Plastic bag makers break out lawyers to continue wrecking the planet!

Plastic bags are starting to look really naff nowadays when you see people carrying them. However, those wacky American plastic bag manufacturers are fighting back.  Three of the largest plastic bag manufacturers are actually suing Chicobags - a maker of stylish reusable bags - for "irreparably harming" their business.  The same unholy Trinity also sued the city of Oakland, California over their single-use plastic bag reduction ordinance.

Are these people out of their minds? - answers on a postcard to your grandchildren, please. Here’s a couple of links

http://www.suedbyplastic.com/
http://www.bagmonster.com/

Here is a video of Chicobag’s bag monster attacking San Fransciscan citizens

On the other hand, look what can be done with A FEW bags as street artist Joshua Allen Harris creates street art that inflates trash bags using air blasts from subway ventilation shafts

Historic uses of subway ventilation blasts included this

 

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Plastic Fantastic starting to pall

Here’s another video with a catchy song, based upon Empire State of Mind by Jay Z/Alicia Keys.  I don’t particularly like most rap, but I’ll make an exception for this one.

Newsflash – Excerpt from CNN.com - The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a preliminary ordinance that bans plastic bags at supermarkets, pharmacies and convenience stores in the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County. In addition to banning plastic bags, the ordinance would require stores that provide recyclable paper bags to charge 10 cents per bag.

 

 

AshEl Eldridge - Rapper http://seasunz-and-jbless.bandcamp.com/
Jenni Perez - Singer

 

Spoof news report about the problems with plastic

 

Here’s a cute TV ad from Animal planet TV

 

And, just because I liked it, I’m republishing this Tim Minchin video that I first aired in a post in June 2010 – the existential life and not death of a plastic bag

 

 

 

 

Plastic bags - going, going - not quite gone yet

Plastic bag use has almost halved in the UK!

Nationwide (and even Jerseywide!) rejection of the bags, which take up to 1,000 years to decompose and clog drains and pollute oceans, followed a government challenge to retailers to voluntarily halve bag use by June 2009.

It began in 2007 with a few traders in the small town of Modbury in Devon refusing to give out plastic bags. But recently their small green revolution reached a national milestone: British shoppers have nearly halved the number of single-use bags they get through.

Figures from Wrap, the government's waste and resources programme, show that whereas 870m single-use plastic bags were handed out in the UK in May 2006, the figure for May 2009 was down to 450m – a 48% reduction.

That is quite a large shift in public behaviour. I always argue that, although the total amount of waste avoided by not using poly-bags is not that huge in relation to the mountains of other stuff that people use once and chuck away, initiatives like this have a much larger effect on the way people think and feel about the subject. Once people are used to not throwing away bags, and that they have to supply their own method of carrying purchases, I am sure that it plants a growing seed that has far greater effects on their perceptions of, and willingness to "do", sustainable behaviour than the raw tonnage of plastic waste avoided would seem to suggest.

In short, I think projects like this start a snowball, or avalanche effect, and make further environmentally friendly purchasing and behaviour decisions more likely to spread at an ever increasing speed.

click for link to an article with more about the fall in bag use