BYOB

BYOB = Bring Your Own Bag. The statistics on grocery bags are truly mind-boggling:

• To make all the bags we use each year, it takes 14 million trees for paper and 12 million barrels of oil for plastic. The production of paper bags creates 70 percent more air pollution than plastic, but plastic bags create four times the solid waste — enough to fill the Empire State Building two and a half times.
• Plastic, because it's cheaper to produce, is the overwhelming choice of grocery stores across the nation — the average family of four uses almost 1,500 of these a year.
• It can take up to 1,000 years for a high-density polyethylene plastic bag to break down in the environment.
• The Center for Marine Conservation based in Washington D.C. recently completed a five year study into ocean debris. Their National Marine Debris Monitoring Program recorded that plastic bags accounted for over 10 percent of the debris washed up on the U.S. coastline.
• The Chinese use up to 3 billion plastic shopping bags a day.

If you like, you can read more here, here, here, and here. We should all try to BYOB.