SOME of you may remember my writing in this column about my support of the Community Links campaign to get the numbers of plastic bags reduced.

These last few weeks we have notched up another success on the campaign to get people in this country to think carefully about the legacy of rubbish we are depositing in the earth, and particularly the difficult and all-prevailing issue of the plastic bag.

Every year, in this country alone, more than 13 billion 'disposable' bags are binned. They end up killing wildlife and littering our streets, parks, rivers and canals.

Last spring, in what was a really pleasant day out, I spent time at Stratford Shopping Centre with a group of young people to highlight the plastic bag problem to shoppers.

They all seemed interested in the shocking facts and figures, and receptive to ideas about changing their habits.

But I know from my own behaviour, it is far too easy for these messages to encourage short-term behaviour only.

I am always forgetting to put my cloth shopping bags back into the boot of the car and have to resort, red-faced, to grabbing the cheap, thin, supermarket bags to shove my purchases in.

It is a consequence of busy modern lives and it has to change. I have to change. If we are going to reduce our impact on the planet, we must work together to change fundamentals about our behaviour, like reusing plastic ones and carrying cloth bags. If we all make these little changes it can make a big difference.

Individuals can make a difference, as can committed groups like our own Community Links group and the We Are What We Do campaign, which produced a designer cloth 'I'm not a plastic bag' bag to raise awareness of attractive alternatives to plastic.

When I am carrying it, I am much more likely to do what it tells me - dump the plastic. But when I'm not, the message is a little harder to always remember - until I am at the checkout!

Being greener has got to become part of the basic fabric of our lives - just as environmentally friendly buildings are becoming part of our landscape.

The new Stratford bus garage under construction has a great green building plan, with recycling and reducing energy consumption at its heart. All around us things are changing.

Of course the big players, governments and huge supermarket chains, can make the biggest impact more quickly, and things are starting to change here too.

Worldwide initiatives like the Kyoto agreement and our Government's legislation like the proposed Climate Change Bill set out targets for reducing carbon emissions in the near and distant future, and link it not only to cutting pollution but also to economic growth.

As we saw at the end of last month, more and more big businesses are tying eco-friendly targets into proposed growth. Not only did Marks & Spencer become one of the latest supermarkets to take a stand on plastic bags, they are putting their money where their corporate mouth is and actually charging for them.

Any money they make on this will be handed over to green charity Groundwork to help boost our environment.

This follows earlier initiatives from Sainsbury's and Tesco who have tried incentive schemes like handing out free reusable bags and giving financial bonuses for reusing existing plastic ones.

Maybe charging for the plastic bags will help me, and others like me, to remember more often the need to pack our cloth shopping bags for the weekly shop.

For me it is about planning ahead for the day and being committed to having my own longer-term green strategy.

It's not 'the environment', it's our environment, and the small things we individually do can amount to something worthwhile.

If you have any comments on this issue, or any other, e-mail me at brownl@parliament.uk, write to me at Lyn Brown MP, House of Commons, London, SW1A 0AA, or call my office on (020) 7219 6999.