Plastic bags are one of the handiest household items used throughout the world. They are easy to produce. Plastic bags start as out as plastic pellets or resin. After the pellets are melted inside the heated chamber of a plastic extrusion machine, the plastic melt is pushed out as a thin roll of plastic film. The plastic film can be produced in varying colors by adding coloured pellets to the plastic melt.

After extrusion, the plastic film is rolled together and later unwound and fed into a printing machine using several rollers in sequence (each printing cyan, magenta, yellow, and black color). The film is finally cut and sealed after printing ready for use as shopping bags, coffee bags, pouches, etc.

The only problem with plastic bags is that they are non-biodegradable. In 2003, the United States Environmental Protection Agency estimated that between 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year. Of these number, less than 1% (50 to 500 million) of these plastic bags are recycled due to the higher costs involved in re-pelletizing plastic bags into reusable resin.

Plastic bags usually end up in the world’s oceans as marine litter. Dumped into lakes, rivers, drains and sewage pipes, they have found their way as far north as the island of Spitzbergen in the Arctic Circle and as far south as the Falkland Islands in South America.

Even oceangoing vessels are heavily involved in ocean littering. According to a report form the US National Academy of Sciences, these vessels dump more than 3.5 million liters of plastic annually.

Not only does plastic kill marine life, they also poison the oceans as the toxic chemicals in them leach out into the environment.

Achim Steiner, the executive director of the U.N. environmental program
, made an urgent appeal: "Single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere. There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere."

The response of manufacturers of plastic bags in the appeal to reduce the depletion of more natural resources was the recycling of plastic bags into resin so that more plastic bags could be made. Their goal was to increase the recycled content of plastic bags over the next few years by 40%. It is estimated that recycling plastic bags can reduce the bag litter by as much 136 million kilograms per year.

As governments work out ways to lessen the impact of plastic bags on the environment, each of us can do his or her part to help recycle plastic litter. For example, plastic coffee bags can be reused in a variety of ways:

1. Use them as lunch bags (instead of paper bags) for the kids.
2. Use them as wrapping paper
3. Cut them up into star and other shapes for use as handmade Christmas décor
4. Put candies in them and seal them up by cutting out neat paper flaps
5. Use them to refill ground coffee in a local coffee shop.
6. Try them as plant bags