Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.
Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.
What is missed in this article is bags for life purchases. We saw the same article more or less in 2019 and once you factored that in there wasn’t much of an improvement in plastic use or disposal. Expect the same to appear after this article at some point.
A reusable plastic bag only needs to be reused ~40 times before it is better than single use plastic bags. Are people really using them so few times that they can’t hit that?
All the data says that no, people are not reusing them.
Anecdotally, it makes sense. You left your bag in the trunk, or at home, or it turns out you got slightly too many groceries, or you’re staying at a friend’s house and you pop out to get some groceries and don’t have your bag…
Well that’s a shame. I guess living in a car-centric region it’s easy for me to just throw them in the trunk so I always have them, but I could imagine if I was taking public transit more often it would be easier to forget them.
Yup, my bus stop is next to the supermarket and I’ll often pop in on my way home from work to get some stuff I realised I need. I have a big bag full of reusable plastic bags at home now. But I’m glad it is working for many people
40 times is fucking wild, I maybe get 5-10 if I really go hard before I forget to bring it one time and have to buy another one
Even in that scenario, it’s not like the first one goes away. Now you have two reusable bags.
Now I have 20+ until I can’t store them any more so I have to throw them out*
There’s no real way to get rid of surplus bags, that’s the problem. So they just pile up until they go to landfill. If shops let you return bags somehow that would be fantastic.