Making Waves

A new BBC documentary about Hawaii and the environment, called Message in the Waves, caused a city in England to ban plastic bags after resident and filmmaker Rebecca Hosking set up a screening. From a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor, which follows the continued downfall of the cheap disposable plastic bag used by grocery stores (500 billion of which are used annually worldwide):

Dumbstruck by what she'd seen off the Hawaiian coast during her year-long filmmaking trip, Hosking set up a local screening of her film and invited the town's 43 shopkeepers to come see where plastic bags end up.

All but seven of them showed up. At the end of the viewing, held in a local hall, Hosking called for a show of hands in support of a voluntary ban on plastic bags. Every single hand went up. The rest of the town's shopkeepers quickly followed suit. On May 1, Modbury won bragging rights as the first plastic-bag-free town in Europe.

Read the entire article here.

Watch the trailer clips from the Message in the Waves here.