BYOBag Campaign Kicks Off Downtown (with VIDEO)

Ever thought about how much plastic you use in a day?

From the milk jug to yogurt container to the soda bottle to the salad bar container, our daily plastic consumption can add up.

Princeton’s Bainy Suri is spearheading a local effort to raise community awareness and specifically to get residents to B.Y.O.Bag—translation: Bring your own bag.

Suri, events coordinator for Sustainable Princeton, believes that Princeton can be a role model for sustainable living.  

“It’s about a collective consciousness and changing behavior,” she said. “And it’s a chance to impact the environment and hopefully changing it for the better.”

Suri, a recent transplant from San Francisco, is an avid composter who carries her own cup to the coffee shop and brings her own containers to the grocery store deli.

On Friday afternoon, she and a group of like-minded residents performed a flash mob in Princeton’s Hind’s Plaza on Witherspoon Street.

It was a way to get people talking about the B.Y.O.Bag campaign, which will officially launch on June 9,

“This is something fun, crazy, wacky, to get people excited and thinking about activism,” Suri said.

Princeton Borough Council and the Township Committee have passed a joint resolution declaring that Princeton’s B.Y.O.Bag campaign will begin June 9.

Officials encourage residents to purchase cloth bags and reuse old plastic and paper bags instead of accepting news ones. They also recommend that merchants distribute or sell cloth or recycled bags and stop offering new plastic bags to customers. 

Ariel Moltak, a senior from Yardley, Penn. who attends Princeton Day School participated in Friday’s flash mob and is also working on the B.Y.O.Bag campaign as part of her senior project.

Moltak wants people to switch from using single use plastic bags to reusable cloth bags to reduce the number of non-biodegradable bags clogging the oceans.  

Daniel Harris of Princeton agrees.

“Plastic bags clog the sewers and cause expense to municipalities across the world,” Harris said. “Buy a cloth bag- it’s inexpensive, about $1 each, and it is eternally reusable and eternally washable.”

Suri said was sparked to activism in Princeton after she watched the film “Bag It” at the Princeton Environmental Film Festival

On average every person uses 500 bags a year and those non-biodegradable bags end up in the ocean, where fish eat them and humans eventually ingest that fish, she said. 

Now Suri wants to attack a widespread environmental problem through community activism.

“I think Princeton is a place with an opportunity to become a real example of what a progressive, sustainable community can be,” she said.