17-06-09

Press Release - Student Plastic Bag Promotion (Plastic bags aren’t free!)

33 enthusiastic students from 8 high schools around Dunedin have come together to raise awareness of the environmental impact of plastic bags and promote alternatives. On Thursday 18th June in Albion Place from 12:45pm - 1:30pm, they will be rolling out the red carpet (literally) to celebrate people who are using reusable bags. This will include an ‘Oscar-like’ photoshoot and street theatre. There will also be guerilla bagging which involves approaching people on the street to swap their plastic bags for the students’ creatively designed reusable bags for free. Their message is that plastic bags aren’t free; they cost us by harming our environment, using up valuable resources, and adding hidden costs to our shopping bills.

The students are part of the ReGeneration Enviroschools workshop, which is run regionally throughout New Zealand. The two-day Dunedin workshop brings together passionate young people and their ideas. This year, the students decided to focus their efforts on plastic bags because the cost on the environment is so great, and it is an issue that everyone can participate in positively. 100,000 mammals and turtles are killed each year by plastic bags alone. They also contribute to $25 million a year in hidden costs to our grocery bills, yet when people receive plastic bags free of charge they treat them as though they are worth nothing. Our precious oil resources are used to create plastic bags, and in fact the total embodied energy in New Zealand’s annual bag consumption would be enough to drive from Dunedin to Christchurch return 160,000 times.

Thursday’s lunchtime event will be a dynamic visual promotion for better attitudes towards plastic bag usage because plastic bags aren’t free.

ENDS

© Scoop Media