Asda’s Got a Brand New Bag
From this Monday, the whole might of the law will prevent supermarkets from giving free carrier bags to consenting adults. Not really a proper law, but an Order made under the Climate Change Act, which allows extra regulations like this to be imposed on an unwilling public without too much inconvenient scrutiny; but a law, nonetheless, with transgressors punishable by a fine of up to £5,000. Nanny-state control-freakery, with a hint of crony capitalism; Tony Blair would be proud. Is this really what the Government is for?
The powers-that-be have been checking up on us. Apparently, the average household contains 40 plastic bags scattered around the premises, which is obviously far too many. Never mind that we re-use these bags as bin-liners, or to carry washing in, or pack sandwiches in, or wrap frozen food in, or occasionally to use as an emergency substitute when we’ve run out of certain smaller bags that come in handy when walking the dog. Hell, sometimes we even employ them as something to pop our shopping in so that the journey home from the shop is a little less like that game they used to play on ‘Crackerjack’. But Nanny knows best and a crackdown is clearly long overdue.
When the majority of Brits purchased their shopping from the local corner emporium, many came armed with their own little tartan trolleys or the shopkeeper provided a brown paper bag to shove their spuds and assorted goods into. The coming of the supermarket gradually saw the introduction of the modern polythene shopping bag, which was invented by a Swedish engineer called Sten Gustaf Thulin in the early 60s, an invention boasting such remarkable durability that some estimate it could take centuries for plastic bags to decompose. It is this very durability that has made the humble plastic bag so problematic when it comes to disposing of it. In the developing world, where rubbish collections are haphazard to say the least, a build-up of discarded plastic bags can block drains and cause flooding, as has twice happened in Bangladesh in recent years and as regularly occurs in Manila. In countries such as ours, however, the infrastructure is a tad more professional, which makes the new law somewhat nonsensical.
To prevent criminal supermarkets from cheating, there will be that dependable old tool of the secret state, mandatory reporting. How many bags were supplied to customers? How much was charged? How much VAT? Records must be kept, sent each year to DEFRA and kept on file for three years. No records? That’s another £5,000 fine. And woe betides any business ‘failing to assist the local authority’ when it sends round the Bag Inspectors; that could cost said business up to £2,000. And Bag Inspectors there will be; it’s the local authority’s job to make sure the law is being upheld, and I’m sure there’ll be a quite a queue for the post when it’s advertised. After all, could there possibly be a higher calling in life, one guaranteed to ensure eternal mother’s pride? Maybe the fines will pay for the extra work. If not, I’m sure the council tax and business rates will cover the cost.
The supermarkets will not be at all upset. I suspect they quietly lobbied for this new law with their friends in government. They would have liked to have done away with free bags long ago, but couldn’t for fear of losing customers to bag-giving competitors. Now they can look sad-eyed and say the Government made them do it. And it’s money on their bottom line: no cost of free bags, no liability if the customer’s own bag fails and drops the shopping on the floor; they get to sell more bin-liners and sandwich-bags, and – the icing on the cake – they get to deduct ‘reasonable expenses’ for all the admin and reporting. They do have to give the balance to ‘good causes’, bless ‘em, but I’m sure they will be extremely reasonable in working out the expenses to deduct.
So, everyone benefits. The supermarkets make money, the local authorities increase their power, staff and taxes; green activists get to feel good at solving this intractable problem. Everyone, that is, except the ordinary shopper and householder – deprived of something that was useful and free; and wishing that the Government would just go away and mind its own bloody business for once.
Gareth
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October 3, 2015 at 9:06 am -
” Apparently, the average household contains 40 plastic bags scattered around the premises…”
Mine are all in the kitchen!
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October 3, 2015 at 9:09 am -
that come in handy when walking the dog and then making those pretty ‘Norfolk Xmas Trees’.
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October 3, 2015 at 9:11 am -
Nicely put.
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October 3, 2015 at 9:33 am -
In the bigger picture, in a hundred years’ time when history compiles its considered view of Cameron’s decade in power, his list of key achievements will surely be summarised as gay marriage and the 5p carrier-bag.
But then, compared to Obama, that’s mega.-
October 3, 2015 at 9:56 am -
+1
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October 3, 2015 at 11:55 am -
If–by some miracle–Camoron ever gets the public execution he deserves then it will be by a plastic bag over the head.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
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October 3, 2015 at 11:20 pm -
+1
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October 3, 2015 at 11:27 pm -
+ another 1
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October 5, 2015 at 2:53 pm -
I would have thought that slotting Bin Laden would count for something….
