Choose cloth, not paper or plastic. Bring a cloth shopping bag with you when you shop.

 

Hundreds of millions of plastic bags are used every day. The U.S. population used 380 billion plastic bags in 2007. Nearly 2.5 billion of those were used in Los Angeles County. It is likely that over a trillion were used worldwide. These choke landfills, end up as littler, clog waterways, shut down drainage systems, provide breeding areas for mosquitoes, and billions of them end up floating in lakes and oceans, where they leach toxic chemicals into the water. Plastic bags cause the death of birds, fish, turtles, and other wildlife when bags choke or strangle them, or end up in their digestive tract and cause them to starve.

 

Paper bags are not the solution to avoiding the use of plastic bags. Hundreds of thousands of trees that are home to wildlife and that also clean the air, filter water, build soil, and put forth oxygen are cut down every year to produce paper bags, literally trashing forests: the lungs of Earth, and the starting base of many rivers.

 

Ireland was the first country to require stores to charge for plastic bags. Since the law went into effect in 2002, the use of plastic shopping bags has dropped by 90 percent.

 

Please avoid using paper and plastic bags by using non-synthetic, biodegradable cloth shopping bags. Biodegradable fabrics include cotton, hemp, bamboo, and sisal.

 

Get your local stores to stop using plastic and paper bags. Encourage laws that require a fee for paper and plastic bag use.