Tag Archive for "plastic bags"
A new report tells us that the recent ban on plastic bags in China has actually saved a good deal of oil. The China Chain Store and Franchise Association has estimated that the ban has saved over 40 billion plastic bags and this is just in about a year. It can be calculated how much oil the 40 billion plastic bags saves and the experts claims that the ban have saved 1.6 million tonnes of oil.
The ban means that 0.025mm thick (or less) bags are not allowed to used anymore and supermarkets had to stop giving away free plastic bags.
Let us hope that other countries will follow China and start banning plastic bags too so we can save a lot of oil and in turn the environment.
If you have lots of plastic bags laying around you can always recycling them into yarn (plarn) which I wrote about earlier on this blog.
China is not known to have the best track record when it comes to environment issues, but this time they are doing something good. The Chinese government has announced that they will (or has?) ban thin plastic bags and that customers will have to pay for regular plastic bags. This is pretty big news since about 1 billion bags are being handed out every single day in China! Stores that do not follow this ban will be fined so hopefully everyone in China will do as the government tells them
It is estimated that China wastes 37 million barrels of crude oil on producing plastic bags each year. In this day and age of skyrocketing oil prices it is kinda stupid to use this resource on plastic bags.
Other nations such as Ireland, Bangladesh, Rwanda and Uganda has already banned plastic bags. I hope the rest of world will follow this soon. It will be cool to see some cotton or hemp bags (organic of course) at the grocery stores again.
