Do not use plastic bags

Do you use plastic bags to store food in your refrigerator? Do you have plastic bin-liners in your home to collect and throw garbage? Have you ever asked for "one more plastic bag" in your local supermarket while shopping? If you run out of gift wrapper, do you conveniently carry the gift in a plastic bag and present it?

If you answered "yes" to the above questions, then you are plastic-dependent. In fact, most of the world is! Every year, around 500 billion (500,000,000,000) plastic bags are used worldwide. So many that over one million bags are being used every minute and they're damaging our environment. Here's how:

* Plastic bags often take up to 1000 years to degrade! When they are thrown away, they cause potentially eternal havoc clogging drains, creating backflow in sewage pipes, spreading disease through pond-like accumulation of sewage, breeding mosquitoes by storing stagnant water. Do you know that they are responsible for the Mumbai floods every year? It is such a big problem that Bangladesh has a national ban on its use, blaming plastic bags for the floods during monsoons that claim so many lives every year!

* The effect of the poly-bags is deadly in the waters too. Being light they are carried far and wide and eventually into the sea, causing immeasurable harm to marine life. The river Yamuna, for example, receives hundred of poly-bags everyday, with flowers in them as offering to God.

* The mountainous regions are not spared either. Plastic bags get buried in the ground, destroy the local eco-system, and retard the soil's carrying capacity. Due to their non-porous nature they seal off air, thus affecting plant life. This in turn reduces the vegetation and hence soil binding, and increases the risk of landslides.

* Poly-bags have harmful effects on animals. Jaipur reported a case of 40kg of plastic bags recovered from the stomach of a dead cow! All over the world, millions of birds, fish and other animals meet their death by mistaking plastic bags for food (or trying to eat the food we throw away in such bags).

* Plastic bags contain toxic dyes that can pass into foodstuffs, endangering human health.

* Burning plastic bags releases toxic gases into the air, creating climate change.

* STOP using plastic! Use recyclable paper bags, reusable cloth bags, jute bags, etc as alternatives.

Let us all collectively work to save our beautiful planet and make it a better place for our children !