plasticFANTASTIC?????

Have you noticed that little ticker I've got in my sidebar?

Can you believe that many plastic bags have been consumed this year? What happens to them? Where do they go? Well, if you click on the ticker it'll take you to a site that has pictures of where some of them end up - polluting the earth.

I first started thinking about plastic bags when I lived in Poland back in the early nineties. You had to buy them. They didn't come free. Just like everyone else, we bought a wicker basket and used that for doing our shopping. Almost twenty years later that same basket is going strong, and it's never broken spilling its contents onto the ground, and when it eventually does die, it can go into the compost and help my grandchildren's veges grow!
(there she is on the left)


Sometimes it used to be a bit of a squeeze to get a week's worth of food from the market into the basket...and now with another eight mouths to feed, it's impossible. So I've made a whole lot of bags, which we take when we go out. They are a talking point and I can spread the word a wee bit.

At first my kids weren't too sure. But they have noticed the ticker. They cannot even imagine how bit the number has got to now - it's much bigger than a million;-)
We worked out what our little effort can do.....if we were to get six bags at the grocery store and another four at the vege shop, then another couple later in the week for more fruit and a couple from the butcher and then three or four more for gifts or clothing or books or other random purchases we might make and one or two from the dairy....that's potentially twenty bags a week. About a thousand bags a year. And we're only one family.
So now my kids have joined me on the crusade to use reusable sustainable natural bags. Our favourites are the ones we make from clothing that has been worn out, but I'd really like to buy one of these recycled juice bags that I've seen at Trade Aid. At first I was put off by the $30 price tag - but if we stopped buying plastic bags at 10c a bag (not to mention the hidden costs of disposal and the longterm nightmare they present), we would save $100 a year and could instead put our money towards supporting some families in the Philippines who are getting a fair wage for making these. WIN-WIN