A culture has evolved in Australia where plastic bags are seen as free and freely available to shoppers. The time has come for all Australian to stop, re think and change the way we carry our shopping. Australian currently use about 5 Billion plastic shopping bags a year – that is about 13 million bags a day Plastic bags are in our hands for and average of fifteen minutes but remain in our environment for up to 1000 years. Around 80 million of these bags end up blowing around as litter, or worse still end up in our waterways harming our marine life. The World Wide Fund for Nature estimates 100,000 turtles, whales, seals and birds die an agonizing death each year through the ingestion of plastic bags, becoming entangled or suffocating in them.

We all know that these bags are very convenient and we also know people will find it difficult to change such a repetitive habit. Plastic bags are in our hands for and average of Fifteen minutes but remain in our environment for up to 1000 years.

Australians pay a big price for using plastic bags – from the devastation they cause to our unique natural environment, to the financial cost to the retail sector of supplying plastic bags to customers…the price we pay for using plastic bags really adds up.

• Australians use 13 million bags a day
• More than half of these bags are used by Supermarket retailers at the checkouts
• Almost half of these bags are given away by non-supermarket retailers such as newsagents, discount stores, pharmacies, fruit and vegetable shops, liquor stores and take away outlets.
• It only takes 4 grocery trips for an average Australian family to accumulate 60 plastic shopping bags.
• Australians throw away about 4,000 plastic bags a minute, with 230,000 plastic supermarket bags dumped in landfill every hour.
• Plastic was the most common source of rubbish on Clean Up Australia Day 2005, accounting for 32%. Of this plastic rubbish, plastic bags accounted for 7%.

Source: Clean up Australia