Are we getting carried away with plastic bag use?

This problem needs to be dealt with by legislation since most people don’t care enough about environmental issues to make much effort.

If we had left it up to personal choice, we would probably not have introduced smoke control zones and catalytic converters. Respiratory disease would have been significantly higher and the only conceivable benefit would be a lower population.

As mentioned in the introduction, plastic bags are not the biggest environmental issue, but it would not be difficult to cut use dramatically if there was a charge. How hard is it to take your own bags to the supermarket? Some people have done this for decades.

I would suggest that we get rid of the flimsy free bags that are not strong enough to re-use and sell heavier duty bags for 10 or 20p.

Paper bags are commonly suggested as an alternative to disposable plastic bags but it does not take much investigation to realise that they are not a solution.

Our regional supermarket chain do push the 10p “Bag for Life” and most of the locals use them, however holidaymakers who make up a significant proportion of the customers tend not to come equipped with a supply of bags.

I think there has been a culture change as far as reusing plastic bags is concerned and more of the single use bags are being used several times often ending up as bin liners or being recycled.
It would be interesting to know whether sales of bin liners are also rising ?

It would not be hard for the Tabloids to describe a bag fee as a ‘TAX on Shopping’ and make a lot of fuss. I take a number of ‘Bags for Life’ when I go on planned shopping trips and would not mind paying a small charge when I forget, but then I have a good income. Perhaps there are many around me living on the fringes of poverty for whom even such a small charge would be a burden and who rely on today’s free bags as their source of bin liners and nappy disposal bags.

When I was living in Australia a few years ago, most supermarkets just stopped using plastic bags and instead offered really robust and good quality tote bags for around $1 (40p at the time) – I was more than happy to meet the inital cost for this quality bag and still carry them round in my backpack to save me using plastic bags here.

The situation won’t change unless we’re no longer offered plastic.

This has been going on for years, why don’t we do what the French supermarkets do and just ban all plastic bags, and if you have come without your own bag, they then charge for bio-degradable cardboard boxes! Simple!

I recycle standard-size supermarket bags as bin-liners – but now that I usually take my own re-usable ones, I find that I run out of them and have to deliberately take a few rather than buy purpose-made bin liners. Yes, I bet sales of bin liners would go up if free plastic bags were banned.

Actually I don’t think supermarkets are the only offenders here. Smaller grocery shops are much worse at compulsory bags – but the real bad guys are shoe and clothes shops which dish out heavy-duty fancy plastic bags with paper inserts and stout handles for even quite small purchases. Yes, they are strong enough to re-use – but how many bags does one person need?

I always ask for plastic bags in my supermarket.
They are small and very lightweight because they are made from thin gauge plastic sheet.
We use them for kitchen bin liners (more essential as refuse collections become less frequent).
If I used/ compelled to use reusable bags for my shopping I would have to buy specific bin liners.
These are larger and are made from thicker gauge plastic sheet (more profit for the supermarket).
This would mean I would be putting more plastic sheet in to the waste system, at least twice as much.
How can this make sense ?, do`nt the powers that be think things through ?

Do people apply the same logic when shopping for clothes/shoes/non-food items?

Could hemp bags be a solution to this? Can it be mass produced as easily as plastic? probably not but it’s worth a look

I like free plastic bags from the supermarket. I think they come in very useful and are not as environmentally unfriendly as some would have us believe.
Yes if desposed of irresponsibly they pose a limited environmental problem but no more so than any other item of litter.
Free plastic bags are often not “single use” and the vast majority don’t end up attached to a dolphin’s nose. Rather they become bin liners, old newspaper holders, loose fruit bags and some get reused for shopping.
The real problem is with all the other unnecessary “single use” packaging we get. There is far more of that around the various supermarket items we put into our plastic bags than the bags themselves, and that packaging cannot be reused.
No, I think this “big environmental problem” caused by plastic bags is a myth.
I’m collecting as many as I can while they’re still free in preparation for when some well meaning but misguided fool makes us pay 5p a go for them.
Wonder who will get that 5p (times who knows how many million)?

From a recent newsletter I see that a local councillor has written to Tesco asking for mesh to be reinstated on the perimeter fence to stop plastic bags being blown out of the Tesco car park, and ending up in trees and gardens. A couple of years ago, this Tesco store started asking customers if they wanted bags and now almost all assistants offer them. Some even start packing them for me, even when I have a selection of well-used reusable bags in the trolley.

Here in Wales the Welsh Government makes stores charge 5p for a bag, so most people us ‘Bags for Life’. The money is donated to a charity of the store’s choosing. The problem arises, however, when buying an item of clothing; here too the 5p charge applies. Who would want to pack new fabric goods in a bag which has been used for the weekly shopping. Certainly not me! So it becomes an unfair surcharge on the purchaser.

I totally agree with the comments of D Preston posted above. My wife & I always re-use the supermarket plastic bags as bin liners and none are ever thrown away empty. We do need to use two at a time as they have holes in them. So if we are forced to use re-usable carrier bags which are no use as bin liners, then we will have to buy specific liners. So where is the saving in plastic?

Maybe a charge for bags is the most sensible solution, so that the customer has the choice. I believe that is the situation in Wales.

