Please recycle those plastic bags

I've come across an article today in The Independent about a woman who's campaigning against the plastic bag:

When wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found hundreds of albatross chicks dying on a remote Hawaiian atoll amid a sea of rubbish, she was appalled. Now she's leading a small Devon town's revolution against the plastic carrier bag.

Here's more of what the article says:

Mankind's appetite for the plastic bag is deeply daunting. It is estimated that one million are used every minute - their average working life just 12 minutes before they are discarded. Every year each person on the planet will consume 300 of them - nearly one each every day. In terms of their environmental cost, the figures are equally stark, says Ms Hosking. "Plastic stays in the environment for between 500 and 1,000 years. Every plastic item that was ever made is still in existence. Some of it starts to break down - maybe into tiny pieces but it is still there."
...
She recalls seeing dolphins cavorting in the water off Maui playing with a plastic bag as if it were an underwater football and later seeing dead dolphins washed up on the beaches - a bag covering their blow holes.

She also remembers the day she watched a heavily protected green turtle choke to death on a plastic bag in front of her.Or the humpback whales arriving in their Hawaii breeding grounds exhausted after dragging huge chains of plastic debris behind them for thousands of miles from their summer feeding territory in Alaska.

Then there were the Hawaiian monk seals - the only tropical seal in the world and one of the 100 rarest species on earth. Conservationists say it is down to its last decade or two despite surviving 15 million years since pre-historic times. Marine scientists identify the remaining population by the scars left on their bodies by plastic packing bands.

Years ago, I went on a whale watch off the coast of Cape Cod and at then end of the boat journey the guide told us that if we were to pick only one thing to do to help save the whales it would be to get our groceries paper rather than plastic bags because of the danger to whales from plastic rubbish in the sea. I've never forgotten that.

Please recycle plastic bags if you use them. Here in Tulsa, you can recycle plastic bags at any Albertson's store. And if you throw away plastic packing strips or beverage pack holders, please cut them into small pieces so that animals don't get tangled up in them.