|
GAZA, July 31-- Baraa al-Madhoun and Ghadeer al-Saqa, two young Palestinian women from the blockaded Gaza Strip, spend long hours sewing fabric bags, dedicated to their initiative of reducing the use of plastic bags in the coastal enclave. Together with five other natives of Gaza, they launched an initiative called My Bag that distributes fabric bags among shop owners and customers with the idea of changing the mindset of the Palestinian society. In order to avoid "grey and boring" bags, they decorate the bags, made of old clothes or their remains they get from local factories, with drawings or traditional Palestinian embroidery. "We want to institute a new culture here and encourage people to use our bags instead of those environmentally harmful plastic products that are being consumed and would lie underground for decades before starting to decompose," al-Madhoun told Xinhua. According to a 2018 report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, the average household waste in the Gaza Strip amounts to 716 tonnes, about 12 percent of which is plastic. The storage of waste is not the only problem in the Palestinian enclave. Another one is the way the authorities dispose of waste, usually by burning or throwing it into the sea, both "devastating for the environment." "We are facing an environmental catastrophe here, especially since we live in the besieged Gaza Strip that has no factories, nor facilities that recycle waste. So what has left for us to do is to try and spread the culture of using cloth bags in an attempt to curb the spread of plastic in the area," al-Madhoun said. | 
