The three Lincoln Academy Climate Action Club members could hardly contain their glee when they brought their first load of “green” bags to the Maine Coast Book Shop & Café last Thursday. It was the culmination of two years in planning and the satisfaction of the project finally materializing had a positively giddying effect on the three.
“We are so excited that this is happening. This is putting Damariscotta on the map,” said Sloane Fossett, who will be a senior in the fall.
Club member and recent graduate Dana Malseptic shares his schoolmate’s view of the potential far-reaching effects of the reusable bag campaign, idealism reflected in the club’s motto, “First here then everywhere.”
“Yes, our town has the power to set an example for the world,” he added.
The first order of 1900 bags will be delivered to 13 locations in Damariscotta where they’ll be sold for $2. Some locations, like the book store and Camden National Bank, already have the bags and others will have them by July 1.
As with any product creation, the club’s reusable bag concept had its twists and turns. The bag was first conceived as made of canvas, but the higher manufacturing cost made it a less desirable option than the polypropylene one.
Although made of plastic, it is of the so-called “number five” type, which is recyclable, and is made out of 20 percent post-consumer materials. Its lower manufacturing cost enabled the club to sell the bag for only $2.
Of course the concept part is only half of a successful product. The other half is marketing, and this is where club members take particular pride. Club founder Chloe Maxmin, who will be a senior in the fall, said it was always the club’s goal to have the campaign be a community-supported project. She and others worked assiduously in courting merchants, organizations and individuals to support their campaign.
She said she has found no similar campaigns anywhere. The closest in concept was at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, where students created a reusable bag for the town, but they didn’t involve merchants in the way the Climate Action Club did.
“This campaign is unique to our town,” she said. “There is nothing quite like it in the country. We are a model for other communities around the world. If our one town can save 671,000 plastic bags from landfills annually, 4.8 x 10 to the tenth power lbs. of CO2, and 400,000,000 BTUs, think of the power of a state or even a nation to make a difference.”
Another successful aspect of the marketing is that it is self-funding, Chloe added. Every dollar collected from the sale of bags will go back into purchasing more.
Maxmin, Malseptic and Fossett said the contributors should feel extremely proud to have made this project possible. They are: Yellowfront Grocery, Skidompha Library, Rising Tide Community Market, Damariscotta Bank & Trust, The First, Bath Savings Institution, Maine Coast Book Shop & Café, Citizens Offering New Alternatives, Elder Power, Maine Cloth Diaper, Maine Coastal Program, the Kaymans, the Hardinas and Eleanor Kinney.
Among the places where the bags are already being sold, a sales clerk at the book store said in less than one day a half dozen were sold. She said one customer said her husband didn’t want her to come home with “another one of those ‘green’ bags,” but when she was told it was a bag created by the Lincoln Academy Climate Action Club, she changed her mind.
Darci Harrington, branch manager of Camden National Bank in Damariscotta, said the bank has the bags prominently displayed and customers seem enthusiastic about them. “We were thrilled to support the club’s green effort and its interest in making a difference, and we’re also quite impressed by the club’s entrepreneurial spirit,” she said.
The bags will also be available at The First, Salt Bay Café, Damariscotta Bank & Trust, Damariscotta River Grille, Waltz’s Pharmacy, Round Top, Skidompha Library, Full Circle Family Medicine, Yellowfront Grocery, Bath Savings Institution, Rising Tide Community Market and Maine Cloth Diaper.
Alongside the bags are handy little cards the club made up, to give people an idea of the difference using such bags can make. A sobering statistic listed is that only five percent of the 100 billion plastic bags used in the U.S. annually are recycled and the rest become litter and take 1000 years to biodegrade.
