Shop responsibly – Bring Your Own Bag
Published: Dec 10, 2019 Reading time: 2 minutes
People in Need NGO representative office in Armenia with funding from the British Embassy Yerevan has initiated a project aiming to contribute to lasting reduction in single-use plastic consumption in Armenia. The main focus of the project with an inspiring name “Reduce! Reuse! Become a friend of Nature!” is to motivate people to switch from single-use plastic bags to a more sustainable alternative in form of more environmentally friendly reusable bags. This is to be achieved thanks to the knowledge of behavioural change experts who visited Armenia and advised the most suitable way to motivate local people to adopt a new habit.
Although the project’s target areas are towns of Goris and Kapan in the southern Syunik region, the topic concerns us all.
Plastic bags should not be associated only with negative connotations. However, they contribute greatly to environmental pollution and hinder efforts of many to keep our surroundings clean and healthy for us and many generations to come. Not being recyclable, they are everyday damaging our ecosystems which concerns human kind as much as wildlife.
On the other hand, several studies concluded that repeated use of plastic bags significantly reduces the damage caused to the environment by their production. Therefore, if you already happen to have a plastic bag in hands, try not to hurry to throw it away. Instead, do Mother Nature a favour and use it again. And then again, until it truly stops serving its purpose.
So far only 7% of inhabitants of Syunik region shop with reusable bags, revealed a survey conducted in frames of the “Reduce! Reuse! Become a Friend of Nature!” project. The full study is available HERE.
To improve the situation and encourage more people to carry their own bag, the project team designed new convenient and fashionable line of reusable bags fitting every lady’s purse or gentleman’s pocket.
People in Need NGO already donated some of the new reusable bags to partner organisations and is actively encouraging everyone to make use of them. If all the establishments made use of reusable shopping bags part of their corporate culture, we could soon witness improvements in plastic waste management in Armenia.
Well-known actors, beloved teachers of Syunik region as well as doctors and other citizens already joined the single-use plastic bag reduction campaign. It is time for us all to unite for cleaner and healthier Armenia.
Shushanik Nersesyan
People in Need representative office in Armenia
Media and Communications Officer
Mob։ 091 50 68 84, email: shushanik.nersesyan@peopleinneed.cz
