When I was in South Africa a few summers ago I was really happy to notice that the stores charged extra for plastic bags. The result: everyone had re-usable cloth/thick plastic bags to carry their shopping with them. Since then I’ve learned that they were just one of the first to start the ball rolling on something most of the world has now taken on, the banning of the disposable bag.
Environmentalist uber-blog “Inhabitat”:http://www.inhabitat.com has a “great article”:http://www.inhabitat.com/2007/12/17/africas-outlook-and-ban-on-plastic-bags/ about the move away from throw-away plastic in Africa and I’m just left wondering, outside of San Francisco where is this movement in the United States. Like a lot of environmental movements, we in the States are in a great position to take the helm on this and yet we sit with our heads so firmly stuck in the sand I’m not even sure we can feel the winds of change blowing around us.
The above picture is taken from an awesome contributor-based photography site called the “Plastic Bag Gallery”:http://www.photonet.org.uk/plasticbag/. Individual credit goes to Jessica Backhaus from the UK.