Consumers in Greece have been required as of January 1st, 2018 to pay 4 cents per plastic bag as the country wants to harmonize its relevant law with EU guidelines, according to a bill having been drawn up by the environment ministry and set to be tabled in parliament.

The Eco-Tax is 3 euro cents but with 24% Value Added Tax, the cost rises to 3.75, the actual charge is therefore 4 cents and as of 2019 the charge will rise to 8 cents per item.

According to Research Institute of Retail Consumer Goods (IELKA) findings, consumers in Greece use a total of 4.3 billion plastic bags per year of which only 1 percent is recycled.

And here is our contribution... 

The idea is to create our own handmade cloth bags and sell them out at a school bazaar in an attempt to convince people to replace the plastic ones and contribute to the environmental protection.

So a few days later, we decided to meet up and under the right instructions to create as many bags as we could. First, we bought the fabric for the bags. The fabric that we used was canvas. Then a teacher of ours who knew the process and how to sew, made a pattern that helped us understand the steps we had to follow. We were divided in groups and we started making the bags. Initially, we took the pattern and we put it onto the fabric. After that we cut the fabric up into the right pieces and dimensions and we gave them to our teacher and a student mate to sew them with the sewing machine. Next, we printed our Erasmus+ logo onto the bags, we added the school's insignia and here we are!

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So....we leave our trace to a change for a better world.