Subway Uses 4,000,000+ Plastic Bags Every 24 Hours
On occasion I am out during the day and need a quick, and fairly healthy, lunch which inevitably leads to me standing in line at Subway. During a wait not so long 
ago I finally noticed just how many plastic bags are wasted by those customers who eat in the restaurant instead of taking it to go.
A bit of searching online led me to the Subway website where they proudly state that they sell enough sandwiches each year to circle the globe at least six times. Stated another way, they use enough plastic bags to circle the globe six times! While some of those customers certainly need a bag to cart their order home or to the office, I’m guessing that a fairly large percentage are carried to a nearby table and then dumped in the trash.
Subway sells 2,800 sandwiches and salads every minute in its U.S. locations (keep in mind, Subway operates in 85 countries and has more than 26,500 locations). Do that math and that works out to 168,000 per hour and 4,032,000 every 24 hours in the U.S. alone!
Subway is by no means the only restaurant to produce massive amounts of garbage, but they are one of the few that use plastic bags. Would it really be so difficult to provide in-store recycling, or better yet, just give the sandwich in the paper wrap and skip the bag altogether?
August 24th, 2007 at 4:51 am
That makes me sick to my stomach. I regularly walk out of stores without a bag if I just have a few items. I get the “is he shoplifting?” look, but I’m just going to throw the bag out anyway. Read an interesting Fast Company article on the environmental impact of the bottle water craze. I get the feeling that our civilization is completely unsustainable, and it wouldn’t even change if every single person drove a Prius.
Message In A Bottle
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/117/features-message-in-a-bottle.html
September 3rd, 2007 at 10:22 pm
Subway Uses 4,000,000+ Plastic Bags Every 24 Hours…
A crazy story about the amount of waste created by one restaurant chain in the U.S….
December 20th, 2007 at 3:22 am
[…] Subway Uses 4,000,000 Plastic Bags Every 24 Hours […]
May 7th, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[…] Every once in awhile I dig through the referring logs of our blog to see who is sending traffic our way. Today I noticed a bit of traffic coming from Facebook and thought that maybe someone had said something nice about us. Even better! A gentleman by the name of Zachary has started a Facebook group called “Tell Subway to Stop Filling the World with Plastic Bags”. The sole post for the group is the article I wrote last August about the 4 million plastic bags that Subway uses in the U.S. each day. […]