Simeon Brody
Over the past few years there's been a lot of noise about the evils of plastic bags. They've been blamed for filling up landfills and inflating people's carbon footprints, mimicking jellyfish and confusing turtles, even being labelled 'witches knickers' when blown into Irish hedges and trees. Now, in the grand scheme of things, plastic bags are not the biggest of our consumption 'wrongs', despite a million being given out every minute. But every little thing we do to improve the problem helps us go in the right direction.
So, at the 'Springboarding' of Kirkbymoorside Transition Town this weekend, I was pleased to see a bunch of women with sewing machines busy making cloth bags. Every time they finished another, one of them rang a little hand bell and a cheer went up. When I'd gone around all the stalls about energy efficiency, local trading, permaculture and saving bats habitats, I said hello to the 'Kirby Baggers', a local pod of Morsbag makers. They gave me a lovely cloth bag, in curtain green... it was in fact a recycled curtain made into a good strong bag with sturdy handles which don't look like they'll come off, even with the weight of stuff I tend to carry around!
Morsbags was founded by Claire Morsman who was moved to do something about the disposable plastic bag problem after first finding a dead sea bird with a plastic bag wrapped around its legs, then seeing the contents of a whale's stomach, which included a handful of discarded poly bags. She describes these as 'serial killers', causing the death of one animal, then floating free of that decomposing carcass to kill again. She also lives on a houseboat in the Grand Union Canal, and despairs about the number of 'urban jellyfish' that float by.
Like Rebecca Hosking, founder of Britain's first 'plastic bag free town', Claire is also a solutions person. Despite not being adept with a sewing machine, she used her great-aunt's old machine and a design her mother came up with, and the (rather excellent) website skills of Joe, now her husband, to start morsbags.com 'sociable guerilla bagging'. There are now over 800 individual baggers using the forum and 850 'pods' registered,all over the world. I also like the fact that morsbags are always given out free and use material given to them or reclaimed from charity shops. The forum has a guide to starting a pod, and I see this as an excellent sociable activity for perhaps young mums, or excluded older people, and could even be seen as theraputic. 10/10 for morsbags, I'll use mine with pride!
Once adept with the relatively simple task of making a morsbag with a sewing machine, repairing clothes should be quite easy too. This activity saves money and saves resources. It is part of the portfolio of being green and ethical... in fact, I saw a patch on a friend's trousers recently, and said 'did you mend that?'.. the answer was, 'no, I bought them like that', so having something which looks patched or mended is presumably now fashionable too!
I was one of the morsbaggers at Kirkbymoorside. There are not many pods of morsbaggers in North Yorkshire so it would be great if one could start in the York area. Contact me at Kirby baggers via morsbags if you want to chat about it or just look on the website www.morsbags.com.