Ideas must work through the brains and arms of men, or they are no better than dreams.'*
A wise man once said this. Right before he grabbed his canvas jute and dashed out the door. Our 'Plastic Ain't My Bag' campaign is We Are What We Do's nationwide appeal - to those brains and these arms - to help rid our shores of the plastic bag. It's a good dream. With your help we can make it our best idea.
This is We Are What We Do's first, nationwide campaign. What started with a book, and inspired actions, congregated on a website and now takes flight, off the page. We chose our Action 01: Decline Plastic Bags because, well, it seemed like an important time and a natural starting point. (If you're waiting for the Action 08: Take a Bath with Someone you Love Campaign, cool your heels tiger.)
Fact. UK consumers use an estimated ten billion bags a year. Each of these bags take 500 years to degrade. Fact. That's 167 bags person, with a one-way ticket to landfill. Fact. We can put an end to this. Last year ten thousand, four hundred and eighty nine of you found it relatively easy to decline plastic bags. (We know, you told us.) This year we aim to make it even easier. Our role in this campaign is not to lecture. Still less is our role to chide. Our role is to champion and support you, to measure your triumphs, mitigate your difficulties and make the occasional (irreverent) suggestion from the sidelines.
Over the course of the month-long campaign we'll provide a few tactical tools. We've created a 'The Art of Saying No' assertiveness course - the better to help you decline bags - and have an A-Z of bag activism. We are working with a community of retailers to help them get drastic around plastic (see Sainsbury's) and will be starring your stories in our website. We plan to measure the numbers of bags you decline with our on-line tracker. And we co-created a bag to raise awareness. (The 'I'm Not a Plastic Bag' Anya Hindmarch shopper. You may have seen it.) Plus we will be staging a day in Stratford where the entire community pushes the plastics issue as well as nudging you from your newspaper, congratulating you at the cash register and - who knows - maybe even prompting you from a billboard or two.
Ten years ago, scientist Richard Dawkins observed that one could 'have travelled thousands of miles through the United States and never see a baseball cap turned back to front.' Today the reverse baseball cap is ubiquitous. Punchline; behaviour is viral. And we humans learn quick. In Bangledesh and Zanzibar and Taiwan they haven't had plastic bags for years and are bearing up just fine. In Ireland and Denmark they introduced a tax on plastic bags - and nearly nobody died. It's worth remembering plastic bags have only been around since 1977. We've managed before.
If enough people act together, things get easier and worlds change. Or, as we like to say, Small changes x Lots of people = Big changes. Altogether now, 'Baby, Plastic Ain't My Bag.'
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