Bag yourself a free seat…

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 by Nigel

Lots of things to mention. First up, for anyone who lives in my area down in Brighton, there’s a special screening of Rebecca Hosking’s deeply moving film Message in The Waves being screened for free at the Duke of York’s cinema on Sunday February 3rd at 1.30pm.

Yes, for free, readers. It’s part of a campaign by Plastic Bag Free Brighton. Filmmaker Rebecca Hosking kicked things off by making Modbury the first plastic bag-free village in the UK. This is a campaign to create the UK’s first plastic bag-free city. (Yes, Brighton is a city…) It seems ridiculous in 2008 that the UK is still behind places like Ireland, where the practice of giving away free plastic bags with your shopping has been banned for years.

There will also be a screening of two short animated films made by schoolchildren with the help of artist Lou McCurdy. Lou is the woman who did that great exhibition More Plastic Than Plankton during last year’s Brighton Festival that I mentioned on this blog. She collected plastic from Brighton beaches and made WEIRD STUFF with it, to highlight the problem of plastic pollution in the oceans.

Lou will be part of a discussion about what we can all do about plastic bags after the screening… It sounds excellent. Try and make it along there if you can.

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New products:

I’m really pleased to be stocking a whole lot more lines this year. There’s new stuff appearing all the time, but I thought I’d take a second to big up the important but not-so-glamorous lines… I’m now stocking organic soft cotton toilet paper and organic soft cotton tissues. Conventional cotton growing is environmentally disastrous. The great thing about organic cotton is that it’s grown sustainably in pesticide-free farms, and is created without using bleach. The cotton used to create these tissues, which are softer and good for removing make up and so on (so I’m told), is a by-product of that process.

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Over the last twelve months campaigners have been pointing out that Apple have been falling behind in the race to create a greener computer. Greenpeace launched their campaign to create a greener apple.

So I was pleased to hear last week aboout the MacBook Air. It boasts a recyclable aluminium case, a mercury-free display, arsenic-free glass, BFR-free and PVC-free circuits and an energy-efficiency rating that outshines any previous laptop they’ve made. Jobs made a big hoo ha of rebutting the Greenpeace campaign, but more than ever, the MacBook Air shows that consumer pressure really does work.

Now what about making Apple recycling depots for used Apple stuff too? That one’s long overdue.

The great bag photo above was taken on 8th Jan this year at Lytham Beach by chez-worldwide.