She was driven to take action after spending more than a year witnessing and filming the effects of rubbish on the world’s largest albatross breeding colony on Midway Island, Hawaii, for a recently aired BBC natural history documentary, Message in the Waves. Her campaign has since inspired towns and cities across the UK and Europe to follow suit.

What inspired you to start the campaign against plastic bags in Modbury?
Last year, I was sent to Hawaii to make a documentary about some of the environmental challenges facing the islands’ people and wildlife. The trip was an epiphanic experience because we were surrounded by all this rubbish for so long. We were there for 14 months, and the thing that really got to me was the monumental scale of deaths [we witnessed], in particular while filming Laysan albatross chicks in the species’ biggest breeding colony, which is on Midway Island. Laysan albatrosses fly out to sea to hunt for their chicks, regularly covering 1,600 kilometres in a single trip. They think that anything colourful floating on the sea’s surface, including plastic bags, is squid, so they pick it up, ingest it and fly back to land, where they regurgitate it and feed it to their chicks. Sometimes the plastic is so sharp that it pierces the chick’s stomach or it becomes filled up with plastic so that there’s no room for squid or water and it dies a slow, horrible death by starvation or dehydration. Others drown when they try to fly out to sea for the first time because they’re so weak. We tried to rescue them from the waves, plucking bits of plastic from them and spreading them out on the beach to dry them out, but I’d say that out of about 30 birds we rescued, maybe one survived. I don’t cry at much, but watching and filming them all die, there were times when I switched the camera off and cried my heart out. One in five chicks die from this every year.

Where does all this rubbish come from?
The UN says 80 per cent comes from landfill and 20 per cent from ships – 90 per cent of it is plastic. The average person in the UK uses 157 plastic bags every year, so that’s almost one every two days. And they use it for approximately 12 minutes. Plastic bags just get blown all over the place into the rivers and into the sea from landfills.

What happened when you returned to Modbury?
When we got back from Hawaii, I just couldn’t look at plastic in the same way again – it has changed my way of thinking. I got a real bee in my bonnet about plastic bags – they’re the epitome of throwaway living and they’re the one thing you can really do without. The campaign started when I showed Message in the Waves to one of my friends, who’s a shopkeeper in Modbury. His reaction surprised me; he was really shocked and said he would never use plastic bags again. Then I showed the film to another friend who owns an art gallery [in Modbury] and she had exactly the same reaction. This was before the film was due to air, so then I thought: ‘Why am I waiting for it to come out on TV? I could be showing this to people now.’ So I persuaded every trader in the town to come and see the film at the end of April and then posed the question about getting Modbury plastic-bag-free – 36 out of the town’s 43 traders turned up.

So what’s the alternative to plastic bags?
If you’re going to have an alternative, it has to be better for the environment and not have any human right issues attached to it. I wanted certificates, I wanted everything questioned by the wholesalers. So fairtrade cotton bags from Mumbai are the main bags that we have, but because of hygiene and tourists, we also have two disposable bags. For hygiene, we have corn-starch bags for cheese and the like. It feels like a very silky plastic, but it biodegrades in 40 days and if it’s ingested by an animal, it passes through its digestive tract. We also have a fairtrade and EU-forested paper bag for some of the top-end jewellers, galleries and so on.

Is it the first ban in the UK of plastic bags?
Yes, I also think we’re the first in Europe to have an outright ban. There are a few places [in Europe] that have stopped using carrier bags, but we’ve banned every single type of bag – whether it’s for a tiny slab of ham, a pair of earrings,
or whatever. We even have corn starch doggy-poo bags and pedal-bin liners, and the florist now has biodegradable acetate and paper for wrapping flowers.

Have you been approached by other people hoping to replicate your achievements in their communities?
Absolutely. So many communities are in the process of banning plastic bags: places in Ireland, Arran and Skye, Jersey and Guernsey. And lots of cities too: Oxford, Stroud, parts of Birmingham, parts of Liverpool and all sorts of little towns just like Modbury. We have one lady who’s hoping to roll out a ban across Brighton and Hove, but she’ll do it bit by bit. If you’re going to pick any city, you’d think that one would be [most receptive]. It’s fantastic!

What would you like to see happen now?
In five years time, I want government rulings in place that makes disposable plastic packaging a thing of the past. In the next two years, I want to see the big five supermarkets at least [no longer using plastic bags]. We pushed the Modbury Co-op to do it because I think the Co-op is everyman’s shop and if the Co-op can do it, then any chain can do it – in the same sense that if Modbury can do it, then any town can do it. You can do this anywhere, you don’t have to be an alternative green town. Modbury is a quintessential English farming town. It’s a pro-fox-hunting, conservative, meat-eating, Land Rover-driving type of place – the last place you’d expect something like this to happen.

For further information, visit www.messageinthewaves.com or www.mcsuk.org