Plastic bags and marine life

Posted: 17.04.09  |  Created by: Do Something

Plastic bags have no place in our natural environment, as these facts attest:

• we only use plastic bags for minutes, but many of them can take hundreds of years to break down
• polyethylene plastic bags are made from non-renewable fossil fuels
• marine life can mistake them for jellyfish and other food sources. As a result, far too many turtles, whales and other marine animals wash up on beaches with their insides littered with plastic bags. Others like penguins can get caught up in them, with fatal results
  
• on land plastic bags trap birds, kill livestock and may be mistaken for food by animals
• in 2000, a Bryde’s whale died an agonising death after becoming stranded on a Cairns beach. The post-mortem found the whale’s stomach was tightly packed with six square metres of plastic. Much of it was plastic checkout bag, as the video shows
• if the whale had died at sea, the plastic bags would have been released back into the marine environment, where they could have carried on their destructive path for many years to come.