstore, go to the market, we ALL have a tendency to have it wrapped.
I made a simple calculation for my own small densily populated country Belgium. Today's population is estimated at 11,098,069 inhabitants.
If each and all of us refuse 1 bag a day, we would save
4,015,000,000 ( more than 4 BILLION ) bags per year
That is huge ! That is horrendous.
And it does not cost us anything, it is FREE.
With an average weight per plastic bag of 32,5 g, this comes down to saving 130,000 ton of plastic per year. If you know then that the carbon footprint of plastic is about 6 kg of CO2 per kilogramm of plastic, Belgians alone would save 780,000 ton of CO2.
A truck in Belgium can load on average 24 tons of cargo. It does not take a Nobel prize winner to realize there will be 5,416 trucks less polluting our highways.
For a city like Buenos Aires with a population comparable to the one of Belgium, my guess is, that in spite of maybe different spending patterns, the same savings can be done.
Can you imagine breathing CO2 reduced air
in a place called Buenos Aires !
So may I ask to refuse at least 1 bag per day
so our kids can breath purer air
and fish can swim in clearer oceans
Some interesting facts around plastics:
The world-wide production of plastic is currently at 35 kilogramm per year per person. On average, it is increasing by 3% per year.
Most of the plastic is used for packaging (35%), followed by the construction sector and vehicle construction.
About 40% of the produced plastic is being disposed within 1 year (primarily packaging material).
The average lifetime of plastic is 12 years. The main reason is the relatively long lifetime in the construction sector.
Recycling of plastic saves on average about 2.5 kg CO2 per kg of plastic. Thus recycled plastic produces about 3.5 kg CO2 compared to 6 kg of CO2 for new plastic (production and incineration).