Date published: 2008/02/29
The BBC says:
Gordon Brown has warned retailers he will force them to cut down on plastic bag use if they do not act voluntarily.
Writing in the Daily Mail, he told stores that "If government compulsion is needed to make the change, we will take the necessary steps."
Campaigners say plastic bags, which take an estimated 1,000 years to decay, damage the environment.
Marks and Spencer has already announced that it will charge food shoppers 5p for each bag from 6 May.
The move follows a trial at 50 of its outlets in Northern Ireland and south-west England, which resulted in demand for polythene bags falling by more than 70%.
Mr Brown praised the chain - which says the money raised will go to environmental charities - as well as Ikea, which stopped providing single-use plastic bags from its branches in July 2007.
But he insisted that, if other stores did not follow suit, the government would be "ready to do what it can".
"We do not take such steps lightly - but the damage that single-use plastic bags inflict on the environment is such that strong action must be taken," he said.
Ideally, he said, any scheme to cut down on their use would also secure funds for environmental organisations.
...
Mr Brown added that carrier bags were one of the most visible and easily-reduced forms of waste and shoppers, supermarkets and the government all had to "accept our own responsibility for ending the environmental damage we are causing".
Brown says it all. Plastic bags are "visible" and the academic middle class do not like them, so have been waging this rather pathetic war on them the last few years. Brown may rather snear at "single-use plastic bags" but most ordinary people (unlike Brown, it seems) re-use their plastic bags as bin liners, and also to store junk. (And in that regard, they only seem to last ten or so years before disintegrating, so heaven knows where the 1000 year estimate came from.)
It would be interesting to compare the environmental damage from plastic bags versus the environmental damage from, say, newspapers. The latter are if anything more "single-use" than plastic bags, and serve much less purpose in life (with one or two notable exceptions). But of course the academic middle class like newspapers, so leave them alone. (And pick any other random source of waste in the world.)
And why should an (arbitrary) charge on plastic bags be "ideally" used to "secure funds for environmental organisations"? Why should the ordinary people of Britain be subsidising a bunch of unaccountable academic middle class control freaks? If M&S want to throw money from their plastic bag charge at some random organisation because they are pretending for marketing reasons to be do-gooders, then that of course is their right. Hopefully other, less middle class, shops, will spend any such money more wisely.
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