Every minute, more than a million plastic bags are used around the world. Most are carried for a few minutes, then blow away to choke the sea for a lifetime. That is the mess. A free handmade bag is a small, stubborn part of the fix.
The gut-wrenching reality
Fact: globally, over one million plastic bags are used every single minute.
Gut-wrenching fact: marine wildlife mistakes plastic bags for food, and dies.
Frustrating fact: it is taking far too long for supermarkets and politicians to sort it out. Plastic bags are still blowing in the wind and choking the whales.
Happy fact: making morsbags helps, with immediate effect.
Plastic bags in water are serial killers. Drifting through the ocean, they look exactly like jellyfish, so a dolphin, whale, turtle or seabird swallows one and dies of suffocation or starvation. The animal decomposes around the bag, the bag floats free, and it goes looking for its next victim.
No one really knows how long these treacherous things take to break down. Humans have only used them for around forty years, and already they cover the planet. They photodegrade — splitting into smaller and smaller toxic fragments — and those pieces work their way into every link of the food chain, for marine life and for us.
One whale, one stomach
A young female minke whale washed up in Normandy, France, on 6 April 2002. This is what was found inside her:
- 1 × plastic and aluminium crisp packet
- 2 × English supermarket bags
- 7 × assorted coloured dustbin-bag pieces
- 7 × transparent plastic bags
- 1 × food-packaging wrapper
Factoids at a glance
- Over 500 billion plastic bags are used worldwide each year — roughly 70 per person. If everyone kept a trusty ten or so morsbags to hand, the problem would quietly solve itself.
- Retailers and governments are still struggling to make the difference that is needed through taxes and bans. We — the shoppers — can take this into our own hands right now.
- “The impact of this plastic waste can be seen littering our landscape, threatening our wildlife and accumulating as ‘plastic soup’ in the Pacific Ocean, which may cover more than 15,000,000 sq km.” — Janez Potočnik, former European Commissioner for the Environment.
- According to MSN, the plastic bags we make each year create enough solid waste to fill the Empire State Building two and a half times over.
- In some parts of the ocean there are six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton.
These are unreferenced facts, and there are plenty more out there on the interweb. But it is widely accepted that plastic bags are harmful one way or another, so we reckon your time is better spent making a morsbag than googling. Hope you agree.
So we did something about it
We started morsbags because we lived on a canal and despaired at the plastic bags floating past like so many urban jellyfish. The sheer number of bags handed out for free in shops is boggling — and it makes shoppers forget that a plastic bag was never the only option.
We would love it if more people simply thought to bring a bag. So we make lovely ones, out of unwanted fabric, and give them away for free — forever. Not for profit, no strings, just a better bag pressed into a stranger’s hand.
The dent we’ve made so far
Every one of those was sewn by an ordinary person who decided the whales had waited long enough. It is sociable, it is guerrilla, and it is working — one free bag at a time.