Lots of plastic is being wasted because of excessive packaging. Plastic packaging creates around 80.1 million tons of plastic as of 2017 and is growing to this day. Plastic creates so much waste, it created a waste field of plastic in the ocean that is bigger than Atlanta. Plastic packaging waste is one of the main contributors to global warming and it needs to be stopped.
There are lots of pieces of evidence supporting this problem. The first piece of evidence is that US shoppers use approximately 365 plastic bags per year per person (~1 per day)! This is a crazy number and even crazier with the fact that shoppers in Denmark use approximately 4 plastic bags per year (~91 times less than we use)! So, we are definitely using too many plastic bags if shoppers in Denmark can get by with only 4 per year.
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Another piece of evidence is the fact that 8% of the world's oil is used to make plastic. So, if we got rid of excessive packaging besides the fact that it would reduce litter and reduce the effect on the ocean and environment, it would also reduce oil production (or put the oil somewhere where it is more needed, somewhere that could help our community). |