Emma Sutcliffe and Wolf Graf are very passionate about improving our environment. They introduced us to the Boomerang Bag. The Boomerang Bag is a bag made by volunteers from scrap fabric (old curtains, sheets, etc) that can be picked up at a shop, used and then brought back for the next person to use.
The concept was started by two women in Queensland five years ago. It was picked up in our local area by a group of Year-9 school students who wanted do do something to reduce the amount of plastic bags that we use. Their year-long project initially delivered 30 bags to the Little River General Store. Since then, over 200 bags have boomeranged throughout the Little River community.
Many public workshops have been run which has resulted in the production of over 700 bags from over 100 kgs of fabric which would have otherwise been sent to the tip as landfill.
The fabric is sourced from various places including the Fit4Use store where Lorry Rowe has generously donated many rolls of material which have been made into handles, pockets and bags.
From its simple beginnings, Boomerang Bags now has 745 groups established worldwide. This has resulted in 250,000 bags being made from 62,000 kgs of fabric.
The aim is get people to share, think, replace, reuse and to change their habits of using plastic. Plastic pollution is at crisis levels all around the world. Emma and Wolf say that it is time to stop making and using single-use plastic items such as straws, coffee cups, shopping bags and water bottles which have such a profound and long-standing detrimental effect on our world. Boomerang Bags will assist in reversing the plastic trend.