School bag designs encourage locals to cut back on using plastic bags

Sally Bird, 13 and Orla Langdon, 11 are very excited they are both receiving custom-built bicycles made by Bike Tech from recycled parts as part of their prize for winning the Keep Hutt City Beautiful bag design competition.

The other exciting part of their prize is having their winning designs printed on reusable bags and sold in local stores.

Sally and Orla are students of Muritai School in Eastbourne, they entered the competition along with 559 other entrants from 25 schools in Lower Hutt.

The competition had two categories for students ages 12 and under and ages 13-18 and required them to create designs that represent what ‘Hutt City would look like without plastic bags’.

Wainuiomata Primary and Te Ara Whanui Kura Kaupapa Maori sent in the highest number of entries winning iPads for their schools.

Event coordinator, Micheline Evans says, “The idea behind this competition was to highlight the issue that plastic bags are harmful to our environment as they are often blown into waterways and end up in the ocean. Also, plastic bags never truly break-down, over time they just degrade into smaller and smaller fragments of plastic.

“We hope the public supports this initiative by purchasing the reusable bags and in turn help us to ‘Keep Hutt City Beautiful’ by cutting down on their usage of plastic bags.”

Leigh Sutton, Keep Hutt City Beautiful Chairman was on the judging panel and said “The winning entries had a ‘human element’ and immediate recognition of Hutt City. They were creative, striking, eye catching and clever. The more you looked, the more you saw. With such high calibre entries it was a difficult decision.”

Stockists of the reusable bags are: Stokes Valley New World, Pak‘nSave Lower Hutt, New World Lower Hutt, Paper Plus Lower Hutt, Pak‘nSave Petone, Four Square Eastbourne, Four Square Wainuiomata and Common Sense Organics.

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