Are we getting carried away with plastic bag use?

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.