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Call for plastic bag free London by 2012 Olympics

A campaign to make the London Olympics plastic bag free has been launched by Zac Goldsmith.

Plastic purge: Campaigners with Zac Goldsmith. Picture: Steve Butler Plastic purge: Campaigners with Zac Goldsmith. Picture: Steve Butler

The Richmond Park MP joined forces with record-breaking ocean rower, writer and environmental campaigner Roz Savage on Richmond Green to unveil banners and bags declaring “London - shouldn’t we be plastic-bag free?”, last week.

It is hoped the bags will be seen on the arms of Londoners across the capital and will put pressure on the Government to make the 2012 Olympics free from plastic bags.

A short film and presentation about plastic and where it goes will be held on Thursday at Kingston University's Penrhyn Road campus, at 7pm, organised by the Greener upon Thames campaign.

The campaign has been backed by politicians, schools, community organisations and more than 500m shops.

If you would like to attend the evening, email info@greenerkingston.org.uk or mike@greeneruponthames.org.

Numbers are limited.

To sign the campaign’s petition visit gopetition.com/petitions/2012-plastic-bag-free-olympics.html.


Comments (5)

10/11/10

Sanity99 says...

I used to keep all my bags for other uses around the house. Now they degrade to dust so quickly they just get binned. I have to buy plastic bags to replace them.

It's alright for people in car's who don't get bags dirty putting them on pavements and floors of buses'.

The whole thing is misguided and obsessed.

10/11/10

Sanity99 says...

I used to keep all my bags for other uses around the house. Now they degrade to dust so quickly they just get binned. I have to buy plastic bags to replace them.

It's alright for people in car's who don't get bags dirty putting them on pavements and floors of buses'.

The whole thing is misguided and obsessed.

10/11/10

mark mellor says...

They started this in Kew and it failed there. The focus here is all wrong the only way you are going to stop or lower carrier bag usage is to start with the big four supermarkets.

11/11/10

diver77 says...

Plastic bag fascists it seems, rather than addressing the behavioural characteristics associated with responsible waste management. Its up to individuals themselves whether they want to use plastic / jute / paper based materials, and not to parliamentary influences who happen to have a personal vendetta against plastic.

Perhaps we can make London 2012 'MP expenses free' instead? Am sure that would help our economy more sufficiently than trying to raise money from bag taxes and waste it on biased environmental campaigns?

15/11/10

Scott Naylor says...

I fully support the mass reduction of plastic bags. It is not just land-fill waste we should concern ourselves with, it is the 'litter' question of bags which degrade very slowly, and affect rivers and their environment. Plastic bags, like plastic hard packaging and film, take petro-chemicals to produce them, and yet a canvass or cotton bag uses natural materials;

I don't consider this 'obsession', whoever in this world thinks our environment is a laughing matter is living in the dark ages where obvious fixes are highly necessary to be focussed on, however some supermarkets are now not automatically putting bags away from the 'automatic reach', and people like M & S sell you a bag for 5p, however if you are buying M & S food generally you won't blink twice about paying for one.

The alternative would be to go back to paper bags for good weather and car users along with cotton and canvass bags for year-round use.

Government help with this is crucial, and starts with the biggest supermarkets, as it is these who sell the majority of our waste, and is is these who need to look to stop use of plastic, for instance look at the good green-grocers, they use brown paper bags, why not use these in a supermarket, instead of the smaller plastic bags held in packs on the sales units?

The trouble with today's supermarket style of living is trying to keep food fresh for as long as possible, part of this indicates that this food is not necessarily 'fresh' but has been shipped or flown in from thousands of miles ago to serve our year-round wish to have out of season produce, which not only adds significantly top our carbon footprints, especially meet and fish, but ensures the need for extended refrigeration and all the power that uses, as well as having to seal the food for extended periods.

So are we prepared to reduce 'choice' in an unsustainable way? Is Air freight too cheap, with fish and flowers being flown around the world to our supermarkets to hit our fine (perceived?) requirements, and bumping commercial non-perishable freight frequently?

I would represent that we live in the golden age of flying, and if we really rationed with kerosene, and made to make hard-choices about use of our limited world resources, we would consider again how to use our natural resources and limit the 'luxury golden age' of flying anything especially the flying of 'luxury perishables'.

Plastic forms part of the equation of creating a very ‘un-perishable’ unsustainable future, it takes energy to recycle waste plastic, and the sieving of ‘similar types of plastic’ takes energy, the difficulty of finding similar plastics to grade and then regrind is very high, the quality is variable, and the re-use at the lowest grade of recycling is high. So do we do the obvious, look at the root cause, or look to the way of trying to sort out the root cause, or the effect? Surely we must put more pressure on Government and the causes of this including public buy-in to change buying habits too, and back this campaign, it can only bring awareness high!