ECO CHIC  Get Rid Of The Green Bag

These days, no trip to the supermarket is complete without an armful of green bags, as shoppers try to reduce their carbon footprint by opting for the supposedly eco-friendly alternative to plastic bags. Well, it turns out we’ve all been fooled, green bags are no better for the environment than a Hummer doing a burnout, as they’re made with polypropylene, a non biodegradable material that has a long term impact on mother nature once disposed of. It was this shocking discovery that prompted financial whiz Reg Ferguson to turn his attention to a new field – the world of eco-friendly carry bags.

“I’m a financial advisor and because I’m in Perth, I would always get invited to functions and seminars on the east coast and you’d go to a typical convention and there would be 30 exhibitors there and they’d all give you a little polypropylene bag with a USB or some merchandise in it,” Ferguson explains of how he first came up with the concept for Earth Bags. “You’d go back to the hotel room and there’d be all these bags there and you would keep one and throw the rest away, so I started to think about what the alternatives could be and did some research and came up with the idea. From there I went to the CSIRO and spoke to a head scientist there and asked him what not to do. When I spoke to him and showed him the bags I found out they were made out of a petroleum product.”

Like many Australian consumers, Ferguson had no idea these supposedly ‘green’ bags were actually pretty damn harmful to the environment, so he set about creating a new product that would act as a suitable alternative, while also raising awareness about the common use of polypropylene in reusable carry bags.

Developed right here in sunny WA, Earth Bags are made from paper sourced from sustainable forests, and biodegrade in just 45 days once disposed of, which makes them a very environmentally friendly product.

“There was some research carried out by the Victorian government in 2004 and there was an average of nine polypropylene bags per household then, so if you use those same numbers, and there’s 8.6 million households now you’re talking about 100 million bags just in households and that’s without the corporate sector. Nobody knows how many are really out there.

“The future cost of cleanup hasn’t been taken into consideration; I’m seeing that with the pacific dump at the moment with all the proliferation of rubbish in the one area, it’s going to be a massive problem. Dr Martin Anda [from Murdoch University’s School of Environmental Science] said to me ‘one point that you’ve probably missed here is that if an albatross was to eat a piece of your bag, it would pass through it without any ill effects, if they eat a piece of polypropylene it would kill them’.”

Find out more and join the Earth Bag revolution at earthbagsaustralia.com.au.