Getting Started
An easy way to get started to find out what others in the community are thinking in terms of plastic shopping bags – here are some thought starters
Find out what your customers are thinking about plastic shopping bags
Find out what is the community attitude to plastic shopping bags
- What are other local stores are doing
- Results of any surveys completed by Local Government or other organisations
Set your objective
As with any business strategy or approach it is important to determine what you want your business to achieve from embarking on a plastic shopping bag reduction strategy. The following examples may be prompts for you
- Achieve the kudos of being a Bag Smart Store
Click here for more information about registering to become a Bag Smart store - An initiative to work towards phasing out plastic shopping bags by 2008.
- Business demonstrating its commitment to being socially reasonable with its impact on the environment (could be linked to other activities such as recycling back dock packaging and cardboard etc)
- Business being associated with a positive community education campaign
- Increased loyalty through incentive programs to reduce plastic shopping bags
- Leveraging marketing $s through community advocacy of your in store activity/initiative
To achieve a significant reduction in any store will need planning and commitment. We are not advocating stores to introduce expensive and sophisticated campaigns, rather look at what you already do and look how these things could be leveraged to reduced plastic shopping bags. The most obvious resource to do this is staff – what you say and how you say it – will be the critical for customers
Community Relations
From a public relations perspective it may be more effective if you consider how you can develop a common voice and approach with others including retailers, community organisations and/or schools:
- Join your community to reduce plastic shopping Bags
- Become a partner in the local initiative to reduce plastic shopping bags
- Collaborative advertising with a community initiate to reduce plastic shopping bags - other retailers in their endeavours to reduce Plastic Shopping bags – develop a shopping precinct campaign
- Declare your commitment to reduce bags to your customers
- Provide leadership to your community
- use signage/merchandising within the store
- Bag Smart stores can use the Bag Smart merchandising to reinforce this message
No one sector of the community can achieve this sort of change in shopper behaviour alone, so we suggest you consider how to link up with other interested parties in your local community, whether they be the local council, environmental group, a service group like Rotary or schools 
