10 Ridiculous Plastic Bag Statistics

Updated 3 January 2020 11:41 AM

It's just a plastic bag right?

Plastic bags are perhaps the shortest use item for the most problematic & longest life of anything ever invented. Ridiculous really. Some plastics are important and inevitable, but the sheer stupidity of many plastics we use for a few seconds every day is even more ridiculous when you consider that there are so many better alternatives.

Here are 10 of our favourite plastic bag waste and recycling facts:

  1. Eighty percent of ocean waste is plastic.
  2. Less than 1 percent of all plastic bags are recycled each year. Recycling one ton of plastic bags costs $4,000. The recycled product can be sold for $32  (Clean Air Council)
  3. Dependent upon who you believe, Australians use between 3.6 billion an 7 billion plastic bags every year. Globally the figure is more than 1 trillion.
  4. If every Australian used one less plastic bag a week, that would reduce use by 253 million bags.
  5. The plastic shopping bags used in Australia in one year could have driven a car for more than 630 million kilometres.
  6. Only 3 percent of all plastic shopping bags are recycled.
  7. Most biodegradable bags aren't biodegradable under the conditions they find themselves in, which is typically landfill.
  8. Plastic shopping bags can be returned to supermarkets like Coles and Woolworths for recycling, but can't be put in your recycle bin.
  9. If you put recycle materials inside a plastic bag, most recycle centres won't open the bag.
  10. The first plastic was made around 100 years ago - which means that pretty much every piece of plastic ever made still exists today.