Excess baggage: will the 5p charge finally kill the plastic bag? | Environment | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ ... lastic-bag

No, because as the article points out, you still need to line a bin with something. You can also get any number of bags with even a small online shopping order. The average person just isn't wasting them, this is more about raising cash than a sensible concern for the environment.

You shouldn't be using a small plastic bag to line a bin.
Seriously, plastic bags are the worst, I'd ban them if I could.
Somehow, I think the fabric of society and our arrangements with conveniently placed waste receptacles would adapt and move on with little more than a shrug.

I've never been in an office that didn't have wastepaper bins because management presumably rather you stayed at your desk*... But also studies, bedrooms... It makes no difference, you're still using bags of some description somewhere.

* Possibly worse, you now see black bags used in offices for wastepaper bins over here! I'm assuming there's a costly trade in rolls of smaller bags now.

They have cost 9c each for over a decade here now. The bags are a better quality than the free ones I got at Tesco when I was visiting the UK this summer.

My last Aldi bag held for buying lunch for about 4 months before it got too many holes to safely carry anything. But cotton bags are making a comeback here - my wife has always used them. I now have a Fairtrade cotton bag from Lidl, which I use daily. It cost about a Euro, but it very robust and should last for years.

When we do a big shop, we take a couple of fold-boxes in the car and use them. It is very rare that we use a plastic carrier bag (other than my buying lunch at Aldi - the only shop within walking distance of my office).

We have two bins at each desk, one for paper waste and one for general waste (at home we have 4 bins, paper, bio, plastic and "rest"). The liners for the general waste are only changed when they start to smell - generally every few months, as we can't eat in the office.

Bio rubbish has to be either thrown into the bin in a bio-degradeable bag or removed from the line and the liner disposed of separately.

At work, nobody gets their own personal waste bin. There's a couple of larger recycling ones dotted around. Somehow, we function. Saying you need a bag for a waste paper bin just isn't true.

Same here. No personal bins. There are communal recycle and general bins.

Why? The vast majority of carrier bags, esp from major retailers, are manufactured with an additive that makes them degradable.

They are certainly far more degradable than your average (designed for purpose) bin liner.

I knew this was happening but I also know it won't affect my habits. The majority of the time, when we go grocery shopping, it's on Sunday and we usually set out from home so we remember the reusable bags. But sometimes we're out and about, and we may not always remember to bring the reusable bags. Even when we do, we still end up using carrier bags (but just fewer). For single items (Eg yesterday I bought a homeplug kit), I won't bother with a carrier bag. Two or three items and it depends on whether I can carry them to the car without dropping.


You can get binliners but they're an extra cost so we don't typically bother except for the kitchen bin. Even that has a model-specific bag which is more expensive than the roll of bin liners we buy/


What do you use?


That reminds me of when we were kids and used to do grocery shopping down the road at the local "Costcutters" supermarket. The girl would price up items and a chap would put them into a cardboard box (eg empty banana box), which he would carry to the car. We rarely used carrier bags back then.

We're obliged to have a large bin, but like I say, somehow management has seen to it that there's personal bins ('wastepaper' is simply what they're known as when ordering, they get used for all sorts). We didn't even have an outside recycling bin until recently! As it is recycling stuff goes in a cardboard box that I transfer to the recycling bin outside more often than not...

I don't. You really don't need it.
It's a sad fact that we need to use a large bin bag for the bin in the kitchen.
Small waste bins don't get anything wet or messy, just literally paper or card or plastic.
Given that ~90% of sea birds have plastic waste in their stomachs, we need to reduce the amount we are binning.
The price of perceived convenience is having a huge impact on the environment, and it will come back to bite us.

Why. I do that all the time. Especially for the bin we put dirty nappies in.

Google image search "Midway Atoll birds".
That's what happens to the plastic we bin.
Plastic bags end up in the environment, and kill things.
If bags end up in landfill, the chemicals they release aren't very good for us and leach into the water table. The plastic itself doesn't degrade, which is bad because it contributes to events like the flooding in Bangladesh and Manilla.
If they end up in the sea, they just kill things.
In 2000, a whale autopsy revealed the animal had 20 square feet of plastic bags lining it's stomach. As I mentioned before, most sea birds have ingested plastics, meaning over time they can't digest food effectively.
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is mostly made up of plastics.
80% of the stuff in the sea starts out on land, in the form of things like single use plastic shopping bags that people use as a bin liner and just throw away.
Just save them up and recycle them at the supermarket the next time you're there if you're not using them again.
Just stop putting them in with the rubbish.

If I get a 5p coin in my change, I throw it away.