Paying for carrier bags

[luciemule]

Just out of curiosity, would you still carry on using your main supermarket (say Tesco, or Sainsbury's) if they stopped giving you any carrier bags and said you either had to pay for them or use another method (eg -boxes or jute bags).

Would you simply go to a supermarket that didn't charge for them or go with the flow?

it's been the law in most of europe for years and people have just accepted it.

england is lagging far behind on this issue.

it shouldn't be the supermarkets responsibility, it should be the law

recycle my bags so wouldn't bother me. will hopefully help reduce waste though.

I always feel a bit narked if i have to pay for carrier bags tbh. I don't mind not using carrier bags as long as there is something free for me to use instead like kwik save (showing my class here) used to give you cardboard boxes to take your shopping home in which was handy because I was a creative child and loved playing with the boxes afterwards, now when my kids want to make stuff I have to wait until we have collected enough stuff.

why not just buy the bags for life and bring them with you though?

it would help me remember totake my own bags as i am tight

Would not bother me as I have a collection of cotton/hemp bags and baskets that I always use.

I'd go out of my way (on a donkey, obv.) to go to a supermarket that did this. Fecking plastic bags.

Most people will use the supermarket they always use, I am sure.
I have three 'bag for life' bags, that I always forget to take in with me -
then need to pop back to the car to get them
I think it is a good idea to charge for bags.

When it comes to paying for bags in a supermarket it would depend on what happened to the money. If it was profit for the store I'd not be very happy about it but if it went on environmental concerns I'd feel okay about coughing up 5p or whatever. I've been using my own bags for quite a while now for supermarket shopping so would only have to pay on the times I forget my bags, which these days isn't very often. However, it's just the wheel turning full circle; bags had to be paid for when I first got married, back in the 70's.

It's shopping on the High St I find more problematic, in that I don't really want to lug a shopper everywhere with me when I'm browsing but if I end up in the M&S food dept I then usually need to use their bags. I'm getting to be a bit of a bag lady in that I keep seeing nice bags and have to have them - I need a bag for all my bags.

Using a reusable bag here in Nigeria is a nightmare, they just don't understand the concept. One supermarket has just started selling bags for life but the packing staff insist on carefully putting everything into a plastic bag and then they put it into the bag for life. The litter problem is atrocious, mostly of discarded bags, esp the ones drinking water comes in. (This is a country that sells water in bags and peanuts in bottles, lol.) And an advert for tetrapaks of drinks that says "Pop, pour, throw!" means they've a way to go yet.

I think we should pay for carrier bags. I use my own and if I forget I pile the shopping in a box that I then use to store my cardboard recylcing. It took a while to remember to take the bags but I'm getting better now.

What I find frustrating is the number of bags you can end up with from other shops. I can just about justify the carrier bag when its completly full of shopping, especially if it gets used for something else afterwards but go along the highstreet and WHSmith will give you a bag for your paper, then you buy a pair of socks in next and they want to give you one and then you buy a bobble in clairs and they give you one and you get home and you have more carrier bags than you ever get from the supermarket. I now take a bag with me and beg assistants not to give me a bag but sometimes it takes some real grovelling.

It makes me laugh at the horrified looks you get from shop assistants when you say, "I don't need a bag, thanks."

I'm from Ireland, where they already pay for bags. Most non-grocery stores use paper bags for your purchases. In fact, I noticed Primark in Oxford Street are doing this now. Penney's (Irish Primark) has been using paper bags for yeeearrrs.

It definitely makes you remember to bring bags to the supermarket.

I was recently in WH Smith and they weren't giving out bags automaticly. The lad serving asked if I needed a bag. i had bought a load of pens and pencils and then he put one of the stores flyers on top. I didn't fancy carrying all that without a bag.

people would go with the flow.

It really did work in France where people were so wasteful about plastic bags, and perhaps not as switched on about recycling as here.

The story of Rebecca Hoskins/Modbury really inspired me. I wish my town was a plastic bag free zone. WHen presented with the terrible impact on the environment of discarded plastic bags you would be mad to carry on using them. It would be fantastic if the big retailers started charging for plastic bags or even better stopped sourcing and supplying them altogether.

Carrier bags sadly are just a token so that people can feel "something is being done".

Firstly of course the "bags for life" aren't for life, they're just not that robust. They are a way of supermarkets to get a few quid more, or for governments to get some tax.

In an average shopping trolley you will find dozens items that each contain more material than all the bags for that trip. A quick review of my last shopping trip had most of the items each with more wrapping than the weight of plastic used in a bag.

I'd be happy to pay for bags, I always use cloth or bag for life ones for grocery shopping and tend to bring one bag with me and shove everything in there for other shopping.

Here in N Ireland M&S is going to start charging for plastic bags in June - but they'll be giving away free bags for life the week before (actually, that's this week!) It's a trial, and they plan to do the same in the rest of the UK later in the year, they started here because you already pay for bags in the south.

I might remember my cloth bags more often if we had to pay for carrier bags -good idea IMO but agree with DC that it is a drop in the ocean compared to the packaging on your food.

Surely supermarkets would save money i(and gain green status) if they put less packaging on their food or am I just being naive?

Tesco had some figures about if we all used one carrier bag less a week. The saving over a year was in the millions so that must be good.

I agree that other packaging needs to be looked at. Especially multipacks - baked beans or baby wipes for example. Not just their normal packaging but extra.

What I REALLY hate is not being able to buy certain fruit and veg at the supermarket (corn on the cob springs to mind) without a tray and plastic wrapping.

Good yes, but important ?
A bag is about 1 cubic centimetre of plastic. Thus there is about one million of them in a cubic metre. ( 100 100 100)
The average wheelie bin looks to me like 1/4 of cubic metre. Thus a million bags is 4 wheelie bins to go in landfill.
Of course a bag looks like a lot, but when put under other rubbish, is not so much.

Tesco of course says millions, is that 10 million ? giving us 40 wheelie bins ?

A rough look at a rubbish lorry looks like 30-40 tonnes to me. To save that mass you are talking about 30-50 million bags depending upon the plastic.

It is of course "good", I suppose, but let's not pretend one lorry load of waste is going to save or destroy the planet.

I think it was about 45 million but I do get your point.

Not using plastic bags won't save the planet but my philosophy is that it all helps.

Re excess packaging, I read somewhere about people who unwrapped their stuff in the supermarket and leave the packaging in the trolleys. I think it would be more effective to unwrap it in the store itself, causing chaos so the supermarkets would be keener to do something about their suppliers.

I've been shopping with bags for life for a long time and don't understand why I see so people doing the same. Supermarkets don't encourage their use at all, I feel, and are always willing to top up mine with carrier bags, which I find annoying.

Yep, between 1 and 1 1/2 lorryloads.
Nice PR for Tesco and a bit more profit; customers feel good about themselves, but almost no measurable effect.
Sounds like most of the so-called Green ideas the media peddle because almost no one there can do numbers, and worse don't think they are important, as we saw on the Panorama scare stories on WIFI radiation.

They media seems to have wholly been captured by the British farming lobbies, with lots of stuff about how imported food is bad.

I think paying for bags is a fantastic idea - stops you taking them without thinking. One shop here does it and you see loads of people in there using their own bags. I hate the practice of being given a bag every time you buy the smallest thing - I have a big shopping bag a re-use that. Ok, if I buy tonnes of stuff I need plastic bags but then I reuse them or put them in the recycling bin.

Domini - sorry to be pedantic but the whole bag for life idea is that they ARE for life - when your first, or current, one breaks you take it back and swap it (for free) for another one and they recycle the broken one - so you always have a bag but are not throwing away one after another.