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.
Call me skeptical, but I seriously doubt the accuracy of these claims. This is the kind of study that the supermarket would pay for to justify their for-profit decision to start charging people for something that has always been free.
It’s a government study.
It wasn’t the supermarkets’ decision to sell them — it’s the law
Well… they’re only counting ‘single use’ plastic bags…
All supermarket plastic bags now are ‘bag for life’ aka. reusable (I’m not sure what was stopping people reusing the other ones, but that’s the way it’s done) so they don’t count in the statistics.
So the statistic isn’t useful - I’d like to know the real numbers (including all bags) as I expect there has been a drop, but it isn’t 98%
Thank you! They did the same crap here where they stopped giving away plastic bags and started charging for paper bags which were always free before. Then they put plastic bags in the stores which are like 20x thicker than the previous plastic ones and use way more plastic, and they charge for those now. They’re like “problem solved!”. But nobody actually re-uses those. They just buy new ones every trip. So the outcome is that they stopped giving away thin plastic bags and started selling thick plastic bags, and they think it’s a win. It’s not a win for anything except the grocery store pocketbook. That study is completely pointless like you said. Of course there’s a massive drop of the single use bags if they completely stopped offering the single use bags. But if it’s anything like over here, they’re actually producing more waste now, and costing the consumers money to do so.
Edited for a bunch of phone typos