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ENVIRONMENTAL FACTS

• Plastic bags are petroleum based, utilizing approximately 80 million gallons of crude oil worldwide.
• Each year, over 500 billion plastic bags are utilized worldwide. In the US, 100 billion bags are consumed. 1 billion of those are in New York City alone.
• Less than 1% of plastic bags are recycled. When disposed in a landfill, one plastic bag will take 1000 years to break down into small, toxic petrol-polymers.
• The United Nations estimates there are 300,000 pieces of surface plastic per square ocean mile.
• Hundreds of thousands of marine mammals, birds and wildlife die annually from being trapped in these discarded bags or consuming the bags thinking they are jellyfish or prey.
• In 1 single day in 2007, volunteers cleaned 33,000 miles of shoreline of the world’s beaches and collected 6 million pounds of waste, which included 587,827 plastic bags.
• If New York City was the only city in the US to use reusable bags, within 5 years we would save $130 million spent on crude oil.