Plastic bag revolt spreads across Britain

international | environment | other press Thursday June 21, 2007 17:35 by Terence

English town of Modbury became the first in Europe to ban them outright.

The Enlish town of Modbury has become the first town in Europe to ban plastic bags outright. This goes a lot further than the plastic bag levy here which did go a long way towards reducing the amount of plastic strewn across our landscape.

According to the report on Christian Science Monitor:


It was watching sea creatures choke on plastic bags in the Pacific Ocean that finally persuaded Rebecca Hosking that enough was enough.

The British filmmaker had already recoiled in disgust at deserted Hawaiian beaches piled up with four feet of rubbish, the jetsam of Western consumerism washed up by an ocean teeming with plastic. Now, filming off the coast, she looked on aghast as sea turtles eagerly mistook bobbing translucent shapes in the water for jellyfish.

"Sea turtles can't read Wal-mart or Tesco signs on plastic bags," fumes Ms. Hosking, who returned to Britain in March. "They will home in on it and feed on it. Dolphins mistake them for seaweed and quite often they'll eat them and it causes huge damage."


Plastic waste has become a huge problem in the Worlds ocean and causes the death of probably millions of sea creatures every year. It is a massive problem. Hopefully this ban is the beginning of the cultural shift that is needed to wipe out this scourge on the environment.

Some other quotes from the article are:

Wave of plastic-bag activism

Dumbstruck by what she'd seen off the Hawaiian coast during her year-long filmmaking trip, Hosking set up a local screening of her film and invited the town's 43 shopkeepers to come see where plastic bags end up.

All but seven of them showed up. At the end of the viewing, held in a local hall, Hosking called for a show of hands in support of a voluntary ban on plastic bags. Every single hand went up. The rest of the town's shopkeepers quickly followed suit. On May 1, Modbury won bragging rights as the first plastic-bag-free town in Europe.

Now, larger towns and even cities are calling up Hosking to ask how she did it. Supermarkets and other retailers are experimenting with plastic-bag-free days, reusable totes, or even buy-your-own bags to discourage usage.

Retailer Sainsbury introduced a limited-edition reusable cotton bag with the logo "I am not a plastic bag," emblazoned on it. Priced at $10, within an hour 20,000 of them sold out. Others stores are trying out paper bags and "green" checkout lines for environmentally friendly customers who bring their own bags.


Now if we could do the same for plastic bottles and bring back glass bottles and the deposit system then we could make significant improvements. While some will say plastic bottles are recycled, the recycling rate is very poor and more importantly they did not get recycled into plastic bottles ago, but lower grade uses of plastic. Glass bottles can be cleaned and reused and then at that point move down the chain and be remelted.

Original article can be found at: