The polluter needs to pay

The Australians are leading the world in a voluntary switch away from plastic bags, but the results are clearly not enough. According to figures from this year's Clean Up Australia campaign, retail sectors other than supermarkets have only reduced their plastic bag use by between 10 and 15 per cent over the past couple of years, and the number of plastic bags in the litter stream is rising rather than falling. Figures showed that while major supermarkets had achieved a near 27 per cent reduction in the number of plastic bags issued in the past year, other stores had been slow to follow. IBISWorld general manager Jason Baker said the problem was that in many cases the significant costs involved outweighed the benefits for the companies, despite what might be best for the environment as a whole. "Until companies, and therefore consumers, are forced to pay the 'full cost' of producing polluting energy or other products - including paying for the cleaning up and avoidance of air and water pollution, or recycling and disposal services - they won't be encouraged to develop 'clean' alternatives, such as wind power or effluent-free farms," Mr Baker said. In contrast consumption of plastic bags in Ireland dropped 90% within a year of imposing a 12 cent tax on plastic bags. The problem is very serious and taxation appears to be the most productive way to go.

India: Great laws, poor enforcement

Our laws are some of the most progressive in the world, but enforcement is zilch. We have strict laws against production, storage, use, sale and distribution of polythene bags. Himachal Pradesh, a state that earns much of its revenues because of its scenic beauty, was the first to implement it. In theory.In theory you can be fined upto a lakh of Rupees (US$ 2000) or be sent to jail for upto 7 years. In practice, no one has ever paid that fine leave alone spend time in the cooler. Most Indian citizens are completely unaware of the law and you see plastic bags flying around everywhere. The Indian cow, considered sacred and an object of worship, is one of the worst victims. 95 per cent of urban India’s stray cattle are suffering from various ailments due to hazardous materials inside their abdomen. 90 per cent are plastic bags. We ship reusable cotton bags every day of the week to the whole world from our website http://www.badlani.com/bags but we have no buyers in India.

Kids have bags of great ideas on how to send plastic packing

A class of 11- and 12-year-olds in Australia is leading a push to make the Royal National Park towns free of plastic bags, the first time a school has instigated such a ban. The Bundeena Public School year 6 campaign - "No plastic packing for Port Hacking" - started with an environmental education project. The snorkelling students were disgusted at the number of plastic bags they found floating in the waterway. The 28 students followed this with a litter survey, letterboxed homes and yesterday called a public meeting to build support for a possible phase-out of bags by September 1. The students are challenging other schools in the Sutherland Shire to follow suit. Nationally, about eight towns and suburbs have ditched plastic bags altogether and many others are planning to do so. Charlotte Bawden, 12, said: "It's the whale season right now and some whales have been found with plastic bags in their stomachs. It's hurting the animals. The turtles think the plastic bags are jellyfish and they eat them." Bundeena and nearby Maianbar are surrounded by national park, Port Hacking and the Pacific Ocean. Hayden McLaggan, 11, said the students were keen whale watchers - they saw five humpbacks yesterday morning - and wanted to protect the mammals from man-made threats such as plastic bags. Planet Ark project manager Doug McLean said: "This is the first town where the children have led the way." The National Parks and Wildlife Service has just banned plastic bags and brought in $200 fines at a rock-fishing site at Wattamolla in the national park. Bundeena and Maianbar, with a dozen shops and a combined population of 3000, are similar in size to the Tasmanian tourist town of Coles Bay, which was the first town to ban plastic bags. Some Bundeena cafes have already stopped supplying plastic bags. The owner of The Fish Exchange, Bruni Ullrich, sells calico bags for $1.10. "People love it after it sinks in," she said. Warren Mason, a partner in the largest retailer, IGA Bundeena, said it was a "wonderful idea in theory" but would require a re-education program for consumers to change old habits. "There are people who buy a two-litre bottle of milk, which has a handle, and they still want it put in a plastic bag," he said. It’s a sad thing that most smaller Australian stores don’t know how affordable reusable cloth bags can be. I hope some of them check out our prices at http://www.badlani.com/bags

Talk to kids. They have the magic!

That’s how I got into the business of reusable cloth bags. My daughter Kaajal came home from school one day and banished them from our home. Little girls know they have that magic. They can make wonders happen. They can banish things. And it works. This not-so-little girl-now helps me build and maintain this website and market reusable bags all over the world. She still has the passion and the conviction! To effectively rid your community of this ghastly substance, engage the kids in your community. If they decide that plastic is harmful, they will have a bigger influence on their parents than any amount of sloganeering and advertising can do. Would it be difficult to convince kids of this? No. Kids are more open-minded than grown ups are. Treat them with respect, give them the facts, and watch them achieve what governments and activists have not been able to achieve. Read the stories on this weblog. There are enough facts and anecdotes to build a lesson plan from. If this isn’t enough, write to me and I will either find you what’s missing or do whatever you need to deliver the message. Actually, encourage the kids in your class to read the blog themselves to extract what they consider relevant to their lives. Then, encourage them to start their own weblog where they tell stories of how their efforts are working out in your community. Tell your local media about the blog the kids are writing. I’m sure they will find it interesting. You’ll be amazed at what this can achieve.

Aberdeen considers reusable bags

Reusable cotton shopping bags are to be distributed free to shoppers on a trial basis to encourage people to reduce the number of plastic bags they use, under the the 'Fantastic it's not plastic!' initiative. Cotton shopping bags will be handed out at the shopping precinct on North Deeside Road during the promotion and local children at Culter school are also being encouraged to participate in the initiative. Amy Gray, Aberdeen City Council's Business Waste Minimisation Officer says, "Aberdeen City Council is encouraging residents to become more waste aware. Refusing plastic bags at checkouts is a simple step anyone can take to reduce the amount of waste they produce. Aberdeen City Council is also lobbying for the introduction of a tax on plastic bags in line with other forms of packaging." The UK now produces and uses 20 times more plastic than it did 50 years ago. Around 10 billion plastic bags are handed out by supermarkets and other retailers in the UK every year. Scots alone take more than 18.5 million plastic bags home from shopping trips each week, according to research by the UK's largest home improvement retailer B&Q. Every year Scotland uses approximately 1 billion plastic bags, this equates to 200 plastic bags for every man, woman and child in Scotland. If national averages are applied to Aberdeen then local residents are sending some 1000 tonnes of plastic bags to landfill each year. The average household is estimated to have 40 plastic bags stuffed in cupboards or drawers. Ireland introduced a levy on plastic bags in March 2002 under the Waste Management Act 1996, reducing usage by 90%. Plastic bags are a major cause of unsightly litter and they also harm wildlife. The amount of petroleum used to make one plastic bag would drive a car about 115 metres. Plastic bags that end up at sea are easily swallowed by marine life that mistake them for food. An estimated 100,000 whales, seals, turtles and other marine life die every year after swallowing plastic bags. In many council areas, plastic bags are the single main contaminant of kerbside recycling. In a report by Audit Scotland it is envisaged that waste is estimated to grow by 7% per annum, compared to a 3% predicted within the National Waste Strategy. The UK's appetite for free plastic bags shows no sign of diminishing despite many voluntary schemes such as bags for life, boxes or recycling of plastic bags. That’s the bad news. The good news is that awareness of the problem is increasing by leaps and bounds and is opening up the market for ecologically responsible products. An aggressive campaign positioning reusable bag users as being trendier and more glamorous and plastic bags users as being Neanderthals can achieve faster change. There’s a huge branding opportunity inherent in this. Patagonia and Body Shop are two very successful brands that have positioned themselves as being the smarter choice for their ecological concerns are a case in point. If you’d like to give your brand that kind of panache, choose from the attractive and economical options at http://www.badlani.com/bags Your logo on one of our reusable bags will position you as a responsible, forward thinking brand.

Plastic bag junk causes Mumbai city to lose billions of dollars

Yesterday Mumbai city was inundated by floods. The megacity, India’s business hub was paralyzed. The cost: Billions of dollars and a miserable day for residents who couldn’t make it to hospitals, schools and places of work. Most flights were either cancelled or diverted to Ahmedabad, and trains were cancelled or ran hours late. Mumbai has an intense monsoon. You can expect incessant downpours at least 4 times every year. The downpours aren’t new. They’ve been coming to India’s west coast for hundreds of years. But the intensity of flooding is new and getting worse every year. One of the major culprits is the increasing number of plastic bags that are choking drainage systems. India actually has laws banning the use of such plastic bags, but like most laws in India, they exist only on the books. No one knows about them, no one follows them, and no one appears to care. Ironically, India is a major exporter of reusable cloth bags. We ship reusable cloth bags http://www.badlani.com/bags every day of the week to other countries as they take effective steps to reduce plastic bag usage, but we don’t have any customers in India. This weblog is being acknowledged by readers around the world as a good source of information on the problems caused by plastic bags and the solutions communities have found, but again, hardly anyone in India reads it. Help! All concerned, thinking people, please help get our people and governments more sensitive to this problem. Talk to me, we'll try and figure out ways to do this together.

There’s hope for Ahmedabad yet!

This morning a nice young lady came by to discuss what she’d read on my blogs, to talk about how she and the organisation she works with – The Center for Environment Education – could get Ahmedabad conscious of the harm plastic bags are doing. I was thrilled. I’d given up on my own home town (shame on me!) and she reminded me that there’s no need to. That thinking and concerned folks do exist right here. I blame myself for not having thought of the people and resources that Ahmedabad has. The CEE in itself represents an immediate and potent force for change. Thank you, Vinutha, for stopping by. I enjoyed discussing the issue with her and I’m sure we can put some of the fun stuff we discussed into action soon. She’s asked me to put together an article on how ecological action can become relevant to businesses here and I’m going to have a blog up on that in a couple of days. Watch, as they say, this space!

The rise and fall of a brand

What do you need to create a successful brand? A huge advertising budget? It helps, of course, to have oodles of money to back up your story, but I don’t think it’s the key ingredient at all. If you’ve got enough passion, advertising budgets don’t matter. If you’re in love with your consumer and your product, a kind of magic happens that allows you to achieve big things with small bucks. If this sounds like wishful thinking, here’s my own story. In 1980 I launched a brand of jeans called Flying Machine literally on a shoestring budget. Its initial launch was done by kids who fell in love with the jeans and sold them to one another. They created such a rush on them that we couldn’t keep up with the demand! Then, to enter the Mumbai market, I released one ad in the Times of India (yes, just one) and used one major billboard (which I negotiated at a bargain rate over a drink with the owner one evening because it was the monsoon season). O&M made such a phenomenal ad for me that it was talked about for years after that. The credit goes to Ranjan Kapur and Elsie Nanji. It had a sassy headline “Who needs phoren?”

Bags or decks, natural products are best

The San Francisco Chronicle had a story today comparing wooden decks with composite decks made from recycled plastic waste. Bottom line, they say, go with wood, because composites also have a limited life span and are eventually not biodegradable. So finally they will contribute to the environmental burden our planet has to bear. But the fact that companies like Trex, TimberTech, Louisiana Pacific, Epoch and CorrectDeck are finding uses for plastic waste is wonderful. We’re also doing what we can as you can see at http://www.badlani.com/recycle If you, like many thinking people nowadays, are concerned about the environmental impact of your actions, please stick to using cotton bags. We offer polypropylene and polyester options also, as they are reusable, not used-once-and-thrown-away like plastic bags, but our cotton and jute bags are best, because they will go, as nature intended, from dust-to-dust. See the options at http://www.badlani.com/bags

The world is going crazy, but there’s hope…

Doug Gordan wrote about how he bought some gum and the store clerk put his tiny purchase into a paper bag and then put the paper bag into a plastic bag. As he left the store, he took the pack out of the bag and threw the bag out in a corner trash can, giving the bag a total out-of-store lifespan of about two minutes. Considering, he says, that so many New Yorkers are rarely without messenger bags, backpacks, or Louis Vuitton knock-offs, most have little use for plastic bags for the few items they might purchase during our daily routines. If you want to rock the world of just about any convenience store employee, tell them that you don't need a bag to hold your purchase. Doug often pre-emptively does this. In return, he says, he’s greeted with looks that most people reserve for the insane and/or Tom Cruise. Its become a habit, over-packaging everything. It’s a habit that is costing the world dearly. Plastic bags don’t biodegrade and will stick around and blight our world for centuries to come. And as they fly around they will be eaten by innocent animals and marine life who will die painful deaths because their digestive systems get choked. Reusable bags are the answer. Preferably cotton or jute bags. Completely biodegradable and far more stylish and amazingly affordable (see how affordable at http://www.badlani.com/bags ) What’s fascinating about Doug’s article is the number of comments its generated. I’m going to write a blog about those comments soon. The really good news is that they all support a pastic bag tax.

This isn’t my opinion, look at the results

Helen Logan reports in the Evening Gazette that Ireland used 1.2 billion plastic bags before 2002, when a 15 cent tax was imposed on their usage. Did it hurt business? Was the Irish government overthrown by distraught shoppers? Not really. What actually happened was that plastic bag usage fell by more than a billion bags within 5 months, and earned £2.25m for the Dublin exchequer to be spent on environmental protection projects. “Many of us pick up and fill loads of plastic carriers when doing the weekly supermarket shop, without a second thought” says Helen, “imposing such a tax seems an easy way of cutting down on this type of consumption. People can either bring their own bags or at least be encouraged to re-use the plastic ones if they have had to pay for them”. Common sense isn’t it? The harm that these innocuous looking little plastic bags do cannot easily be visualized by everyone. If a 15 cent tax can bring the issue home, I’m all for it!

Plastax is a brilliant idea says Shane from Ireland

Shane Doyle from Ireland wrote in about my blog on Ireland’s plastic bags. Here’s what he said: "I'm from Ireland myself and the whole plastic bag tax has been a roaring success. You have to ask for a bag now if you want one, the days of automatically being handed a bag are long gone. And it really works, people can be seen going to the shops with their own "green bags", as they are called, or even just re-using the same plastic bag again and again. You rarely see a plastic bag being blown down the street in the wind anymore! I must say, it was a brilliant idea!" Thanks, Shane, for sharing that. I agree that it is a very bright idea. If you’re sick of seeing plastic bags destroy your environment, ask your elected representative to read this blog.

Promotions? Bags make the most sense

I just read an article by Cindy Carrera where she explains the basics of how organizations can use imprinted promotional articles to their advantage. She categorizes their uses into Advertising Specialties, Business Gifts, Premiums, and Recognition Awards. “The trick to a good promotion is to attach your company details to something useful. Now, there is "private useful" like the promotional toothbrush you use in the privacy of your own bathroom, and there is "public useful" that you use out there where everyone sees you inadvertently parading the promotion. This is where promotional bags come in. Few of us can get people to wear sandwich boards for us without paying them, but easily collocated promotional bags act in much the same way” she says. “Imagine” she adds “the happy recipient of your promotional gift arriving at a jazz concert in the park toting your promotional bag. There it sits on the blanket, sophisticated, serene and discreetly advertising your sophisticated and serene company. What a pleasure.” Indeed. We’ve found that our bags get reused more than 300 times. Choose a relevant bag, she suggests. She’s right. There’s a huge variety to choose from, and most are more affordable than you might think. See the variety at http://www.badlani.com/bags I'm sure we have something suited for your next promotion. And if we don't, we'll design a special solution for you.

What possible harm can one little plastic bag do?

Not much, you’d think, right? Until you realise that the world's plastic bag consumption rate is estimated to be well over 500 billion plastic bags annually, or almost 1 million per minute. One million plastic bags minute being added to the burden that our Earth must bear. One million plastic bags a minute being added to a horde that will not biodegrade for the next 3000 years. That’s a lot of harm. If this doesn’t depress you enough, read the full article from the Sun Star Pampanga in the Philippines. The saddest thing is we do have a choice. A simple and elegant choice: calico bags. See how affordable and practical they are at www.badlani.com/bags

Got any ideas?

I just read an article which says: “If you have an unusual use for plastic bags, the American Plastics Council would like to hear about it. We’ll consider publishing your idea on our website!” Got any ideas? If you do write to them, do please share your thoughts with me also. These guys have a vested interest in continuing the use of plastic bags, so their interest is of a different nature, but people like me, who are committed to convincing people to use reusable bags instead, also have to acknowledge that these evil things are so convenient and so cheap that people will continue to use them. We're doing our best to make it easier for the world to switch to reusable cotton bags (http://www.blogger.com/ ) but people will continue to use plastic bags. Less people, I hope, but I have to be realistic. The uses these guys have found are really face savers, and a terrible waste of energy and resources, but it is a lot better than letting these bags be swallowed up by poor unsuspecting animals and marine life. But one day when someone has a really good idea, I’d love to know. For example, we have so many fisherfolk in India for whom wooden boats become expensive because wood decomposes and plastic might make longer lasting boats. Then, so many people could use a longer lasting material to make huts from and roofs from. How can this happen? Are there easy, low cost, low energy consuming technologies? There is plenty of manpower in India and if we could find a way to recycle plastic bags into such uses, w'd be making a win-win happen. Meanwhile, ABC Online has a wonderful webpage on this subject at http://www.abc.net.au/science/features/bags/

What are we doing to our world?

I just read an article Rob Crilly and Emma Newlands wrote for The Herald in Scotland about a whale that was washed up on the Hebridean coast. Its stomach was filled with plastic bags. More evidence that plastic bags are playing havoc with life as we know and love it. A recent survey found scraps of plastic inside 96% of seabirds tested. Sad, when such easy solutions are available and affordable.See some at www.badlani.com/bags/