The beauty of our Blue Mountains region is being ruined by plastic pollution in our creeks, parks and bushland.
- Trish Doyle
Students from Kindle Hill School in Wentworth Falls have presented a petition to Blue Mountains MP Trish Doyle to ban single-use plastic bags in NSW.
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Every year tonnes of plastics are littered in wetlands, bushland and creeks across the state. In NSW up to 61 million bags are littered annually, while the national number of littered plastic bags is estimated to be 180 million.
Bans in South Australia, Tasmania, the Northern Territory and the ACT have seen a rapid reduction in plastic bag use with great consumer support. In South Australia, the ban is estimated to have led to 400 million less plastic bags being used in that state every year. In the ACT there has been a 36 per cent reduction in bags going into landfill.
Labor has introduced a bill into the NSW Parliament to ban single-use plastic bags and has repeatedly called on the Berejiklian Government to back it.
“I am really impressed by the efforts by Kindle Hill students to advocate for change,” Ms Doyle said. “They have done the hard work of preparing and promoting this petition. I was tremendously pleased to receive it and I commit to supporting their campaign to ban the bag.”
“It’s a very simple issue. The beauty of our Blue Mountains region is being ruined by plastic pollution in our creeks, parks and bushland,” Ms Doyle added.
The students’ teacher, Pippita Bennett, explained that the students prepared the petition by hand, collected signatures themselves, and wrote individual letters to their local MP and included drawings to illustrate the impact of plastic on the Blue Mountains’ waterways and bushland.
Some easy ways to eliminate plastic include:
Drink out of glass.
Use a steel or a reusable plastic bottle and stop buying bottled water.
Keep a metal or wooden cutlery set handy in a bag or car.
Use paper towel and put lunch in a brown paper bag rather than plastic packaging.
Use only real or biodegradable plates.
Buy grocery items that are packaged in glass instead of plastic.
Keep glass jars and reuse them rather than buying plastic containers.
Bring cloth bags to the supermarket and say no to single use plastic bags.
Compost green waste so using fewer garbage bags.
