By Kelly Rand •
June 16, 2008
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Raise your hand if you’re like me and have an overflowing bag of plastic shopping bags?
Ok, good. That’s just about everyone.
Raise your hand if you try and reuse them for random things like other trash bags and carrying lunch to work?
Great! I think that’s still a good chunk of you.
Now, raise your hand if you still have all these bags and still don’t know what to do with them but refuse to throw them away?
Yup, that’s what I thought.
Well you’re in luck because this week I am going to explore a bit about what to do with all those plastic bags. I’ve already told you about Conserve, a wonderful company that employs rag pickers in India to pick up plastic bags and then uses the bags to create the most amazing purses and totes. I’ve always wondered how to make bags out of plastic and knew that it involved fusing plastic together, but that’s about it. So I started to do a bit of research into what it take to do it yourself.
From the looks of these three tutorials it seems pretty simple. All you really need to fuse plastic are your plethora of plastic bags, an iron, freezer paper, parchment paper or other scrap paper, and a well ventilated area.
By Pem Charnley •
February 29, 2008
I apologise profusely for having brought that advert to an international audience, but I had to. It’s cathartic to share.
I shudder at the voice-over to such an extent that I need to lie down in a darkened room afterwards and gnaw at my knuckles. Hideous snobbery. What were the creatives thinking?
But to M&S. Or Marks and Spencer, to give them their full title, a clothing and food store from here in the UK who in an announcement to the press state:
“Marks & Spencer is to roll-out a 5p charge for food carrier bags in all of its UK stores from the beginning of May to encourage customers to reduce the number of bags they use and to raise money for environmental projects.”
By Gavin Hudson •
February 23, 2008
Julie Chow: Environmentalism in Singapore | The first impression most people have when they think of Singapore is cleanliness. Hand-in-hand with the anti-gum-chewing rule, it is not an unfair assumption, given the island-city-state’s patriarchal government and tropical climate (palm trees and greenery cover the island in abundance.)
Here is something that might surprise you though: Singaporeans don’t recycle. Or if they do, it’s not as blatantly apparent as in the United States. Occasionally, you’ll see a receptacle on the street that is divvied up into plastics/metals, paper and waste, but for the most part, everything gets tossed into one big trash can. Trash shoots aren’t sorted into blue recyclables and black everything-else-goes here. I remember once during the summer, I was sorting trash while at work when my boss came up to me and asked what I was doing. Apparently it’s all just trash over there — nothing specific about it.
Lately, however, there has been a growing concern in the country, due to rapid industrialization and urbanization. Over recent months, the government has been giving the country a massive developmental face lift, introducing towering high-rise apartments and chicly designed shopping plazas to rival those of Paris, Tokyo and New York City. There are more plans to introduce casinos (”integrated resorts”) and a Formula One race track — all for the sake of drawing more tourists to Singapore and boosting the country’s economy.
Paper or plastic? By now we've all been educated to respond with a resounding "no thanks!" The benefits of BYOB (bringing your own bag) are overwhelming, but what bag to bring?
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