Kitchen Garden Forum

Despite the fuss about inconvenience and confused shopkeepers just before the "big day". it all seems to have passed off without problems. Shopping yesterday - not a single plastic bag to be seen in shops or in shoppers' hands.

I shopped in Wales yesterday and the woman in front of me in the queue paid for eight bags! I produced my own Morrison's bag in Harry Tuffins Supermarket in Knighton Powys.
Since the fuss a couple of years ago when I use Morrison's there are very few people who do not have their own sturdy and brightly adorned Morrison's bag and very few plastic bags are in evidence.
I do not think it necessary to have the same 5p tax in England.
JB.

alan refail wrote:Tomorrow Italy goes all the way and bans them:-

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12097605

Italy was the first place I saw massive use of plastic bags in supermarkets some 40 years ago. So popular were they that within a year or so towns and the countryside were littered with their tattered remains.

The tattered remains blowing in trees etc around us are often sheets of plastic discarded by industry and the black bags that blow out of dustbins. I hate to see it once the trees lose their leaves the problem becomes more evident. I've seen plastic like this stay trapped in a tree for over three years being too high it the tree to reach.

Coming soon to a country near you?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-18563395

England next?

Our independent supermarket phased them out ages ago, except for the insulated plastic freezer bags. We managed before plastic bags. If you think about it we have just come full circle years ago women used to take their own shopping bags or wicker baskets and a string bag in their handbag just in case. No hardship to use our own shopping bags and better for the planet.

This is a case of bolting the stable door after the horse has already gone!
My impression, using local supermarkets, is that the use of plastic bags is now almost non-existant in this area. Most people I see at the checkouts have their own long term reusable bags.
NB, I would suggest that you are somewhat behind the times for most areas of the country.
I live in an exceedingly rural area and I know only one old lady who lives on her own who still uses a shopping basket and that is falling to pieces.
We have better ways of storing produce today so food is no longer bought on a daily basis as it was in yesteryear.
JB.

But what about all the plastic they use to wrap fruit and vegetables etc. (In fact meat, bread and other things too). Our supermarket sells loose fruit and veg (as well as packaged in plastic) but still have plastic bags for you to pop the loose fruit in to take for weighing at the checkout. They wouldn't like it if you just popped the poose fruit in a basket.

I also think they try their best to make it impossible to compare prices - for instance pre-wrapped it may be priced per fruit but loose per kg so you have no idea which is the best value.

Then there is the sweating caused by sitting fruit and veg in plastic sometimes strategically positioned so that you can't see the underside.

Hi Sue,
Most of the plastic packaging is used for health reasons and certainly packaging in a safe manner is essential.
Pop down to the butchers and buy and buy some mince or sausages and wrap them in greaseproof paper that was never particularly 'grease proof, and put then in your wicker basket and by the time you get home the wicker basket has something leaked onto it and that is itself is a health hazzard.
It's all very well showing the boundary fence of a rubbish tip with masses of polythene bags stuck (the classic photo) on it as an example but what that actually means is that they were disposed of responsibly by householders and it is those who operate the tip that are responsible for their escape into the surrounding area.
So paper bags are to come back into fashion which the next moan will be thousands of papaer bags all over the place.
I wish this government of ours would stop wasting public money trying to prove that they are so 'green' because they are green but in a different way. Gullable is the true word!
JB.

Johnboy you misread I was talking about what women used to use. Actually my shopping bags are quite modern, not a basket, and certainly not plastic.
Gallotments, I agree the packaging and comparing like for like is not good in supermarkets, also many products are flown or shipped great distances adding to emissions which we should be reducing. I try to buy local wher possible. Veg box schemes are more sustainable, they are often local, and use biodegradeable card containers / packaging.

Johnboy wrote:Hi Sue,
Most of the plastic packaging is used for health reasons and certainly packaging in a safe manner is essential.
JB.

But not for fruit and veg JB where they also offer a non-packaged alternative. A biodegradable paper bag would be OK for that wouldn't it?

The one interesting point in my district councils vanity magazine was tucked away in a puff for their recycling operation, where the contractor asked for all plastic bottles to have the lid left off, because the lid is invariably a different plastic to the bottle and the only way for them to do it is by hand. The computerised vision sorting machines can sort all the different items by reflective vision and air jet technology.

Hi Sue,
And we have biodegrabable plastic bags hereabout that are made of corn starch I believe so see no need to go back in time to use paper bags.
The next bitch will be that we are using too many trees for packaging.
I think that this government is too much in the faces of the population.
Trying to tell us how we should live our lives when they apparently do not have the foggiest idea how normal folk live.
Final posting for me!
JB.

The Welsh Assembly Government have also decreed that paper bags used for carrying goods,as opposed to wrapping goods,also be levied at 5 pence on the grounds that they are more expensive to produce and use more energy,therefore,more emissions.