Supermarket plastic bags down

[dan_b]

This must count as a good thing?

https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4054 ... -bags-cent

"The single-use plastic bag charge has helped reduce the number of single-use plastic bags in supermarkets by 97 per cent since 2015, according to new analysis released today by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra)."

[AE-NMidlands]

but unfortunately lots of households now have dozens of "bags for life" because the individuals haven't got the foresight to put them back in the car, or if they have, to take them into the supermarket! Including not a few friends... their wives aren't very complimentary!
I am always amazed at thenumber of people I see buying new ones.
A

[rogeriko]

Indeed. I think we have close to 80 Bags for Life in our household. At least we dont throw them out to go to landfill, they are piled up everywhere.

[billi]

Well there was a campain in my youth-times called "Jute statt Plasik" that clearly educated me and left an impact

1. The
Jute Not Plastic Campaign
Jute statt Plastik (hereafter Jute not Plastic) was a political
campaign that originated in Switzerland in 1976. It arose out
of activities by Erklärung von Bern (The Bern Declaration), a
nondenominational and politically independent organisa-
tion based on a manifesto of the same name that garnered
1,000 signatures in 1968. The manifesto called for fair glo-
balisation, and the signatories committed themselves to
donating 3 per cent of their income to development coop-
eration. The main aim of the Jute not Plastic campaign was
to combine political education with the implementation
of specific projects of development cooperation. The cam-
paign bought jute bags produced by women’s cooperatives
in Bangladesh, which were initially sold in Switzerland as an
alternative to plastic bags. Two main reasons were cited for
problematising plastic objects: Firstly, the low manufactur-
ing cost of plastic items resulted in less demand for objects
made from natural material and thereby a reduction in
manufacturing jobs in countries such as Bangladesh; sec-
ondly, plastic objects bring with them an ‘unsolved disposal
problem, because they cannot be degraded by any biological
process (rotting, decay) and can only be incinerated’ (Jute-
Aktion 1977b: 40).1 The campaign argued that a plastic bag
entails four times the energy consumption of a jute bag and
that extended use of a jute bag increases the energy-saving
twentyfold in comparison with a bag made out of plastic

from here https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... ny_Austria



Surely i still forget sometimes to bring a bag with me and buy one at the way out and your comments are so true that those then pile up and basically most of them are full of much more plastic than the on-off ones



But pretty easy to avoid those bags are as on has the trolly anyway to bring the goods to the car or the bike

An slightly more concerned about food packaging in general seems that we move to a "every little blueberry needs a plastic wrap " society

[Gareth J]

It's not a simple calculation. Single use Vs something else.

How many times does that something else need to be used to make it less bad? And what metric do you use to compare? CO2? Embodied energy? Microplastic pollution?

I suspect that that a bag for life used the average number of times is no better, similarly a cotton one (for some metrics).

I reckon it's all largely irrelevant anyway. Compared to the energy and CO2 used to get the food into the shops and for consumers to take it away.

However it has value in getting people used to not binning stuff, which, even if it turned out to be worse environmentally than single use bags is probably worth it.

[smegal]

Since the "bag tax" my bag use has fallen off a cliff. I either use a trolley to carry the shopping to my car, or pick up an (already empty) box. Id have to be really caught out to buy a bag. I'd call it a success by any mesure.

[Joeboy]

Since the "bag tax" my bag use has fallen off a cliff. I either use a trolley to carry the shopping to my car, or pick up an (already empty) box. Id have to be really caught out to buy a bag. I'd call it a success by any mesure.

Same here in Scotland, we have re useable bags over here in Turkey too and very rarely forget to take with us. I also carry in the Mazda Bongo camper van so we take it on the road there too.

[Oliver90owner]

I don’t think I have ever paid for a single-use plastic bag. Don’t intend to, either. The answer to the question of me wanting anything put in a bag is ‘not if it is going to cost me!’

One of the main problems with single-use plastic bags was that of them turning up floating down rivers and at sea - as well as not decaying in land-fill.

Since covid, when I shop at supermarkets, the goods go straight into the trolley and are transferred to bags at my car. Any nasties were not transferred to the outside (at least) of my shopping bags.

[AE-NMidlands]

Indeed. I think we have close to 80 Bags for Life in our household. At least we dont throw them out to go to landfill, they are piled up everywhere.

I would put 2 in the back of the car straightaway, one or two in my bike panniers and one in each rucksack as a liner or just folded up so that there was always one or more to hand.

I might also give a dozen to each of the various charity shops we support. My experience with stored plastic things is that they degrade with time: I get something like a plastic tin-cover out to use for something else and it crumbles in my hand. A plastic push-in cap off a cardboard map tube did that just this morning.

[openspaceman]

My experience with stored plastic things is that they degrade with time: I get something like a plastic tin-cover out to use for something else and it crumbles in my hand. A plastic push-in cap off a cardboard map tube did that just this morning.

I'm seeing this with various old plastic from the dash light on a 50 year old car to polythene liquid containers amongst other things and these are not necessarily subject to sunlight. The plastic partition between the cylinder and carburetor on two of my saws has similarly disintegrated.

Who remembers "the man in the white suit"