Motueka's reducing plastic with re-usable Boomerang Bags

Thursday, 2 March 2017

Noah Williams 11, Tiana Knoef 11, and Adam Irvine, 12, with scraps of material to be made into boomerang bags.

Re-usable Boomerang Bags are coming to Motueka.

Motueka's Claire Hutt and Jo Calt are two members of a team aiming to reduce the town's use of plastic shopping bags by offering a locally made alternative.

Noah Williams 11, Tiana Knoef 11, and Adam Irvine, 12, having bags of fun with the material.

Boomerang Bags are made by community volunteers from recycled or leftover material. They are left at various outlets for shoppers in lieu of plastic bags. The bags can later be returned to the shop on the purchaser's next trip to town.

Popular in their Australian birthplace the bags are already nationally available in Wellington, Tauranga and Rotorua.

Hutt said Motueka would be the fourth New Zealand town offering the plastic alternative.

The Motueka bags would also carry the town's name, so they could make their way home from other parts of the country, she said.

Calt, who is the associate principal at Parklands School, said the initiative was all about community, getting old and young together, gathering unwanted material and holding sewing bees to make the bags.

The project would help reduce plastic pollution, reduce plastic waste going to landfill and support the move away from being a throw-away society.

'We hope to have 500 bags available at the Kai Festival on April 9,' Hutt said.

Boomerang Bags first breathed local air after the idea was individually tagged to Calt and Hutt on Facebook. Three meetings and a team of supporters later and the plan would now be put to the community.

For a week from today people could donate suitable unwanted material (not knits) and thread to the project through a drop-off point at the Motueka Community Store, in Whakawera St.

A public open evening at the Motueka Technical Education Centre (MoTEC) would be held on Wednesday for interested volunteers to find out how they could help, the pair said.

The launch evening would include a screening of the documentary 'Bag It' about the environmental harms of plastic bags.

Please RSVP to (03) 528 8978 (extension 3) or email:boomerangbagsmotueka@gmail.com. Community sewing bees will be held at MoTEC on Saturday March 11 and 18 from 9am to noon and on Tuesday March 14 and 21 from 2.30pm to 5.30pm.