Austin’s Bag the Bags Coalition News
Why I Care:
Big Big News
This week at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, Wal-Mart announced a new program to reduce plastic shopping bag waste 33% per store by 2013.
The program will focus on reducing the amount of plastic bags distributed at Wal-Mart stores, encouraging customers to purchase and use reusable bags, and promoting more recycling options for bags.
This is INCREDIBLE!
If the effort is successful, the program could reduce energy consumption by approximately 678,000 barrels of oil annually and reduce CO2 emissions by 290,000 metric tons per year, the equivalent of removing 53,000 cars from the road annually.
The announcement is good news certainly and having the world’s largest retailer acknowledge the harmful effects of plastic shopping bags is a big step in the right direction. Within the next few weeks, the first round of data will come in from the Austin plastic bag voluntary reduction program. It will give us the opportunity to take stock, see what we’ve accomplished and then plan for the future.
Source: Bag The Bags Coalition
October 5th, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Check this out -
“A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.”