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Ban the bag!

Forget Al Qaeda, it seems those mad-men are no threat to our way of life in comparison to free plastic carriers bags handed out at ASDA it seems

These bags really have become the issue of the moment.  The Independent newspaper took up the campaign a couple of years ago. Unfortunately as hardly anyone reads the Independent it fell to The Daily Mail to wade in before the UK’s collective ears pricked up, after which Marks and Spencer decided to charge people for carrier bags. For the environment you understand. Not to boost profits. Oh no. Latterly, sprinting after the bandwagon, the Government announced a plan to have a plan if someone didn’t do something this heinous crime

Doesn’t banning-the-bag all make good sense though? I don’t know about you but I’m almost obsessive about recycling. I’ve even been found fishing things out of the kitchen bin, rinsing them and putting them in the recycling. So please don’t think this is an anti-recycling rant – it’s more of a call for some rational discussion

Nowadays, if you question banning-the-bags you will be castigated in the same way as you would if you disputed Global Warming. Or drove a Range Rover

But I do want to discuss some of the suggestions which people say will solve the problem

Should we replace plastic carriers with brown paper bags? Paper bags take up a lot more space and weigh more than plastic bags. That means more truckloads of bags on the roads, more pollution and they’re also hopeless when you try to carry more than one of the things full of shopping. You’ve also got to manufacture them, which uses huge amounts of energy and water, even if they’re made from recycled paper

Should we ban carrier bags and make people use a re-usable plastic bag? Two issues with this. Firstly, in Ireland where a bag-tax cut carrier bag use by 90%, they saw an increase in sales of heavy-duty plastic carriers and plastic bin bags. Total weight of plastic bags used? Up 80% on when carriers were free. Issue two is that a lot of us use these things for bin bags, a form of recycling itself. Well, re-use anyway

I decided to do a little investigation, with the aid of my ever-tolerant investigative assistant, Amy, and a set of Salter kitchen scales. Bear with me here metric-martyrs, I was brought up on grams and kilograms but it’s the relative weights that count. A plastic carrier bag is 7 grams of plastic. The black bin bag I will now have to buy to use as a liner for my waste bin is 25 grams of plastic. More interestingly, the tub some stir-fry veg came in, for a single meal, was also 25 grams of plastic. Where is the campaign about that?

So what should we do? Well, reusing bags does make sense.  What I’d really like to see is for any bags handed out (or sold for 5 pence) to be made of a compostable ‘plastic’ material (readily available). That way they will at least rot down quickly and if we want to use them as bin bags, so they are an environmentally friendly way of containing any rubbish going to landfill

What I would really love to see is the UK’s collective ‘bag-rage’ aimed at all the supermarket packaging which contains far more plastic than the carrier bags and is often of a non-recyclable type. Only then will we minimise waste going to landfill and really make a difference to the environment for future generations

All the best

Matthew Lobley

Roundhay Ward Conservative Councillor

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