The Book of Rubbish Ideas

Grrr...there's even bags for the boys...

I came across an incredibly inspirational company last week called Morsbags, with a delightful strapline of ‘Sociable, Guerrilla, Bagging’.

‘What are you on about now, you crazy woman’, I can hear you from here you know!

I’ll tell you, I haven’t felt this excited and sane about a project in a long time…

Perhaps the story is best told by the creator of Morsbags, Claire Morsman.

A young female minke whale was washed up in Normandy France on April 6^th (my birthday) in 2002.  This was in the contents of her stomach.

• 1 x plastic/aluminium crisp packet
• 2 x English supermarket bags
• 7 x various coloured dustbin bag bits
• 7 x transparent plastic bags

Plastic bags in water are serial killers.

They are eaten by marine wildlife, which often mistake plastic bags for jellyfish.  The fish, whale, turtle or bird dies and decomposes around the bag, the bag floats off, ready for its next victim.

No one knows how long these treacherous plastic bags take to biodegrade, humans have only been using them for 30 years but they’re already covering the planet and globally we consume 1 million plastic bags per minute.  They photo-degrade  (break down into smaller and smaller toxic bits) and wildlife accidentally ingests the bite sized pieces.

I created Morsbags because I live on a canal and endless plastic bags float by like urban jellyfish.

I grew up on the coast in Devon where the beaches were, and still are, strewn with plastic bags.

Whenever I am in a supermarket I am bugged by the staggering amount of plastic bags being freely offered to shoppers who habitually forget that they are not the only option!

I would love it if people could think to bring reusable bags.

So Claire set about designing a simple bag that could easily be run up on a machine or by hand if you have a little more patience and she posted the instructions on how to make it on her website, www.Morsbags.com.

Essentially, she’s encouraging us ALL ideally to get together with a group of friends known as a pod.  Everyone brings along a few bits of scrappy material (of course wine and chocolate are delicious optional extras) then you have a good chat with your chums and make a few bags.

Any thrifty reader will know, you can get an awful lot of strong cotton and denim material from the charity shops for hardly any expense at all and if you go to good old  Freecycle of course, you can pick it up for nothing!

The Morsbaggers have special labels you can buy to sew onto your bags (very inexpensive – I’ve bought 50 small and 50 large for £3.42 inc postage) which will help spread the word further by giving the bags an identity.

Morsbags is a truly excellent initiative and should be widely celebrated!

The finished articles  can be used by your good selves to fetch and carry your own shopping, or to give away to friends and family as presents, but if you and your collective pod make a great stack of them, Claire rather hopes you might like to hand them out free to shoppers outside supermarkets….you know I just love a bit of actual activism!

To that end, I’ve just set up a pod called ‘The Book of Rubbish Ideas Bag’ (see the Pod Page) and the details should go up on their list of pods from around the world sometime soon.

I’d be delighted if you’d like to do any of the following, either:

1. join my ‘Book of Rubbish Ideas Bag’ pod and physically come meet up with me and my friends for a sewing session in West Dorset, details to be emailed to you once you join
2. join my ‘Book of Rubbish Ideas Bag’ pod, stay wherever you are, make your own bags and be part of (hopefully) a large ‘Rubbish’ collective all over the country making bags
3. go start yer OWN pod and do all of the above…lol…!

Drop your thoughts on this into the comments box below and as soon as my pod is up and live, I’ll post further details of how you can join the cause and how we’re getting on.

Happy baggin’

Rubbishly yours,

TS x