Imagine if you could drive your car using plastic bags. There would not be one plastic bag littering our environment. In fact you would find people walking the streets to pick them up. Who knows, people would probably even go and steal them. They would become such a highly wanted resource.
As fuel prices are driven up and our natural resources are decreasing, the use of oil in products are staring to be looked at. So the fact that in every plastic shopping bag found at your grocery store, there is enough oil to drive your car 11m, well that is a waste of oil. With Australian’s using 6.9 million plastic bags every year, that means you could drive a car 75,900 kms. That is the equivalent to driving around Australia 5 times.
That’s just plastic bags. Imagine if you took into account all plastic. For instance the plastic that your bread is wrapped in, the plastic your toilet paper is packaged in. It is a lot of oil that we have alternatives to, alternatives that would help our farmers. Vegetable oils and corn starches are the most popular alternatives and can create bags that are stronger than traditional plastic yet compost in the ground.
Using less oil has to be good for the environment but more importantly, leaves oil for uses that are more important. Wasting oil in the production of bags is crazy. Think of the movie Mad Max. Imagine if we were that desperate for oil in the future yet we are wasting oil in shopping bags now!