A big thank you:>) to everyone that came and talked to us this evening and a special thanks to Ken, Paula and Mhairi who did a fantastic job chatting with people and handing out leaflets.

What an evening! The rain started the moment we had put up our gazebo and didn’t stop. However, this didn’t seem to dampen the spirits of Chesham folk who kept on smiling from under their sodden hoods.

If you were not able to buy your bag this evening, please make use of the bag form on our website and we will contact you. If you already have several bags, think of these as fab Christmas presents!

Buying a bag shows your support for our cause, it also helps us fund the whole project. And since they are eco-friendly and fair trade you are doing the planet a favour at the same time :>)

Just a reminder that the CarryAbag team will be joining in the festive fun at the Victorian Evening on Friday! Our stall will be set up near to Millets and will have for sale our fab fairtrade, recycled cotton CarryAbag…

So come and talk to us, buy a bag and spread the word!

You can now order your fabulous Fairtrade recycled cotton must-have bag of the season through our website. The link is on the front page…….

 So what’s stopping you? Stop reading and start working out how many you need, it’s the perfect Christmas gift!

We are selling the bags as a promotional initiative to raise awareness about plastic bags in the environment. All monies raised go into the campaign to further our work.

We’ve made it on to our Mayor’s blog! Complete with a photo that was taken of Julia, Sally and Donna at the Green Fair earlier this month.

 The CarryAbag shopping bag

Ladies and Gentlemen, the fabulous CarryAbag Fairtrade recycled cotton shopping bags have arrived!

If you would like one of these wonderful bags, either for your self or for a loved one please contact us and let us know.

We will also be selling them at the Victorian evening, so if you are coming along, come and see us.

Oh yes, one more thing, the cost, a hugely reasonable £4.50

Hello Folks…

Thanks to the endless patience of my CarryAbag buddies, I have now caught up with the previously elusive world of blogging!

And I would like to use my debut Blog to thank the Shopkeepers whom I have so far visited for your enthusiasm and support for a plastic bag free Chesham! It’s been great to meet you all, hear your views and discuss ideas of how we can achieve our goal.

Alison and I were in town talking to Shopkeepers this afternoon and found shops we didn’t even know existed! Over the next few weeks we hope to visit many more shops… so see you soon :-)

Sainbury’s in Chesham have been doing a promotion this weekend where they have been handing out free ‘bags for life’ instead of their usual carrier bags. This is to encourage customers to reuse bags, I am assuming.

Although it is a laudable sentiment, there is one aspect of the promotion that worries me, the bags for life are still plastic and although they are designed for multiple use, they will still end up in landfill, where they will not degrade for many many years, and may still end up blowing away and polluting the countryside.

In an ideal world Sainsburys would either be handing out cotton or jute bags instead or trying (as some other supermarkets have done elsewhere) having a bag-free day where they just take all the carrier bags off all the tills, forcing customers to use their own or use cardboard boxes….. radical thinking!

But hats off to Sainbury’s for starting to think about customer bag use, maybe next time they’ll take it to the next level.

Big thanks to a client who told me this morning that ‘ban the bag’ had been discussed on GMTV this morning, with a representative of Sainsbury’s and ’some green lady’ (!) Here is the piece on their website

http://www.gm.tv/index.cfm?articleid=27485

Get on there and start voting!!! It’s a shame that they only talk about the supermarkets in the terms of cutting down, rather than offering viable alternatives, but one step at a time, methinks.

It really does appear to be the topic du jour at the moment, so lets keep that momentum going, bag-banning fans.

So says “The Independent” front page today.

The article goes on: “Could there be a more potent symbol of our throwaway society than a plastic bag, snagged and flapping on a suburban hedge? Even if a plastic bag is disposed of properly, it is likely to end up in a landfill site, where it will decompose for centuries, emitting harmful carbon dioxide.

“The good news is that there is a simple and proven solution to this environmental blight. Ireland imposed a modest plastic bag tax in 2002, which has reduced their use by 90 per cent. The bad news is that, despite the fact that Britain’s plastic bag pollution is every bit as bad as it used to be across the Irish Sea, our own government refuses to follow Dublin’s example.

“Yet something is stirring at a grass-roots level in this country. Earlier this year, a local campaigner in the Devon village of Modbury, Rebecca Hosking, persuaded all 43 local shops to substitute their plastic bags with reusable cloth bags. Traders in 80 other small towns around Britain are following suit. Brighton and Hove council last week became the largest authority in Britain to offer support for a voluntary ban. And the heads of London’s 33 local authorities voted yesterday to support a tax on plastic bags within the capital.”

We’re in good company :>)

Now that’s a  sad headline to see in the BBC pages today. Apparently, Britain dumps more household waste into landfill than any other country in Europe. On the other hand, government stats show that we are recycling or composting more now than we were last year and our landfill waste has actually gone down as a result. Phew!

So, how can we cut down on landfill waste?