Filipino Stars Refuse Plastic Bags, Bring Their Own

6
by Rebecca Carter September 6, 2006
Categories: .

Risa Baraquel Says No to Plastic Grocery BagsCelebrities in the Philippines showed up at the grocery store on Monday. Why where they there? To encourage consumers to drop the ‘plastic bag habit’. The celebrities declined plastic bags at the supermarket. Instead, they did as we all should they brought their own (BYOB!). Using “bayong” or straw bags and cloth bags, these local celebrities carried their goods out in style.

The campaign is run by the Ecowate Coalition. The INQ7 article notes:

“The plastic invasion of the Filipino culture and society must end. The health and environmental costs of its production and use are too high,” Gigie Cruz of the Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives (GAIA) said.

A survey done by the Ecowaste Coalition on August 14 found that 76 percent of the wastes on Manila Bay were plastics, which would take a thousand years to disintegrate and gradually release toxins into water and soil.

Celebrities that participated in the BYOB day were Representative Risa Baraquel, Miss Earth-Philippines Cathy Untalan, TV anchor Kristine Bersola-Babao and actor Roy Alvarez.


Categories: .

About Rebecca Carter

Rebecca Carter is the Co-Founder of Ecorazzi. Rebecca was recently featured in the book Hot, Rich, and Green. She is one of 70 eco-achievers featured in Glamour magazine in April 2009, named Best of Green 2010 by Miami Magazine and Best Environmentalist by Miami New Times Best of 2008. She's raising a couple of little boys in Miami and speaks English & Spanish. Find out more at www.RebeccaCarter.net. Follow Rebecca on Twitter: @rebeccacarter

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  • Christine

    I know that at Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods you get a small (small!) discount on your groceries for bringing your own bag. And I’ve never met a bagger anywhere else who was mad they couldn’t bag my one item.

    Yay for reusable bags!

  • http://www.gbwatch.com Lynn

    Oh wow, I really, really, really wish this campaign would succeed! Paper bags aren’t available here either, so plastic bags have always been in use.

  • James Rubenol

    The sad thing is that cloth bags and other reusable items (such as ceramic mugs), use a ton more energy to make….adding substancially more greenhouse gases and thus creating the major problem that we have (global warming). I know that for ceramic mugs the energy consumption makes it so the mug has to be used over a 1000 times to be equal to the energy of 1 plastic cup. A better solution is to press people to recycle plastic bags.

  • http://www.greenermiami.com rebecca

    James, I disagree. Here are some facts from reusablebags.com:

    Recycling Can Fix This, Right? Wrong.

    First of all, recycling rates for plastic bags are extremely low. Only 1 to 3% of plastic bags end up getting recycled.

    Secondly the economics of recycling plastic bags are not appealing. From the process of sorting, to the contamination of inks and the overall low quality of the plastic used in plastics bags, recyclers would much rather focus on recycling the vast quantities of more viable materials such as soda and milk bottles that can be recycled far more efficiently. If the economics don’t work, recycling efforts don’t work.

    Furthermore many bags collected for recycling never get recycled. A growing trend is to ship them to Third world countries like India and China which are rapidly becoming the dumping grounds for the Western world’s glut of recyclables. Rather than being recycled they are cheaply incinerated under more lax environmental laws.

    Even if recycling rates of plastic bags increased dramatically, it would not solve other significant problems, such as the use of non-renewable resources and toxic chemicals in their original production, or the inevitable glut of bags that end up littering our environment where they eventually breakdown into tiny toxic bits.

    While recycling has it place, it falls far short of solving this issue.

    What to do? Choose to reuse!

    See more here: http://reusablebags.com/facts.php?id=2

  • Christine

    Check out today’s IdealBite daily tip:

    http://idealbite.com/tiplibrary/tip.php?tip=20060907&title=BYOB

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