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October 3, 2015 at 9:40 am -
Yes indeed – you are so right, everyone benefits except the consumer. TPTB realise that any law or “rule” can be introduced if they use one of the following This text is
excusesout!/reasons;It stops global warming
It protects children
If it saves one life it’s worth it
By the way, who is this Gareth?
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October 3, 2015 at 3:17 pm -
“By the way, who is this Gareth?” – I don’t know but I rather like the cut of his gib.
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October 3, 2015 at 4:50 pm -
So do I, but as far as can recall, I’ve not seen anyone of that name appearing on here before. I just wondered if it was somebody we might know by another moniker?
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October 3, 2015 at 9:43 am -
Pfft. They’ve been charging 5p per bag in Scotland for a while now. The number of bags used has gone down by a ton because it’s so annoying to go out to buy stuff and have to fork out for additional bags. The sky hasn’t fallen in yet.
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October 5, 2015 at 2:30 pm -
The problem is mainly the judgemental attitude from the people on the tills. You’re standing then with a conveyor belt full of three weeks’ groceries and the troll on the till asks if you “need a bag”.
“Yes, please.”
“How many?”
“That fucking many. ”
“And what’s more, once I’ve unpacked all the bags I”m PAYING FOR, I will be quite happy to block a drain or strangle a seagull or whatever hideous act it is you imagine you’re preventing by sneering at my bag procurement.”
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October 3, 2015 at 10:20 am -
The Environment Agency’s own assessment of carrier bags https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/291023/scho0711buan-e-e.pdf notes that a cotton shopping bag has 131 times the “carbon footprint” of a standard plastic carrier bag. On those terms a cotton bag would need to last for 2 1/2 years of weekly shops to compete with a plastic bag even with no reuse at all; I reuse mine maybe a dozen times each.
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October 3, 2015 at 10:49 am -
a cotton bag would need to last for 2 1/2 years
The German Environmental agency ‘discovered’ that fact decades ago (after everyone in Germany felt compelled by the Power Of Nature) to switch to cloth bags….made from environmentally friendly unbleached jute or hemp, handwoven by photogenic 3rd World Fair Trade natives-what-lives-in-‘armony-with-Nature .
I can’t be arsed to google but I will wager that among those who have been lobbying for years against carrier bags, it is well known that it is all a load of ‘dingos kidneys’ (a technical term for ‘the scientific facts do NOT support the contention that cloth bags are ‘greener’) but the Greenmeanies are adamant, despite it being bunkum, that we as a society NEED TO SET A SIGN!
Which , by strange non-coincidence- mirrors exactly the ‘We must SAVE the poor lilkle cheeEEElden from being exposed to TOBACCO SMOKE in cars’ . Can’t recall which scientist it was, a Jap I think, who proved 20 odd years ago that diesel exhaust fumes contain the single most carcinogenic chemical known to science…Tributyl-wtf-somethingortheother
Not so long back someone was mouthing off to me about how she knew that no Kiddy had ever started smoking because of the shiny packs but WE MUST SET A SIGN!
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October 3, 2015 at 10:36 am -
If I go to the nearest shops on foot, I walk along the A40 (on the footpath!) where the verges, bushes and ditch are covered with litter. But strangely, I rarely see any plastic bags. There are cans & bottles galore, beer cans, Red Bull cans (a lot of them), along with fast food packing, polystyrene boxes and trays, cardboard boxes, torn wrappings, but no plastic bags. Most, I suspect was thrown from passing cars as few people walk that way of an evening and in any case I would suspect the locals would prefer to eat their takeaways at home. So the plastic bag charge isn’t going to do much about our local environment.
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October 3, 2015 at 11:07 am -
Stupid isn’t it? Now we will have to buy bin liners because we can use the bags. Naturally the durability and disposability of plastic bin liners is far nicer than the carrier bags they replace.
So shopping bill goes up, supermarkets make more money, and we’ve still got the same number of plastic bags as we did beforehand. The only difference is that we have to buy them.
Effect on environmental pollution? Bugger all!
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October 3, 2015 at 11:32 am -
Not forgetting, of course, that the very same environmental lunacy means that we only get our bins emptied once a fortnight, the alternate weeks having a ‘recycling’ collection. As a result, waste needs to be double bagged, and that was where the good old supermarket bags came in handy.
Having said that, my tally of bags in a weeks shopping hardly comes to a huge sum of money, but my refusal (for now) to pay the bag tax guarantees that I will always take my car when I go shopping.
