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The small rural town of Modbury in Devon has banned plastic bags from its shops. On 1 May 2007, all 43 shops in the town stopped giving their customers plastic bags for a trial six-month period. The experiment was such a success that it has now been made permanent – and villages and towns across the world are following Modbury's example.
The campaign was started by 33-year-old Rebecca Hosking who grew up on a farm near Modbury and, after obtaining a degree in photography, film and television, joined the BBC's Natural History Unit. When she was filming marine life around Hawaii for the BBC2 programme Natural World, she saw at first hand just how much devastation is being caused by plastic pollution. 'What really brought it home for me was one day filming a turtle,' she said. 'It had a plastic bag in its mouth and was slowly dying; there was nothing we could do. We were also filming albatross who were picking up plastic and feeding it to their chicks and we saw so many suffer a slow and painful death.'
Rebecca decided that, since this was not a natural disaster but one caused by human behaviour, she could not sit by without trying to prevent further damage to the environment. When she returned to Modbury she began her campaign to persuade the town's shopkeepers to stop giving away plastic bags.
After seeing Rebecca's film, many of them, along with their customers, were quickly convinced. Now, instead of giving out plastic bags, the shops offer, for a small fee, a choice of fair-trade cotton bags, vegetable starch bags, paper bags and recycled cardboard boxes. Rebecca's success in educating people about the damage caused by plastic waste has brought requests for advice from all over the world. Modbury's response has been to transform its local town website into a resource which is packed with information, from campaigning advice and facts about plastic pollution to sources of sustainably produced cotton bags.
She is a mover and shaker in the Bristol Permaculture Group, she is a consultant, teacher and community leader.
Find out more
Modbury South Devon – Great Britain's First Plastic Bag Free Town
www.plasticbagfree.com
Everything you need to know about how and why to persuade your community to stop using plastic bags.
Message in the Waves
www.messageinthewaves.com/
A site where you can watch some of Rebecca's film about the damage plastic causes to wildlife in Hawaii.
