GrassROOTS RSO seeks to ban plastic bags in Kalamazoo

By David Alexander
Western Herald

A new Registered Student Organization is calling for citizens to stand up and serve their communities.
GrassROOTS President Melissa Nichols, a freshman majoring in secondary English education, and vice president Jake Durrett, a junior majoring in film, video, and media said that the new RSO was born out of the enthusiasm they witnessed during their contribution to the “Obama for America” campaign.

However, Durrett emphasized that the RSO is a community-organizing group not political in nature and said they didn’t want to come off as “Obama nuts.” He said the group welcomes members from all political affiliations and is all about reflecting the members of its community.

“Essentially what we are doing is taking community organizing skills that we learned working on the Obama campaign and trying to put it into issues that matter now … and make sure people are active in their community,” Durrett said.

The group is still in its formation stage, but is committed to promoting what they call “progressive politics.” Nichols said the group wants to take on projects that won’t be too easy, but won’t be impossible to accomplish. Such projects tend to scare people away, she added.
Nichols and Durrett agreed that the RSO should undertake bigger projects for their main initiatives, but both said they wanted to keep a few smaller short-term projects, like volunteering in soup kitchens, going as well. Durrett said that he also wants GrassROOTS to do things like podcasts and screen documentaries to raise awareness.

“We want to show that if you have the right structure, the right plans and the right energy to what you’re doing, you can change government; you can have a say in what happens in the world,” Nichols said.

Durrett said the group encourages input from all its members when establishing which ideas to pursue as campaigns. He added that the group is in the process of attempting to become a 501 non-profit.

In the meantime, funding for the group will come from a variety of sources such as bake sales, personal donations, member contributions and an online store that will feature a variety of organic and free trade products with the GrassROOTS logo.
GrassROOTS’ first proposal is to eliminate plastic bags from the city of Kalamazoo. With the “No Bag Please” campaign, the group seeks to achieve a ballot initiative to obtain a city ordinance similar to the one in San Francisco that would forbid business owners from offering plastic bags.

Plastic bags take 1,000 years to biodegrade on land, according to the United Nations Environment Program.

“It’s kind of necessary to actually create the change in businesses,” Durrett said when asked why he felt an ordinance was necessary to rid the city of plastic bags. “We realize that we are going to meet a lot of resistance and it is going to be a lot of hard work, but it will be fun.”

Durrett and Nichols said that in addition to spreading their message by passing out flyers, producing radio ads and public service announcements and posting on Facebook, they will also simply be going around and talking to people.
Nichols said the group’s goal is to rally support on a person-to-person basis. Durrett went on to add that eliminating plastic bags is justifiable because it has no negative impact on businesses and isn’t changing anyone’s lifestyle. The duo thinks that a sort of positive peer pressure will motivate the community to action.

“If everyone is doing it, everyone is more likely to go along with it … everybody is aware that plastic bags are bad, but we want you to be so aware that when you go to pick up a plastic bag, you think, ‘This is going to take 1,000 years to decompose’, so you might think twice about using a plastic bag,” Nichols said.

“If we are casual about the plastic bag thing, it won’t happen.”

GrassROOTS doesn’t want to be known only as an environmental group. GrassROOTS meets at 8 p.m. every Wednesday in the Bernhard Center.
Room numbers for the meetings vary, but are available week to week on the group’s Web site, www.grassROOTSwmu.org.

Short URL: http://www.westernherald.com/?p=4044

Posted by HeraldAdmin on Feb 17 2009. Filed under Local, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry

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