Single Use Plastic – Not So Fantastic

With over 8 million tonnes of the stuff entering the oceans every year, it’s no secret that plastic certainly is not fantastic. However, some plastic items are worse than others.

Single-use plastic like drinking straws and plastic shopping bags are a particularly nasty form of plastic. These items have a shockingly short lifespan, normally used once and then discarded to landfill. Like other plastics, they never biodegrade and take hundreds of years to break down. Plastic straws and plastic bags have an average useful lifespan of twenty minutes and are ending up in our oceans by the thousands.