Plastic shopping bags are the one of the biggest enemies to our watersheds. 71 percent of the Earth is covered in water which all leads back to the ocean in one form or another. A person uses a plastic carrier bag on average for only 12 minutes. On average we only recycle one plastic bag in every 200 we use. Each year, an estimated 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags are consumed worldwide. That comes out to over one million per minute.