The La Porte County Solid Waste District collected a mountain of plastic bags at its recycling events held at Al’s Supermarkets over the past two weeks – 17,897, to be exact.
“It was only the third year we’ve held the event, but response from residents has been fantastic,” said Alicia Ebaugh, the District’s education and public outreach coordinator. “We collected more than five times the amount of bags we received last year, and we got to replace those bags with 400 reusable ones. This is a win-win for everyone. By promoting reuse, we’re hoping fewer plastic bags will become litter in the environment and waste will be reduced.”
The bag swap events were held to celebrate America Recycles Day, a nationally recognized day to promote recycling in the United States. It is officially celebrated on Nov. 15 each year.
Solid Waste District employees counted every single plastic bag collected, Ebaugh said, because it’s important for residents to know just how many of them are wasted each year. “Having nearly 18,000 bags sounds like a lot, but it's probably only 1/20th of one percent of all the plastic bags used in La Porte County each year,” she said.
Although difficult to determine exactly, it is estimated that 100 billion plastic bags are used in the United States each year, Ebaugh said. That figures out to about 313 per person, so a family of four might go through about 1,250 single-use plastic bags per year. The amount the District collected at these four events would have been used by about 57 residents over one year.
“That might be enough people to fill one apartment building,” Ebaugh joked. “I can’t even visualize 34 million of these plastic bags sitting around, which is probably what we’d have if every county resident brought their bags in for recycling.”
The bag swap was meant to encourage residents to bring reusable bags with them every time they shop, whether they are at the grocery store, a clothing store or elsewhere.
“No matter how good it is to recycle bags or anything else, it’s always better to think of ways to reuse them or not use them at all,” she said. “Obviously sometimes it’s more convenient to take the plastic bags at the store, and many of us already have ways to reuse plastic bags at home. But the sheer amount of plastic bags simply thrown out after one use in this country is astounding.”
Reusable bags are also a better option now that the District is no longer accepting plastic bags and films for recycling in its curbside program, Ebaugh said. Instead, those bags can be recycled at stores like Kroger, Wal-Mart and Meijer every day.
“The change was a matter of logistics,” she said. “This type of plastic is much harder to clean after it gets mixed in with the rest of the recyclables, so the companies who can recycle it stopped taking it from the sorting facility where all of our items go. They prefer the clean, dry bags and films be returned to a store for separate recycling. These bags are so light that they often blew out of the recycling trucks, anyway, which defeats the purpose and also places litter in fields, ditches and trees of La Porte County.”
The District would like to thank its generous event partners – all four Al’s Supermarkets in Michigan City and La Porte, along with Republic Services and Waste Management, who donated the reusable bags given to residents. The La Porte Wal-Mart provided recycling for all the plastic bags. “We couldn’t provide this service without their help,” Ebaugh said.