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BEING GREEN 2: ECO BAGS
When I was a kid, you had to pay for a carrier bag, unless you went to a really posh shop. Supermarkets never handed out free ones. You took your own shopping bags with you. That’s all changed. Shop owners started to see the advantage of the free advertising they got by sending people out of their shops carrying their names and logos. In the developed world, where there are ways and means of recycling bags, the environmental impact is bad, but in the developing world it’s appalling. Cheap plastic carrier bags are trapped in hedges and trees, blow about on beaches and are eaten by birds, mammals and fish where they cause their early deaths. Now, there are two forces working together to reduce the numbers of free bags being given out: companies are looking to cut costs, and more people want to protect our environment by reducing waste and landfill. We’re now using shopping bags again, but this time they’ve been rebranded: it’s the era of the eco-bag. There are ecological advantages to using eco-bags because they reduce the numbers of plastic carrier bags, and there are branding advantages too.
The idea In France the hypermarket Carrefour have fabulous eco-bags, brightly coloured with strong graphics and slogans, tough, long lasting and recognisable. Customers buy them to make a statement
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