Students have bag-ban plan

A group of seventh-graders has done what staff at city hall were unable to do earlier this week — come up with a plan to eliminate plastic shopping bags.

The students from Cecil Rhodes School have produced a three-minute video promoting the banning of plastic bags and are challenging community leaders and all Winnipeggers to find alternatives.

“If Leaf Rapids can do it and San Francisco can do it, Winnipeg can do it,” said Jayel Masangkay, part of the Grade 7 video club at the Weston-area school. “Stop using plastic bags.”

The eight students have produced the video It’s In The Bag using a comic touch, live action and animation to get their message across. The video features Mr. Polymer in a session with a psychiatrist, complaining that he’s feeling unwanted after having been a vital part of people’s lives for 30 years.

“We started out with an idea of 17 ways to stop global warming, but
then we decided to focus just on one,” said Jezel Axalan, the director
of the video.

Cecil Rhodes School has had a lunch-time video
club for six years. The club is open to students in grades 6 to 8 and
the students work with project resource teacher Andrea Powell.

Powell
said the videos made so far have all had environmental themes, adding
that last year’s seventh-graders captured three national awards for
their video on the precarious health of Lake Winnipeg. This year’s
eight-graders made a video for the Children’s Rehabilitation Centre
that is now being distributed as a fundraising tool.

“I’ve been
teaching for 18 years and I’ve never found a project as engaging and as
rewarding for students as video production,” Powell said.

The seventh-graders began their project in September and tossed around ideas for weeks.

“It was when we came up with the idea of the psychiatrist that everything else came together,” Masangkay said.

The
students did the work themselves: writing and rewriting scripts,
building the tiny sets and animation characters, then filming and
editing the video. The work was done during their lunch breaks over the
past six months. Powell said she drove the students around earlier this
winter so they could record some live-action shots in various parts of
the city.

The video stresses using reusable fabric bags as a
replacement for plastic, pointing out that paper bags actually wreak
more havoc on the environment than plastic.

The students’ video can be seen on the school’s website: www.wsd1.org/cecilrhodes/crsinternet/projects/Current_Projects/other/movies/plastic.html.

They were disappointed that a civic committee decided this week not to
take any action on plastic bags, largely because civic administration
said they lacked the expertise to develop a plan to eliminate the bags.

The students said they want a meeting with Mayor Sam Katz and a chance
to persuade city hall to do something concrete that will lead to a
reduced reliance on plastic bags.

aldo.santin@freepress.mb.ca

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Dear plastic bag users,

You need to rethink how you use bags. Do you have a cupboard full of
plastic bags at home? Are you bringing more home when you shop? Do you
see plastic bags floating around the city? Are you ready to make a
difference?

We are a group of Grade 7 students from Cecil Rhodes School. We have
been learning about global warming and the environment, and have just
finished a video about the need to ban plastic shopping bags.

Did you realize that it takes up to 1,000 years for a bag to decompose?
Did you realize that Canadians use six billion single-use plastic bags
each year? These oil-based products are sitting in landfills and are
being eaten by animals.

To make 14 plastic bags, you would use the same amount of petroleum
that it would take to drive 1.6 kilometres in a car. And paper shopping
bags are no better — they require raw pulp to make them strong, and
have just as negative an impact on the environment.

So! We have a challenge for you. We want to encourage everyone to use
reusable bags. Think twice when you enter a store, and support an
all-out ban on plastic shopping bags in our city.

We’d like city councillors to change their position on banning bags,
and we’d like Mayor Sam Katz and Premier Gary Doer to show vision and
leadership in regards to the environment.

We believe that we can make a difference. If they can ban bags in Leaf
Rapids, Manitoba, and San Francisco, California — we can do it in
Winnipeg.

Help us get the word out. Check out our video on our school website (www.wsd1.org/cecilrhodes/crsinternet/projects/Current_Projects/other/movies/plastic.html) and help us win the battle of the bag!

— The Cecil Rhodes Video Club