Ban Single Use Plastic Bags in Dallas, Texas

Dear Dallas City Council Members,

BAN SINGLE USE PLASTIC BAGS IN DALLAS COUNTY

Please join other cities in Texas such as Austin, South Padres Island, Brownsville, and Stockton in banning single use plastic bags.   

 OVER 1 MILLION PLASTIC BAGS ARE USED EVERY MINUTE!!!  

Recycling is a joke.  It doesn't work.  Most bags end up in landfills or as pollution trash.  The bags break down into little pieces that go into our foods supply, water supply, blood supply, and into the environment killing countless fish, birds, and other creatures.  Dioxins are even showing up in breast milk supplies including PCB and BPA, highly toxic materials.  

The only way to stop this is to ban plastic single use bags.  Please help us to petition Dallas City Councel Members to join other cities such as Austin, TX, South Padre Island, TX, Brownsville, TX, Fort Stockton, TX,  LA County, CA and Portland, Oregon in banning these destructive bags.  

 Consequences of Convenience

We’re addicted to plastic, especially plastic bags. 
If you are like 95% of US shoppers, whenever you purchase anything, it ends up in a plastic bag.  In the grocery store, most of us put our vegetables and fruits as well as bulk items into single-use plastic produce bags, and all those bags end up in a single-use plastic check-out bag.

Shoppers worldwide are using 500 billion to one trillion single-use plastic bags per year. 
This translates to about a million bags every minute across the globe, or 150 bags a year for every person on earth.  And the number is rising.

“But plastic bags are so convenient!”
It depends on how far you are looking.  A plastic bag may be convenient for a minute or two when you carry something out of the store, but consider these costs:

• Plastic bags are made from a non-renewable resource: oil! 
  An estimated 3 million barrels of oil are required to produce the 19 billion plastic bags used annually in California.

• Greenhouse gas emissions
  Plastic manufacturing’s air pollution contributes greatly to global “weirding” (extreme weather of all sorts) we are experiencing is the result.

• Non-biodegradable
  Plastic is food for no one.  It never completely breaks down.

• Litter
  We see bags hanging on trees, along the roadside, slipping down the storm drain, and floating in the ocean.  Even when we do put them in the garbage, they don’t always make it to the landfill.  47% of landfill blow-away trash is plastic.

• Toxicity 
  Manufacturing plastic releases toxins in the air, as does recycling plastic.  The additives used in plastic are often toxic and can leach into our food.  The surface of plastic is chemically attractive to some of the worst toxins in our environment (e.g., PCBs and pesticide metabolites).

• Harm to Marine Life
  More than 100,000 marine mammals and turtles, one million seabirds, and countless fish worldwide are killed by plastic rubbish each year.

• Choking the ocean
  Beaches on every continent are littered with plastic scraps and particles.  In a recent surface trawl of the North Pacific Gyre, 46 pounds of plastic were found for every pound of zooplankton.

• We’re eating plastic 
  Fine particles of plastic are taken in by filter-feeders in the ocean.  These plastic-laden small creatures are then eaten by larger animals and plastics work their way up the food chain, all the way to our seafood menu.