Victoria's Green Matters - 20th Jan 2011

Deal With IT's Secretary Victoria Nicholls writes a regular column in the East Kent Mercury:

How is your campaign against plastic bags coming along? Maybe you don’t have one. As I go through the checkout at the local supermarket, I am often quite shocked by the number of people who have a trolley full of goods packed into numerous new plastic bags.

While the retail trade has made much of using disposable plastic bags which they advertise as ‘biodegradable’, there are many millions of discarded plastic bags around the world which cause a danger to wildlife everyday. When the bags biodegrade, they do so into tiny balls of plastic, which end up on the seabed, can be swallowed by marine life and cause death. The UN estimates they account for the deaths of 100,000 marine mammals each year.

A better approach is to buy an ‘everlasting’ bag from the supermarket, which will be replaced free of charge when it wears out. Another option, for the ladies anyway, is always to carry a thin cotton bag in your handbag when you go shopping. And no excuse for you, gentlemen, one will fit into your coat pocket quite easily! If you shop by car, it is easy to carry bags with you – just don’t forget to take them into the shop!

At New Year, the Italian government took the forward-looking step of banning all retailers from handing out plastic bags to customers. A group of supermarkets are having biodegradable plastic bags manufactured for them but most shops will opt for the re-usable bags. Stylish Italians are not keen on old-fashioned shopping bags and some are opting for modish shopping trolleys.

As resources become scarcer and oil is less easily available to be used to manufacture plastic bags, we will have to get accustomed to using bags made from durable but far less dangerous materials than plastics.