Writing the last blog post on litter reminded me that back in 2008 the Gravesend Group sponsored and helped organise a “Green Day” at Holy Trinity School in Gravesend. All of the pupils took part in a wide range of activities and workshops. One of the workshops was about replacing plastic carrier bags with re-usable natural bags. Somehow we got hold of lots of cheap cotton bags and we asked the pupils to decorate them with signs of nature and slogans.
I remember that the children enjoyed this workshop very much and I wonder if any of the bags are in use. Despite all of the talk from politicians though we are still producing and discarding millions of plastics bags into our environment. Many of the children that we worked with that day will soon be able to vote. Let’s hope they vote for nature.
Malcolm
I was standing outside Tesco’s in Gravesend yesterday – Friday 2nd January about 1pm. The store was very busy! I noticed that most people that left the store had plastic bags – usually 3-4. I watched for a while and estimated that 1 plastic bag left Tesco’s every second. I have no idea really when the store is open – but here are some rough calculations.
60 bags per minute, 3600 per hour, (8 hours?) gives 28800 per day, 201600 per week, 10483200 per year. That’s over 10 million plastic bags from one store in one town! Either my maths is bad (it was never very good!) or something else is wrong.
Malcolm