Clearly they are a more evolved society than most others. Elsewhere, governments are facing opposition from retailers when they propose a tax on plastic bags, but not in Japan.Here, the Japan Chain Stores Association have themselves called for a law to enable stores to charge customers for plastic shopping bags.The industry body said retailers have incurred growing costs for recycling plastic trays and other recyclable containers. It said if those costs continue to increase, some retailers mi...

I just read an article by Jeremy Watson in the Scotland News that the Scots will soon be charging a 10 cent tax on disposable plastic bags.Scotland uses about a billion bags a year totaling up to 6,500 tons of waste.Most are buried in landfill sites, where they can take hundreds of years to degrade, but many litter urban areas, the countryside and the sea, where they can become a major hazard for wildlife. The stomachs of whales and seabirds washed up on Scottish shores have been found to be ...

The culprit is an ingredient in plastic goods called phthalates says a story in The Guardian.They seep into your food from plastic packaging and get into your bloodstream.Result: ‘Women with higher levels of four different phthalates were more likely to have baby boys with a range of conditions, from smaller penises and undescended testicles to a shorter perineum, the distance between the genitals and the anus,’ said the report."Every aspect of male identity is altered when you see this in m...

Fitzroy Falls sets a fine example of how this can easily be done.Some cities in Australia did this by having their local government invest in cloth bags and hand them out free to every citizen.Some cities that thrive on tourism had citizens take a pledge to each buy and use cloth bags. But Fitzroy Falls has followed what appears to be simplest path. They utilized the local retail network and citizens bought cloth bags from the retailers they do business with.The local council imported cloth ...

What a great idea!R Vasudevan, Head of the Department of Chemistry, Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai has pioneered a way to use a mix of shredded plastic waste in making roads.It’s mixed in with the “metal” used to make the road and assists in binding it better, making it capable of withstanding heavy rains, reducing the amount to bitumen required. The development team believes it also offers better road grip than rubberized roads.Sounds seriously win-win to me. Much better than th...

Sure is a great looking bag, isn’t it? We call it the Jute #B06. Attractive, economical and capable of saving the world from the waste of as many as 1000 plastic bags, this bag is a hero!Packing and shipping costs are being worked out even as I write this, and we hope to have this lovely bag up on our website very soon.

The Daily Yomiuri today reported that Japan’s Environment Ministry has decided to forbid retailers to hand out free bags. The ministry hopes to submit a bill to revise the law in the ordinary Diet session next year.Wise. The Japanese throw away 30 billion plastic bags annually.As one of the cleanest, most well-kept societies in the world, the Japanese have a deep stake in keeping their environment safe from the havoc that plastic bags wreak on the world.The National Association of Super Marke...

This morning I was appalled to read an article in the Indian Express that said “NO NEED to kick this plastic habit” Seems some ATIRA scientist has found a way for plastic bags to become brittle and turn into a fine powder when exposed to sunlight. And the Indian Express article implied that plastic bags were now “safe!” Until now, innocent animals and marine creatures, who couldn’t differentiate between plastic bags and food swallowed the stuff and died horrible deaths because plastic is indi...

I believe our Minister of State for Environment and Forest Namo Naryan Meena said in parliament that ''it is not possible to ban their use''. Worse, I’m told he actually said that plastic bags were ''not harmful to life Finding that the Minister was not equipped with details on the matter, the Speaker skipped over to the next question, avoiding an embarrassment to the government on the issue.From taxation to voluntary movements, enlightened governments across the world are encouraging citizen...

Online Greek publication ekathimerini.com today published this shocking fact.“There will have to be a change in the law forcing supermarkets to charge for shopping bags so that their excessive use, which is detrimental to the environment, can stop,” said Apostolos Alexakis, president of the Association of Greek Supermarkets.An average store serves about 800 customers a day, each uses four plastic bags on average. Each supermarket gives away roughly 3,200 bags a day and with some 2,500 stores ...

Plastic bags are affecting the environment in India more than in most countries because of our complete lack of discipline and enforcement. People throw plastic bags everywhere. Though we have legislation in place banning the manufacture and use of thin-gauge plastic bags, these laws exist only on paper, are flouted every day, and plastic bags continue to be thrown away everywhere.You see them everywhere. The streets are littered with plastic waste and animals continue to ingest them, mistaki...

2005 looks even better, suggests an ASIC survey. ASIC stands for the Advertising Specialty Institute. “Companies are looking for new, more effective ways to spend their marketing budgets, as many are discovering that advertising on satellite radio, TiVo television or the Internet is not as effective as it once was” says Greg Muzzillo, founder and Co-CEO of Proforma, said to be one of the top 10 promo product distributors.I’m convinced this is part of a worldwide trend that is leading away fro...

Too many discussions on branding focus on projecting a brand to external audiences. To the extent that branding gets considered as being synonymous with advertising. I disagree. I think the place a branding exercise starts from is within the organisation. It is only when an organisation is in total internal agreement on the subject of “who we are and how we behave” that it is actually equipped to deliver a consistent branding message to the external world.One of the most effective ways to mak...

Winning a customer’s trust is what makes it happen for us. Clearly, the folks who run the Bahrain Exhibition Center were happy with the bags we’ve been doing for them so when they had a need for a colossal “tent” for a major event, they chose to discuss it with us.From fabric selection to fireproofing to fabrication, we enjoyed the challenge of working on something new for us. Finding ways to communicate all the zillions of variables with our customers was also an exercise that gave us learni...

This isn’t some ad man’s wild pipe dream. Read this amazing true story at http://www.poconorecord.com/lifestyl/alh97889.htm Columnist Martin Sloane contributed a story encouraging people to switch to reusable cloth bags, and here is what reader Louise Fail wrote in: Dear Martin: At our local 99-cent store they sell a lovely, large reusable tote bag. Of course it carries some advertising, but I really do not mind! I bought four of them. One is for trips to the library. The other three...