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October 3, 2015 at 12:50 pm -
but my refusal (for now) to pay the bag tax guarantees that I will always take my car when I go shopping.
A man of principles!
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October 3, 2015 at 4:48 pm -
Not having a car, I’m fortunate to live within a few yards of several supermarkets, but the once-a-fortnight bin collection is ludicrous if you live in a multi-occupancy house. Three black bins for five flats, all of which are brimming over with crap within a week, whereas the green one sits practically empty.
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October 3, 2015 at 5:37 pm -
Want to rent some bin-space, Pet ? I’m fortunate that our local council still does weekly collections and even more fortunate to live somewhere with difficult access, an access which their standard large bin-trucks can’t manage. Hence they send a smaller ‘rural round’ truck – but they don’t have any small ‘rural round’ trucks for all the green/recycling nonsense, so we only have general wheelie bins – and I’ve got two of them, both of which are filled to the brim every week with pretty much everything, from car batteries and tree-branches to building rubble and engine-oil (and the occasional domestic waste too), and they happily take it all. As it’s about the only service I get for my extortionate Council Tax, it’s still pretty expensive though.
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October 3, 2015 at 11:46 am -
I think carrier bags are all made of degradable polythene, so they only last for a few years before disintegrating.
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October 3, 2015 at 9:32 pm -
I think they are degradable. Some, I find, disintegrate on the way home from the supermarket.
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October 3, 2015 at 12:14 pm -
The truly daft thing is that this was an EU initiative sponsored by Italy. They in turn have been pressing ” call me Dave” for some time at the UK’s reluctance to pass a bill charging for bags. Of course our leader here Renzi would have no idea that the Brits would take it so seriously. To the Italians you pass a law , congratulate each other and then totally ignore it. Who, an Italian would say, can do without plastic bags.
Certainly down here in the Heel of Italy we are awash with them. It is impossible to avoid being given one in any shop even for the smallest of articles. Like the Brits we too use them then for rubbish and happily toss them into the bidone ( the large refuse containers parked at the side of most roads around us. 5 times a week ( yes a week) the dustbin men empty them and then take them to the biggest landfill site in Europe near San Veto. The community charge for this and the library ( yes we still have them here) etc is €120 a year !!-
October 3, 2015 at 9:37 pm -
It’s similar to the “Know Your Customer” financial regulations based on the incredible success of anti-money-laundering legislation in Italy.
Thus in Britain, after the regulations were introduced, elderly couples were having to “prove their identity” to their bank officials after 60 years of banking with them. There have been some other bizarre cases of unintended side-effects of that legislation. Curiously, there have been hardly any newsworthy cases of real villains caught up by anti-money-laundering, although it has usefully added to the set of charges that can be levied as plea-bargaining fodder in some unrelated case.
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October 3, 2015 at 12:30 pm -
@Alex “By the way, who is this Gareth?”
Just that bloke that comes in sometimes – sits in the corner with a pint of mild, muttering to is’self
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October 3, 2015 at 4:52 pm -
Nice to meet you Gareth. Perhaps we will have some more from you in the future?
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October 3, 2015 at 5:04 pm -
More than welcome he is too – help yourself to the Pork Scratchings – good post!
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October 3, 2015 at 7:23 pm -
Can he have a carrier bag to take them home in?
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October 4, 2015 at 9:30 am -
Yes, but leave your 5p in the ‘Cameron Memorial Fund’ charity-box at the end of the bar.
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October 3, 2015 at 1:20 pm -
A lifetime spent in the cans & plastic bottles industries has taught me that 99% of the green anti-packaging guff is nonsense; the rest is doubtful.
Still, we’ll get by without ‘free’ bags.
I rather like the folding cardboard troughs some French hypermarkets introduced years ago as an alternative to bags, but an examination of card and paper processing really is an education for prospective greens.
Meanwhile I’ve accumulated a sack of old bags to use as bin liners; no orange ones in sight due to Sainsburies split now or split later quality.
I can’t really see what the problem is with using oil in the form of plastic bags before eventually releasing the energy for use by burning them.-
October 3, 2015 at 4:57 pm -
I may well be wrong, but I am under the impression that aluminium was one of very few things worth recycling – the rest create more pollution and waste more energy during the recycling process.
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October 3, 2015 at 7:01 pm -
Steel is worth recycling. About 75% of the world’s steel consumption is produced from recycled scrap. I think it gets a bit more iffy when you get to stuff like cardboard and lawn clippings, though. One very good use for collected waste is as a fuel for energy generation, which reduces the volume of waste for final disposal – ash, basically – quite a lot. The downside is that the residual ash tends to contain all the nasties that were in the original rubbish, but in a much more concentrated form.
