September 21st

September 27th, 2006 Yang Mulia Awang Hj Brahim bin Hj Ismail Controller of Royal Customs and Excise Headquarters of Royal Customs and Excise Department Jalan Menteri Besar Berakas BB 3910 Negara Brunei Darussalam. Assalammuailakum, RE: BAN THE IMPORT OF PLASTIC BAGS. My groups are third year undergraduates

at Universiti

Brunei

Darussalam (UBD) and currently taking a course on Multidisciplinary Approach for Sustainable Development, PS3403. In this course, we are conducting a Community Problem Solving project on “The usage of plastic bags in Brunei”. As part of the course, we would like to share with you our findings from our project so far and ask for some response from the Royal Customs and Excise Department on this matter. It is a major community concern from our view that there is an obvious overuse In a quick survey that we have conducted with 60 people in Brunei, a person obtains at least 5-6 plastic bags per week. If we extrapolate this for the whole population of Brunei, we use 1750000 plastic bags for only just one week and approximately 90000000 plastic bags are used or obtained per year. This is a large number of plastic bags. Plastic bags cause a lot of problems in other countries, such as flooding in Bangladesh so much so that now plastic bags are banned in this country; harming marine animals in many places where plastic bags are mistaken as food. On top of that plastic bags do not deteriorate fast and therefore stay a long time in our environment. Due to their lightness in weight, they are blown all over the place and cause an eyesore. From our survey respondents agreed that plastic bags are overused and are the main source of litter in Brunei. We would like to implore Bruneians to reduce the usage of plastic bags in this country. By stopping the import of plastic bags, we could reduce the amount of plastic

bags usage in this country. Maybe this way Bruneians can change their way of using plastic bags, and revert to using their own carrier bags for shopping. We would really like to see Bruneians use reusable shopping bags instead of using plastic bags We hope your department would take consideration the suggestions that we have highlighted that could be fulfilled by the Royal Customs and Excise Department on this matter. Thank you for your understanding and cooperation n this matter. Sincerely,

Mohammad Nordin bin Ramli (Group member) (04B2415) BSc Education Email: [email protected] Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah Institute of Education Universiti Brunei Darussalam Cc: Controller of Royal Customs and Excise. Lecturer of PS3403 Dean SHBIE, UBD Registrar & Secretary, UBD Enc.