Skip to main content

Marks and Spencers starts 5p plastic bag charge

After months of talking about it, and an official government stance in this year's budget that plastic shopping bags should be charged for, Marks & Spencer's has officially started charging 5p for every plastic shopping bag customers use. 

It may be just one store for now, but it means a few million people a day will be deterred from getting a bag for a single sandwich or a soda, which happens all of the time. Prior to the charge coming into effect on May 6, every time I bought my lunch at an M&S it seemed like everyone is front of me was getting a plastic bag for the tiniest of purchases.  I support a full ban on plastic shopping bags altogether, until they make them non petroleum based and completely bio-degradable. They aren't necessary and they leave a terrible legacy. 13 billion a year used in the UK alone, just sitting in landfill for the next thousand years. And if they aren't around people will be forced to use their owns bags, boxes, baskets and carts and that will be that. 

I doubt anyone will ever say 'Remember how great things were when we used to get those free little plastic bags?' 

Labels

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Recycling centre visit request

I have made an official request to visit any of London's recycling centres for an in-depth look at how they really work. Questions like a) who sorts out the 'mixed bags' full of various types of recyclables and b) how are they actually recycled?   Most people I speak to are cynical that anything happens to the mixed recycling bags and I myself don't understand how our typical mixed recycling bag, which will usually contain up to 6 types of plastic, aluminum, glass and various types of paper (including little bitty pieces) can be efficiently sorted unless there is a huge team rifling through it all on conveyor belts.  I want to know - is it all a London borough con? Where is the evidence of how it is all actually recycled? I can never find any reports on it, apart from % of waste that is sent to recycling sites, not how much is actually recycled or how it is recycled.  One of our friends accidentally put his recycling bag out a day early on his street in Notting Hil...
1 comment
Read more

Relieving your travel guilt with carbon neutralization packages

Brother Ren, who shall now be called Research Ren as he is better at it than I am, has sent in this guilt-alleviating website which allows anyone to purchase carbon neutrlaization packages. + Carbon Neutral Question you may have: What is a carbon neautralization package? Is it something that can only be purchased at Star Trek conventions? Answer: These packages plant trees to help absorb the nastiness left in the air from your flight to the Maldives. It will also calculate how much CO2 you emit on flights based on your destination as well as CO2 you emit with your car mileage. It's a smart site, easy to use and I feel more green-angelic just for looking at it. We're taking the Eurostar/TGV to a wedding in the south of France in 2 weeks rather than flying but we still have all of those air miles to make up for from our London-NY-San Fran-LA-London trip so looks like we'll be using this site's offerings to help to plant a small forest somewhere. (Though I do wonder how ...
3 comments
Read more

TGV - how energy efficient is it really?

We took another holiday, using the TGV instead of flying as our mode of transport, in August, as our attempts to keep air miles down continues. But as we zoomed through the French countryside at 180 MPH, we wondered how efficient is the TGV, really? Or have we just bought into the hype that it is more efficient than flying? I've never seen any statistics other than soft evidence provided by The Guardian and various news sources. We've been told by journalists that train travel is significantly greener, but with the electricity required to hurl a TGV through the countryside, and electricity plants being a major contributor to green house gases, what was a real, non-hype comparison? Or was my sudden skepticism just an excuse to trade the 5 1/2 hours on the stuffy train in for 1 hour on a plane? (Always fun going down and an absolute pain coming back.) With a little investigating, I found some statistical information comparing the efficiency of various modes of transport, based...
2 comments
Read more