Plastic Bag Free Day Date in the current year: July 3, 2024

Every minute, people around the world use a million plastic bags, most of which are thrown away after approximately 25 minutes of use. Depending on the type of plastic, it takes between 100 and 500 years for a plastic bag to degrade. During this time, microplastic particles get into the food chain and pollute drinking water, leading to poisoning and other health problems. In addition, marine animals often mistake plastic bags for food such as jellyfish and ingest them, which results in a slow and painful death. Since plastic accounts for 80% of marine litter, you can see how dangerous plastic bags are.

Here are just a few of the dangers of plastic bags that the organizers of Plastic Bag Free Day highlight:

• They take at least 100 years to disintegrate and cause both direct and indirect harm to the environment and living organisms.
• Despite their low production cost, they end up being too expensive for humanity, given that they take so long to decompose and are very hard to clean from the environment.
• They contradict the principles of conscious consumption and respect for the environment.
• Thoughtless use of plastic bags by our generation will negatively affect the quality of life of future generations who will have to live on the planet that we’ve polluted.
• Microplastics get into the food chain, accumulating in living organisms and causing health problems.
• The main raw material for plastic bags is crude oil, which is an exhaustible resource.

Plastic Bag Free Day is part of the broader Break Free From Plastic and Zero Waste movements. It encourages people to stop using plastic bags and opt for more environmentally friendly options, such as paper bags and textile shopping bags, and to promote an environmentally friendly lifestyle.

Unfortunately, in the modern world it is virtually impossible to not use plastic at all, but this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to minimize its use. For example, instead of buying coffee to go in disposable cups with plastic lids, you can ask a barista to pour coffee in your own mug or tumbler (in fact, some coffee shops will even reward you with a discount if you bring your own tumbler). Or when choosing skin and hair care products, you can opt for cosmetics in recyclable and/or reusable containers (and then, of course, sort your waste to make sure that recyclable packaging does indeed get recycled).

The environmental situation on our planet depends on the efforts of all people who inhabit it, and giving up single-use plastic bags can be your personal contribution to reducing pollution and protecting the environment. It may seem insignificant to you, but in this case, any effort matters because it does help to make this world a better place for us and future generations.