Hold on, you may proudly say, I use those bags in my small kitchen bin and to scoop my puppy’s daily doo-doo. Good for you. By recycling everything (paper, glass, plastic, tin, food scraps) every family can greatly reduce their impact on landfill sites and on nature.
Practically speaking, we all need bin liners of some type, so please investigate the Tuffy range. Tuffy have been proudly South African since 1986 and are the first company to have fully recycled content in their refuse bags.
Their bin liners are varied and incredibly thin, making them more likely to disintegrate rapidly in landfill, yet still strong enough to withstand the reduced amount of waste one finally sends away with the trash truck each week.
When it comes to poop-scooping it has always fascinated me that dog owners use “everlasting” plastic bags. Naturally I understand this from a hygiene perspective but in terms of the eternal preservation of the faeces themselves, all I can say is that we will definitely make for fascinating studies in human behaviour in eons to come.
So what are the alternatives? How about using old newspapers or kitchen towel roll, both of which will keep your hands clean if handled correctly? Why not even be a community champion and initiate bio-bag options on a dispenser roll in your local park. Now that ought to impress the pooches…
Let’s get back to the plastic shopping bag, approximately 8-billion of which South Africans use every year. Not many shoppers consider refusing this bag when it’s offered and leave stores, multiple times a week, with handfuls of filled plastic bags.
This is the behaviour we have come to perpetuate, generally without thinking. Perhaps you are one of those who complains about the dreadful plastic bag pollution that causes harm to the planet, yet you persistently buy more plastic bags instead of using a reusable bag. Today is a good time to change your shopping habits by buying a couple of reusable bags and storing them in your car boot for shopping trips.
Most regular visitors to our Aquarium are aware of the Rethink the Bag campaign. For those who aren’t, the aim is to create awareness of how harmful plastic shopping bags are to the environment and to consistently work towards influencing a total ban on these bags nationwide.
Worth mentioning is that Aquarium staff agreed to an outright ban on bringing these bags into the workplace more than three years ago. Long-life, reusable bags are the way to go.
The Western Cape town of Greyton is working towards becoming the first town in South Africa to ban the bag by 3 July 2014. They chose the day to coincide with International Plastic Bag Free Day.
Many major retail stores in Hout Bay and the Western Cape are taking part in the Rethink the Bag/Two Oceans Aquarium initiative on 3 July by not offering or selling any plastic shopping bags on the day. Keep an eye out for colourful and well-priced reusable bags for purchase in Hout Bay in support of this initiative.
The popular Puppet Stories will be presenting a Keep the Beach Clean show in the mainstream amphitheatre at 10h30 and 1pm this Thursday, 3 July 2014.
“With profoundly dismal recycling and recovery rates, banning plastic bags not only protects the environment, it sparks a long overdue public dialogue surrounding the marine eco-disaster of plastic pollution as a whole and lays the groundwork for a paradigm shift in human consumptive behaviour” – Stiv Wilson, Director The 5 Gyres Institute.
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