Australian Town Bans Plastic Bags
by TreeHugger on 06. 2.05
The blog run by Rajiv Badlani has a very specific focus: plastic bags. He advocates the elimation of plastic bags, and covers news stories related to this issue. One of the stories is about a town in Australia, Fitzroy Falls, which has banned plastic bags completely.
Deputy Mayor Nick Campbell-Jones said the declaration of Fitzroy Falls as a plastic bag-free town was an example for the rest of the shire to follow. "This is the first locally-branded, re-useable shopping bag in the area and it goes some way towards the creation of a sustainable community," he said.
Local students were encouraged to come up with a design for the re-useable bags which would express an environmentally responsible message and also promote the Fitzroy Falls region.
Badlani also has a store where they sell cloth bags, as a substitute for the non-biodegradable kind.
:: Badlani Blog
[by Justin Thomas]
I’ve long admired treehugger and am so happy that you’ve carried this story.
I’d like to invite you to see this development http://www.badlani.com/recycle.
I think this project can save millions of plastic bags from being junked. So instead of choking landfill or being eaten by innocent animals and marine life, they can become a resource which can help thousand of unemployed people earn a decent living wage.
Input from savvy marketing folks would be very useful in finding practical ways to finance and bring these products to market.
Imagine. City councils, instead of throwing away discarded plastic bags, send them to use and we convert them into very strong and hardy bags which they repurchase and give to their citizens so that they don’t have to use throw-away plastic bags again.
I’ve worked out the economics also. Shipping a 20 foot container of used plastic bags to us, having them converted into 30,000 reusable rewoven totes and shipping them back to the city council would cost less than $ 50,000. That’s less than $ 2 for a very attractive, uniquely hand crafted tote bag that is strong enough to be reused thousands of times.
I’d be very grateful for all the input/help anyone cares to offer.
Thanks, Rajiv
Several developing nation's have struggled to get plastic bag bans in place, not as a nice-to-have thing but as an absolute necessity. Bangladesh comes to mind as a prominent one in this category. Motive is flood prevention. Plastic bags end up all over the city during high water, and eventually end up plugging the sewers completely, prolonging human exposure to disease organisms, property damage, and misery. Such places have old narrow sewers and no easy way to clean them out. Once the necessity emerged, all kinds of other reasons to ban them surface. Its a classic example of where a "normal" western practice has a very poor fit elsewhere.
Another plastic bag free town in Australia is Coles bay, which is near the famous Wineglass Bay.