05 July,2017 09:00 AM IST | Mumbai | Gaurav Sarkar
Kandivli residents distribute 1,000 cloth bags and hundreds of stickers, to encourage locals to say no to plastic bags on the occasion of International Plastic Bag-Free Day
The Residents Forum of Thakur Village and Siddharth Nagar distributed cloth bags to local shoppers on Monday
The plastic bags we throw away every day could still be around for the next 1,000 years, piling up into mountains of trash that the coming generations will inherit. But residents of Thakur Village in Kandivli East have their own bag of tricks to combat this issue.
On July 3, which was International Plastic Bag-Free Day, members of the Residents Forum of Thakur Village and Siddharth Nagar distributed 1,000 cloth bags to shoppers, to spread awareness about the impact of plastic waste and the importance of reusing bags. Each bag is printed with the message: 'Our Locality's Smart Bag, Take it with you, Your reusable Bag'.
These bags were distributed to hundreds of people who were out for their daily round of evening shopping.
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"We went to one of the buildings in the complex and sold around 400 of these cloth bags for Rs 25 each," said Sandeep Srivastava, a retired naval commander who is a member of the Residents Forum.
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Another member, Harsha Udipi (58), pointed out that the aim of the campaign is to target demand, not supply. "We could have given these bags the shopkeepers and vendors themselves, but that wouldn't help tackle the demand for plastic bags," he said, adding that some shops had even promised to call for their next consignment of carry bag to be made of cloth and not plastic.
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Over the past month as well, the residents of the two societies have used quirky memes to grab the audience's attention on social media (such as, 'Ek plastic bag ki keemat tum kya jaano, Ramesh Babu'), as well as distributing thousands of stickers that state 'Say no plastic bags, Carry your own cloth bags'. These stickers were distributed it among nearly 500 shopkeepers in the neighbourhood. Apart from carrying out their shop-to-shop campaign, wherein they encouraged (and received support from) these shopkeepers to put up these stickers, they also stuck the same on notice boards of most societies in the area to drive the message home.
