Use 'bayong,' cloth bag

Plastic bags are made from polyethylene, which comes from petroleum, a nonrenewable resource.
They are ubiquitous. Between 500 billion and a trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide each year, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency.

However, less than 1 percent of the bags are recycled because it costs more to recycle a bag than to produce a new one. It costs $4,000 to process and recycle a ton of plastic bags, which can then be sold for $32.
If the economics don't work, recycling efforts don't work.

Cloth bag
We can save six plastic bags a week if we use a cloth bag. That's 24 plastic bags a month, 288 plastic bags a year and 22,176 plastic bags in an average lifetime. If just one out of every five people in our country did this we would save 1,330,560,000,000 plastic bags over our life time.
There's another reason why plastic bags should be banned. Plastic bags take between 20 and 1,000 years to break down in the environment. Even when they do break down they are not really gone. Plastic bags do not biodegrade rather, they photodegrade.

Top discards
So it doesn't come as a surprise that plastic bags are the top discards collected in Philippine waters.
A discards survey in Manila Bay found that plastic bags comprised 51.4 percent of the flotsam in 2006 and 27.7 percent in 2010, according to the EcoWaste Coalition, Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives and Greenpeace. Plastics in general, including plastic bags, made up 77 percent of the discards in 2006 and 76 percent in 2010.

In Laguna de Bay, plastic bags accounted for the biggest group of discards at 23 percent, according to a survey in September 2011.

LGUs support ban
Recognizing the threats posed by plastic bags to the environment, a growing number of municipalities and cities are now implementing ordinances aimed at reducing the use of the bags.
he league of 27 municipalities of Nueva Ecija also signed a resolution declaring a ban on the use of plastic bags.

Subic Bay Freeport is the latest addition to the list.
Muntinlupa City reaped the benefit of banning not only plastic bags but also polysterene, commonly known as Styrofoam (a brand name) when a tropical storm struck last year. With its waterways free from plastic bags and Styrofoam debris, the city was flood-free despite the heavy rains brought by Tropical Storm "Falcon."

The Metro Manila Development Authority, thus, strongly encourages local government units to adopt similar strong measures like what Muntinlupa has done.
For its part, the Laguna Lake Development Authority has issued Resolution No. 406 requiring local government units in the Laguna de Bay region to pass and implement an ordinance banning the use and distribution of thin-film, single-use, carry-out and nonbiodegradable plastic bags.

More countries are also banning the use of plastic bags:
Bangladesh was the first country to impose a nationwide ban on plastic bags that led to  jute exports increasing by up to 70 percent.

Ireland introduced a "plastax" of 15 cents (now 22 cents) on single-use carrier bags. Plastic-bag use dropped by 95 percent.
Other countries include China, India (Himachal Pradesh), Britain (Modbury), South Africa, Rwanda and the United States .