Handmade Cloth Grocery Bags

- Hundreds of thousands of sea turtles, whales and other marine mammals die every year from eating discarded plastic bags mistaken for food. Turtles think the bags are jellyfish, their primary food source. Once swallowed, plastic bags choke animals or block their intestines, leading to an agonizing death.

- Leatherback turtles sometimes mistake plastic bags for their favorite food of jellyfish, ingest the plastic bag and then suffocate; In the early 2000s a minke whale was found on a Scottish beach with 800kg of plastic bags in its stomach; A form of pollution which threatens Maui's dolphins is solid rubbish such as plastic shopping bags which can be mistaken for squid and ingested, killing the dolphins.

- On land, many cows, goats and other animals suffer a similar fate to marine life when they accidentally ingest plastic bags while foraging for food.

- In a landfill, plastic bags take up to 1,000 years to degrade. As litter, they break down into tiny bits, contaminating our soil, water, and the food web, and threatening the lives of marine and land animals which often mistake these little bits for food.

- Plastic bags put an unnecessary burden on the limited available landfill space and cause air pollution when incinerated. Billions of pounds of plastic bags, wraps, and sacks add also considerably to the cost of garbage collection, hauling and disposal.

- Recycling requires energy for the collection, processing, etc. and does not solve the problems.

A growing list of communities and countries are beginning to rethink their dependence on plastic bags. Already a complete or partial ban on the bags has been approved in Australia, South Africa, parts of India, China, Italy, Bangladesh and Taiwan.

Africa has seen an increasing problem with bags as Environmental News Network reports, "South Africa was once producing 7 billion bags a year, and Kenya not so long ago churned out about 4,000 tons of polythene bags a month."

In Bangladesh they banned the use of plastic bags in the year 2002, after they were considered to be major factors in blocking sewers and drains which caused the severe flooding that devastated the country in 1988 and 1998.

Taking a different route, in 2002, Ireland imposed a 15-cent tax on bags, which led to a rapid 90 percent reduction in use. Ireland uses the tax to help fund other environmental initiatives. Bags are also taxed in Sweden and Germany, and are set to be banned outright in Paris this year. The United States has been slow out of the gate in addressing the growing problem with plastic, but recently momentum has started for positive change.

In the United States, currently 30 rural Alaskan villages and towns have banned plastic bags. And the city of San Francisco became the first major municipality to ban the use of plastic bags, and nearby Oakland has followed suit, but not without controversy and litigation from industry groups.

California passed Assembly Bill 2449, which requires all supermarkets, pharmacies and other large retail stores to provide bins to help consumers recycle (info Tara Lohan, Alternet)

At present the best we can do is to reduce the use of plastic bags or reuse what we have at home to slowly finish them. Every consumer should think to use any sort of durable bag, cloth bag, back pack, conference totes, book totes thus we will use less of the plastic bags. We also need to teach our children to keep reusing their paper lunch bag or buy a durable lunch box to eliminate the use of the lunch bag.