Reusing is reducing. In reusing, you’re lessening your environmental footprint and making the world a cleaner place to live, one bag at a time. Here are some startling facts about plastic bags, by the numbers.

500,000,000,000
Number of bags consumed each year worldwide.

84,000,000,000
Number of bags consumed each year in the USA alone.

60,000,000
Tons of polyethylene produced worldwide each year. Because, plastic bags are made of polyethylene, using more and more plastic shopping bags further contributes to needless energy consumption, dependence on foreign petroleum, and greenhouse gas emissions.

12,000,000
Gallons of oil used in the annual production of plastic bags.

350
Average number of plastic bags used per person yearly in the USA.

70
Number of plastic bags each person will use per year if each bag is reused 5 times.

11
Number of barrels of oil saved by reusing one ton of plastic bags (in energy equivalency)

1,000
Number of years it can take for a plastic bag to decompose—and even then they don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade, breaking down into smaller and smaller bits of toxins that wind up in soil or waterways

1,000,000,000
Number of seabirds and mammals that die each year by ingesting plastic bags.

6:1
Ratio of plastic fragments to zooplankton by weight in the central Pacific Ocean, as discovered by Captain Charles Moore in a 1999 study.