Jane Davidson AM, the Welsh Envionment Minister is the latest person to receive a special Snowdonia Society re-cycled shopping bag. It was rather larger than the hundreds of others produced so far! The Minister was presented with the giant bag by Bea Kelsall (Project Co-ordinator, pictured right) and Alun Pugh (Society Director) at the 2009 Society AGM.

The Snowdonia Society’s Conservation Snowdonia Project have over the last year been inviting local communities to come along to free fabric bag making workshops. To date the society has successfully run eleven workshops and held three demonstrations; during the Ecobro Sustainability Fair, the Snowdonia Society’s Annual Plant Sale and to a local Merched y Wawr group. The Society has also demonstrated its work at the National Eisteddfod in Bala in August 2009. Communities are now approaching the Society asking to host future bag making events in their towns and villages, usually following the participation in a previous workshop or having received a bag made during a workshop.

An aim of the initiative is to show participants how easy it is to reuse items such as old curtains or bedding, which will otherwise end up unnecessarily in landfill. By encouraging people to make a bag during a workshop with the aid of a simple pattern, and the help and advise of other workshop participants, we hope that people will take their skills on to recycle and reuse other items, which in the current economic climate will help them to move towards a more sustainable lifestyle.

The initiative is also trying to reduce the use of plastic carrier bags, by offering an alternative. We are hoping that by raising awareness of the problems surrounding our reliance on plastic, we will encourage people to make more sustainable choices at the point of sale. And that such grass roots changes in peoples consumer choices will encourage businesses to address the current excessive reliance on unsustainable and excessive choices in packaging in general.

An additional benefit of the initiative, funded by CCW and CAE,  is in bringing communities together to pass on skills, which are in danger of being lost, such as sewing and knitting. We hope that by starting out with simple accessible actions such as these, that people will feel more empowered towards moving forward as communities towards local sustainably robust futures, possibly incorporating initiatives such as the Transition Towns movement.