New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn joined fellow elected officials and President George W. Bush’s niece Lauren Monday in an effort to push through a City Council bill aimed at reducing the city’s dependence on plastic shopping bags. Here’s the story.

Bush plugged the FEED Bag she launched on-line in April for the United Nations World Food Program. (She’s its honorary spokeswoman.) Proceeds from the $60 reusable burlap and cotton bags — with the word “FEED” stamped on the side — help the U.N. provide a child with food for an entire school year. Story here.

Ms. Bush told reporters: The average American uses between 300 and 700 bags a year. To give you a visual of that number, if everyone in the U.S. were to make a giant chain with their plastic bag, it would wrap around the earth 760 times. That’s just the American annual consumption of plastic bags. And on top of that, plastic bags don’t biodegrade. They only break down into tiny toxic little bits that pollute the soil and our waterways. This process is called photodegrade and it takes around 1,000 years for these bags to break down in our landfills. It is for these reasons that I support this legislation in City Council. I think it is important for New Yorkers to recycle plastic bags and buy reusable bags. Story here.

Will Chicago follow New York and bag the plastic bag? Mayor Richard Daley is on a mission to make Chicago the greenest city in the country. Story here.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic DEVON shoppers will undergo radical “plastic surgery” thanks to a series of ‘Don’t let Devon go to waste’ roadshows next week aimed at reducing the use of plastic bags. A team of green surgeons will be on hand at supermarkets across the county to transplant shopping from disposable plastic bags into sturdy cotton bags which can be used again and again. This story is here.

Norwich City Council is looking into the possibility of planning to launch its own reusable cloth bag in the new year. This story is here.

Steve Morphew, leader of the council, said it was committed to tackling the problem to the extent that it is making sure that its bag is organic and fair trade.

He said: “We’re planning to bring out a Norwich bag in the new year. It will be a genuinely organic, reusable, fabric bag.

“We are thinking about selling it at the tourist information centre and once that has kicked it off, maybe getting more businesses on board and possibly some of the local schools.

“Maybe once we have got one design we can start producing different designs to make the bags trendy and collectable. It is fine to tell people not to use plastic bags, but you have to give them an alternative.”

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