How your plastic piles up: See your contribution to New Zealand's plastic bag problem
Friday, 24 November 2017
How many plastic bags do you use every week? Do you come away from the supermarket laden with plastic carriers, or are you a dedicated holder of a reusable tote?
What about the bag your Friday night takeaway came in, or what you carried that new shirt home in? Bags soon mount up - as the stash in the kitchen drawer, or under the sink, is testament to.
Use our Bags Not tool to find out how your plastic bag waste compares with other Kiwis, and how it adds up over time.
You'll see how your couple of bags a week becomes a lot of bags per year. What about over your lifetime? And what if everyone in New Zealand used the same amount of bags? Then it becomes a really big pile of waste.
**READ MORE:
* Where do plastic bags come from?
* Tell us if you want a ban, levy, or nothing**
But it's when we get to a global scale that the numbers start to get scary. Clearly, many countries in the world don't go supermarket shopping and use carrier bags in the same way that we do. But plenty of others use even more than us.
If the whole globe started copying your plastic habits, you might find that we'd soon be getting through enough bags to cover New Zealand, every year.
Given that most single-use bags are used for an average of 12 minutes, but could take 100 years to break down, that stash of plastic could be around on this planet for a really, really long time.
Research suggests Kiwis used an estimated total of 1.29 billion bags per year. That's more than six per week for every adult in New Zealand. How do you compare?