As Ian says, there are many other ways we use plastic bags. Our use of plastic should certainly be reviewed

I believe it is right to tackle free supermarket bags first because it is so easy to take bags to the supermarket. Bags sold at the checkout should cover the cost of production and the cost of disposal, but that will not do anything about the amount of oil we use to produce them.

the article this month is fascinating – 131 uses for a cotton bag to be better for the environment. And 3 for a paper bag (which will never happen)

One issue is that Tesco bags for example are so much worse than Morrisons bags. You can get a lot more in the latter and it is less likely to need double bagging. Saving weight on each bag is possibly a false economy.

I’d prefer the incentives for using your own bags to be more widespread

I am referring back to the interesting comments above on polyethylene magazine wrappers and the disposal problems with all sorts of plastic packaging. I have been wondering why the landfill issue usually gets cited as the most serious concern. An increasing amount of the UK’s unrecyclable waste is dealt with by incineration and our county, like others and prompted by the government as a matter of policy as well as through the landfill tax mechanism, is moving towards that method of disposal. Surely the incineratioon of so much plastic material cannot be good for the environment [even if the flue gases are “scrubbed” this uses other finite resources, transport, energy, etc}.

Unfortunately our local authority does not want poly wraps in the recycling bin but neither does it want any paper envelopes [because of the glue in the joins and seals] so what now goes to landfill and would degrade over time willl in due course be incinerated with immediate consequences.

As has so eloquently been said by others above, we just have to arrest the use of plastic wrapping and packaging in all its forms.

What a lot of fuss about nothing. Our bin is filled with packaging that supermarkets have to use, because any one can handle foodstuffs, so it is deemed essential to carefully wrap every item. Our plastic bags are required to line the waste bin in the kitty, and if no free bags, then we shall have to purchase them, and so still use plastic bags.
Folk should be sensible and accept only so many bags as they require, and never throw them away without putting them to further use. Environmental issues are used to impose further taxes without putting these taxes to a profitable use.

It is very simple in France, supermarkets don’t give out or sell polybags at all. You can however buy proper shopping bags (much more substantial than our supermarkets’ “bags for life”). We are still using 3 Carrefour bags that we brought home 5 years ago. Of course it will never happen here because our Government will pussy foot around the issue for ever rather than taking action.

With regards to the argument that people need plastic bags to line bins with – this is only because many councils these days insist that waste is bagged before being put in the dustbin. When I was a child, people just put the waste in the dustbin unbagged, and washed the bins out from time to time. The waste was emptied into a dustcart by tipping the bin upside down (as some carts now do automatically with wheely bins). If we are serious about the environment (and we need to be), we also need to have a debate about persuading councils to accept unbagged rubbish again.

It won;t change until they are either banned or charged for. My local aldi charges just 3p for a carrier and i would say 70-80% don’t buy them. 3p puts people off! We are a bunch of tight wads when you think about it 🙂

Personally I would like the same as what someone said they had in Australia.

Paper bags are no good as they cost about 5-10 times more to buy in than carriers.

We find plastic bags very useful for many things being both light, strong and waterproof. The supermarket bags are also ideal for bin liners and if we didn’t have these we would have to buy them so for us the usage would remain broadly the same. They’re not single use.

We don’t have a car and often shop spontaneously, we often carry a rucksack each and maybe a stronger plastic bag after that we need extra. A charge or tax is annoying.

Encouraging people not to take more bags than they need should be sufficient. Introducing oxo-biodegradable plastics will take care of food plastics that end up as litter.

So we’re against a tax.

We don’t accept plastic bags in the supermarket or anywhere else if we can help it. We take our own. We don’t need to find something to reuse them for. We don’t need to.

We separate our food waste into a newspaper lined food waste bin (and sometimes a wormery).

We rinse and recycle what plastic we buy (inadvertently as packaging). Hard plastic (except large items, flower pots and polystyrene are not recycled by our Council (not that they realise that there is more than one kind of polystyrene and I’ve always presumed they mean expanded polystyrene packaging). Plastic bags for bread and some other items are often recyclable in larger supermarkets (check the packaging). It often says so on the bag but doesn’t on the recycling bank in the store – still – years on!!

So with nothing messy in the bin we don’t need a bin liner.

We have a green box for other recycling – including clean foil (which in many areas if not collected kerbside can be put into can banks – ask your Council).

Waste paper goes into a waste paper basket – nothing else and we never put food into a bin anywhere other than the kitchen. That’s how it always used to be in the past. It is still a good system.

You can get more (if you need to but we don’t) into your bin if you don’t try and fill it with lots of little bags. You can just line your bin with a black sack and then tie it up and put it out when it is full.

The occasional single-use bag still gets into the house occasionally and will be reused somehow BUT they no longer cascade out of a drawer or cupboard when it is opened. Such freedom is a joy!

I think 3p would be a better price. I used them in my under sink bin. There are very few shops that sell packs to fit that will replace them. So I have to make a special journey by car now to buy 40 x 3p 16 litre bags of more or less the correct size. Bin bags are too big and not suitable for rectangular under the sink bins. I don’t think the council would appreciate rubbish eg food waste going straight in the outside bin.