Thursday 18 October 2007

Knitting a Madonna bra - and plastic bags

This week it is both National Knitting Week and Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and to mark this, Bedecked in Backfold has thought up a novel fund raising idea. For 50p visitors to the shop can have a go at French knitting, and the lengths of knitted tubing produced will be made into one of those conical bras that Madonna made famous in her stage acts.

Meanwhile, the bid to ban plastic bags continues. They have a launch date at the beginning of December, for the Hay Festival Winter Weekend, and the idea is that retailers around town pledge not to buy any more plastic bags, and to use up the ones they already have in stock. Biodegradable bags made out of corn starch will be available through the Wholefood shop, to be sold on at 5p each, and a Hay-on-Wye Fairtrade cotton bag is being launched on the same weekend. Some shops are also using paper bags. The inspiration for this campaign came from the Devon town of Modbury, and there's also been a recent campaign in Presteigne.
Here's a statistic or two for you - between 500 billion and one trillion plastic carrier bags are used annually worldwide. Each one is used for an average of 12 minutes, and takes around 500 years to decay.

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