About: Eurofeu, Paper Bags, Papillion, Recycling
Written by Christopher de Gruben on Friday, June 26, 2009.
The Mongolian government has recently announced that it planned to ban plastic bags from all shops in Mongolia.
This is a welcome initiative which should help clean up the ever growing ecological disaster that has been witnessed on the shores of the Tuul River where plastic bags seem to have become the predominant feature of the river.
Textile or recyclable paper bags are gradually becoming a common sight in European and American countries; Mongolia is one of the first Asian countries to set the example by taking the drastic step of banning them.
Once the plastic bag is gone from our everyday shopping experiences, what will replace it? The favorite European option is expensive, posh textile bags, often with wooden handles that people bring with them to the shop or buy at the shop for a price. But this means that you have to remember to take it with you each time you go shopping or shell out to buy new ones when you forget.
The preferred American option is the handle less, ubiquitous brown paper bags, again not the most convenient thing to carry around and not the strongest either.
A new product is needed, something strong, easy to use, cheap to manufacture and more importantly, biodegradable. It seems that some fancy Parisian boutiques and a few New York shops have developed just the right product, a new kind of fashionable bag; enter the newspaper bags. Simple bags made from recycled newspapers. They fit all the criteria’s required and even look fashionable, in a hippy kind of way.
But newspaper bags are no longer the reserve of the rich and fashionable, they can now be found as far field as UB. A fire safety company, Eurofeu Asia, has created a small dedicated workshop for making those newspaper bags. The work is done by disadvantaged women from the suburban ger districts of Uliyastai.
The women of the workshop regularly collect old newspapers from various city locations and spend their days gluing and assembling Mongolian newspaper bags. Those are then sold on to Mongolian shops such as the Papillion Bookshop which just ordered 200 bags on June 25.
They are cheap to manufacture (at around Tg400 a bag) newspaper is plentiful in UB (also free) and they are biodegradable within two to five months. Eurofeu Asia sells them at cost price in an effort to promote their use as well as give work to those that would not normally have any.
Papillon Bookshop Manager, Ts.Narantuya, says that “We have used those newspaper bags for over a year now, our customers love them, and we feel better by not polluting the streets of UB”.
The UB Post you are reading now might be well become a bag in the next couple of weeks and be taken back to Europe as a souvenir by a tourist or used to carry the groceries of a UB resident.
About: Eurofeu, Paper Bags, Papillion, Recycling
