“We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.” ~Marion Wright Edelman
I am visualizing a world without such a strong reliance on plastic shopping bags. Slowly but surely an awareness of the environmental consequences of indiscriminate use of plastic bags is growing through out the world.
Dominica has not been using plastic bags like now for long. As little as 10 years ago if you went to the shop in my neighbourhood without your bag they sent you back home to get it! We went to market with baskets and cloth bags to carry our produce home.
Do we really need to receive a bag every time we go to shop? When calculated over a year it adds up rapidly; if we shop on an average of 3 times a week; get 2 plastic bags each time; that adds up to 302 bags a year! Multiply that times 30,000 (guessing that would be the number of active shoppers on island out of 70,000) - now that’s a lot of plastic.
We can recycle our plastic bags and that does happen a lot here. Clean intact plastic bags rarely go in the landfill they are often reused but still ….. imagine if there were none!
Europe’s biggest consumer of plastic bags, Italy, (they use more than 20 billion plastic bags annually) has banned plastic bags as of January 2011.
In 2007 San Francisco was the first city in the US to ban plastic bags and so far, that translates into 5 million fewer plastic bags every month. Long Beach California and a host of other US cities have followed suit.
As of January 2011 Malaysia starts the process of banning plastic bags by banning them one day a week.
Dominica has always had a certain eco slant within the traditional culture.
