Five Friday Facts: Plastic Bags

The following come from Factory Direct Promos, which has the plastic bag ban map. Some of these numbers are actually hard to comprehend, like 1 million bags are used every minute worldwide.

• It is estimated that 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed each year worldwide – this works out to over 1 million bags per minute.

• A million sea birds and 100,000 animals such as whales, dolphins, turtles and seals die from plastic bags and other waste each year.

• Retail businesses spend about $4 billion each year on plastic bags.

• In the United States only 8 percent of the total plastic waste generated in 2010 was recycled.

• Americans throw away about 1 billion plastic bags a year, which is equivalent to dumping nearly 12 million barrels of oil.