Anybody who looks at the problems of waste disposal and proposes easy solutions is a grade A plonker, and that includes the ‘don’t generate it in the first place’ brigade. There will always be some waste. There are no easy solutions.
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October 4, 2015 at 8:57 am -
Aluminium in cans is very much worth recycling – a lot of energy is needed to produce the metal in the first place, but not much to recycle it and produce high quality material. Steel cans are less useful; in my days in the business tinplate scrap had little value, and what there was for the minute quantities of tin that could be stripped from the steel. Compacting & transporting the stuff to the picklers was an issue too.
Commonly used plastics may start life as a high performance packaging material but if recycled will end up in a less demanding role. Even in the original manufacturing environment the use of the inevitable scrap arising is often less efficient than the use of virgin materials.
Recycling drinks cartons must rank as one of the most pointless exercises – something about unintended consequences.
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October 3, 2015 at 7:56 pm -
Rarely disagree with the musings in the snug, but I entirely agree with charging for the bags in the hope to reduce use. They are very bad for environment and a bloody eyesore in most cities. The small charge is not a ban, just means we will all be more careful in when taking the things. Also, my partner had made me use ‘bags for life’ for ages, so I have already adapted long ago. More fear of the nagging than 5p costs!
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October 3, 2015 at 9:40 pm -
My ‘bag for life’ split after about six months, which left me a little worried as to how long I had left on this earth!
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October 3, 2015 at 10:25 pm -
Caused recall of an excellent cartoon some time ago. The scene is at a funeral wake: funeral director takes a phone call, shouting across to the assembled mourners,”It’s Sainsbury’s on the phone – they want their bag-for-life back”.
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October 3, 2015 at 11:17 pm -
Yes, women are particularly susceptible to this form of madness and thus impose it on their subjugated menfolk. Who then persuade themselves that they agree with it.
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October 3, 2015 at 9:35 pm -
Symbolic of an unserious government.
Whilst the country is under seige from invaders, the health system is disintegrating , the “armed” services and police’s futility is displayed daily, the electrical power supply is at a critical point (amongst numerous other serious problems) they choose to attempt to restrict the use of plastic bags in the hope (nothing more) that this can assist in reducing climate change, an outmoded terminology the greens have now abandoned mostly because there has demonstrably been zero global warming for nearly twenty years. In summary a futile gesture from a futile goverment-the managed decline continue,s the debt grows, pensions decline in buying power.
The camoron has his priorities.
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October 3, 2015 at 9:40 pm -
I’m fairly sure it was Alistair Darling who first announced the intention to levy such a charge in his last budget … before the financial collapse.
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October 3, 2015 at 10:23 pm -
You are probably correct, after all DECC is a child of liebour madness, that does not excuse the camoron from continuing the nonsense. DECC should have been disbanded day one of the camoron government, but just like the bonfire of the quangos, nothing happened.
I repeat-“The camoron has his priorities.”-mostly unserious priorities.
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October 4, 2015 at 6:00 am -
Cameron is a grade A plonker – he was the twat with a wind turbine on his chimney thus proving his “green” credentials.
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October 3, 2015 at 11:16 pm -
This is basically a show of power. It’s the Government saying, “we can do whatever we want and you can’t stop us” and it’s the Progressives saying “we can make the Government do anything we want”.
We live not so much in interesting times as ludicrous ones.
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October 3, 2015 at 11:57 pm -
Hence election choices are between one ludicrous party or some other equally ludicrous party.
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October 4, 2015 at 6:01 am -
Hear, hear!
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October 3, 2015 at 11:31 pm -
I will got to the checkout with a few of those steel baskets in my trolley. I will then load the shopping into those baskets , pile them onto my trolley, take the trolley to my car, put the baskets into my car boot. Result !
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October 5, 2015 at 2:59 pm -
I’m wondering how the next Tesco deliver will be handled, given that it usually comes with a multitude bags, colour-coded so that even I cannot incur the wrath of an absent Mrs Raite by not realising which bag contained stuff that needs to go in the fridge or freezer, rather than being left in the dining room with all the non-temperature critical items…
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October 6, 2015 at 2:15 pm -
As the plastic bags are now being ‘sold’ does it mean consumer rights legislation applies to them – i.e. being fit for purpose; of merchantable quality etc?
Few if any will pass this test.
Regards
Russell
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