Half A Million Eco Friendly Carrier Bags.
Enough ‘green’ carrier bags to carpet the M40 from Midlands to London have been bought by The Royal Horticultural Society from an environmentally aware Shropshire company. The Society has paved the way and purchased half a million compostable carrier bags from a small family-owned company, Ecosac in Shropshire, as garden experts prepared for this month’s Hampton Court Palace Flower Show.
In contrast to the damage to wildlife and the environment caused by a similar number of plastic bags, the compostable carrier bags will do no harm and will also become the green option to carriers made from oil, if Gordon Brown’s ‘bag tax’ is endorsed.
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To give an idea of the scale of the deal, the half-metre bags would stretch, side-by-side, from Ecosac’s base at Tern Hill, Shropshire, most of the way to the world-famous Royal Horticultural Society gardens in Wisley. The RHS responded to the challenge of eliminating plastic bags by replacing them at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show with Ecosac’s compostable carriers.
The sustainable solution will drive home the Society’s green message, and significantly reduce the damage from plastic bags. Ecosac is also supplying Clients from the Coop to the Soil Association, The National Trust, Organic Farmers and Growers, WWF and for the Welsh Assembly Government’s ‘Healthy Eating’ programme. The bags are made with GM-free non-food grade cornstarch grown on redundant land. They were used at the Chelsea Flower Show and BBC Gardeners’ World in Birmingham, and the RHS were so pleased with them they have extended this eco-friendly initiative to other Shows.
Frazer Walker, Ecosac Director, said: “This is a milestone for environmentally friendly packaging in the UK. We are a small company, which for six years has been supplying compostable products and with concerns about plastic bag pollution being high on the public agenda, Ecosacs are attracting growing interest, especially from towns which are determined to go plastic bag free and highlighted in the Daily Mail’s ‘Banish the Bags’ campaign in February of this year”. The carriers are also bearing the ‘green conscious’ message for Clients from organic food suppliers, to large garden centres.
Ecosac already supplies its carriers to the RHS Shops in Surrey and Yorkshire, where they are proving a great hit with the public. This latest development further shows the Society’s commitment to reduction of waste and recycling.