K.V. Prasad COIMBATORE: Students of 90 schools in the city brought plastic carry bags from home and handed them over to members of the Residents' Awareness Association of Coimbatore (RAAC) at their institutions on Thursday as part of an ongoing drive against non-biodegradable varieties of plastic that could harm the environment. RAAC teams fanned out to various parts of the city to provide one cloth bag for every 10 plastic bags thus collected. "Our aim is to provide cloth bags to at least 40 per cent of the total number of students in each school,' RAAC vice-president G. Soundararajan told The Hindu. Among others, a group of students at the PSG Sarvajana Higher Secondary School assembled during lunch hour to hand over plastic bags to their headmaster, A. Balakrishnan. Mr. Balakrishnan handed them over to RAAC members and supplied the association's cloth bags to the students. "Each of you must make it a point to bring 10 bags in exchange for a cloth bag. And, you must take a pledge not to use plastic bags,' he told the students, while exhorting them to join RAAC's drive in the run-up to the anniversary of its Alagana Kovai (Beautiful Coimbatore) programme on June 29. The students brought till afternoon almost 2 kg of plastic bags, Mr. Balakrishnan said. "There is a lot of awareness among them about the ill-effects of such plastics. It is vital that they talk about these to their parents and people in the neighbourhood. This way, the entire society gets sensitised to the need to shun plastics.' By evening RAAC had distributed 37,000 cloth bags among schools and collected almost 1.5 lakh plastic bags from the students. "There was demand for more cloth bags from the schools as students of even Class IV and V wanted to be a part of the programme. The bags exchange programme is for students from Class VI to Class XII,' Mr. Soundararajan said. "The response is overwhelming,' he said.