Lake Macquarie Sustainable Neighbourhood Groups step up campaign to phase out single-use plastic shopping bags

Lake Macquarie Sustainable Neighbourhood Groups – an initiative of the council – are hosting information stalls on the topic at Morisset and Toronto next week.

The groups said Australians used more than 3.9 billion plastic bags per year. That’s more than 10 million new bags being used every day.

Lake Macquarie Sustainable Neighbourhood Alliance board member, Steve Dewar, said single-use plastics were damaging the environment at a rapid rate.

“Plastic bag litter kills tens of thousands of birds, whales, seals and turtles every year but we can change this by taking simple steps to reduce the amount of single-use plastics in our environment,” Mr Dewar said.

“In Toronto, the sustainable neighbourhood group and Toronto Tidy Towns have made considerable efforts to reduce and phase out plastic bag use. We’ve approached local supermarkets and retailers to voluntarily make changes to reduce plastic bag use, hosted clean-up days to remove litter, and we’ve implemented the ‘Tossers can be binners’ project, which is an integrated litter reduction and awareness program.

“While we’ve had some success, this is a bigger issue and it requires a state-wide or national effort to change business and community attitudes towards plastic bag use.”

Mr Dewar said the group was taking its message to the streets.

“To raise awareness in our local communities, volunteers from a number of sustainable neighbourhood groups will be hosting drop-in sessions at local supermarkets to talk to people about the damage plastic bags are doing to our environment and how they can take simple steps to reduce their use of plastic bags and other single-use plastics.”

Sustainable neighbourhood group volunteers will be at Toronto and Morisset on the following dates.-

For more information about the sustainable neighbourhoods group’s plastic bag campaign, visit sustainableneighbourhoods.org.au/plastic-bag-campaign.