Date published: 2008/11/26
The BBC says:
Four of the UK's leading supermarkets say they are confident that by next Easter they will have halved the number of plastic bags handed to customers.
They were speaking after Waitrose and Asda told MPs they had already achieved 30% cuts by moving bags under counters so shoppers had to ask for them.
Supermarkets agreed to voluntary annual 25% cuts in bag use last year - heading off the option of plastic bag charges.
UK retailers hand out an estimated 13 billion free plastic bags every year.
Use of the bags, which take about 1,000 years to decay, is being examined as part of an inquiry by the Commons environment and rural affairs select committee into waste management in England.
It's amazing how hysterical the academic middle class are about plastic bags. So they have used emotional blackmail, with the threat of worse, in order to browbeat the supermarkets into curtailing plastic bag use. And by making it hard for customers to get hold of plastic bags, surprise the usage has gone down. But plastic bags are not even close to being the number one environmental problem in supermarkets. Top of that list must be the crazy amount of energy that is used because chilling units are kept open to the air. But nobody ever mentions that for some bizarre reason.
And this alleged "1000 years to decay" is just one of the many arbitrary figures that the anti-plastic-bag brigade throw around. But most modern plastic bags pretty much dissolve into dust within a decade or two, in normal conditions. Of course when buried in the ground, plastic bags, like a lot of rubbish (e.g. paper), doesn't decay very quickly. This is hardly an alarming fact.
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