Dubai: Huda Al Shourbagy is doing her part to usher in Earth Day through action and not words.
The Dubai resident was among 100 eco-conscious volunteers who turned out in high spirits yesterday at Crowne Plaza on Shaikh Zayed Road to create usable bags from discarded newspapers with a view to discouraging the use of plastic bags.
Hosted by National Geographic Abu Dhabi to ring in Earth Day, the Bag the Waste event created thousands of paper bags that will be distributed to grocery stores across the UAE in coming days.
"This is great, using the newspaper is so much better than just throwing it away," said Huda in the thick of an upbeat competition between Dubai volunteers and Abu Dhabi volunteers to build the most bags throughout the day.
"Anything we can do to reduce the amount of plastic bags going into the environment goes a long way," she said.
Teams created a sturdy carry-all thanks to organic glue that bonds the newspaper bags to such a high degree that heavy foodstuffs can be carried with confidence.
Simple solutions
Athreyan Sundararajan, director of marketing for National Geographic Abu Dhabi, said the Bag the Waste event follows last year's success of a Nat Geo event that collected 20,000 plastic bottles to raise awareness about the environment.
This year, the push is on once again to make people think about ways they can come up with their own simple solutions to make a difference through individual action.
"We wanted to do something proactive, we need solutions for the common person at the common level to implement," he said.
Making paper bags is an ideal way to use existing resources for other purposes and to delay sending materials to the land fill.
"By helping people who make use of plastic bags, we're helping people reduce the use of plastic bags and extend the life of newsprint," he said. "The life of newsprint is 24 hours but now it can be one week or more." Yesterday's event is the latest in a string of campaigns designed to help consumers change their casual use of plastic bags.
For the last four years, Gulf News has waged its "No to Plastic Bags" campaign following an initial investigative report that revealed camels, gazelles and donkeys were dying in the desert after ingesting discarded plastic materials strewn across the desert floor in some places.
Dubai Municipality has also jumped on the bandwagon to raise awareness about the push for more environmentally friendly materials such as paper.
Globally, it is estimated that between 500 billion and one trillion plastic bags are used annually, or roughly one million bags a minute.
Many plastic bags in the emirates escape the garbage stream and end up in the UAE wild where it can take forever for the plastic to break down.
"The disposal of a plastic bag constitutes the beginning of troubles and not it's end," the municipality said.
