The Daily Mail makes an effort to catalogue the environmental impact juxtaposing pictures of a typical British family, heading home from the supermarket laden with plastic bags packed full of the weekly supermarket shop, and a haunting image of a sea turtle, thousands of miles away, struggling through the deep ocean waters as discarded plastic bags wrap themselves around its flippers and body.
The paper reports that these animals are dying in alarming numbers because they mistake the flimsy translucent bags for jellyfish. They swallow them and die.Supermarkets should be charging for new bags as they do in Ireland. I really can not understand why the government here has not followed the Irish model.In 2002, the Irish government introduced a bag tax, currently 16p, which led to a 90% reduction in the use of bags.In France, there is activity also. A year ago, after shopper pressure the biggest supermarkets in France imposed a ban on free carriers. They now charge between 2p and 42p for reusable bags. Two pence is far too cheap, but the action has removed millions of free bags from high streets with a French government ban planned for 2010.The Daily Mail report says that 13bn free single-use plastic bags are dished out by Britain's high street stores every year. It's shocking. People simply would not take them if they had to pay 10p a bag. It is the cheapness that makes them so disposable and why you see people taking half a dozen at a time twice a week.The life span of a typically Tesco carrier bag is 20 minutes. They are then thrown out and game over. But while their use is 20 minutes their life span is as long as 1,000 years. Generation after generation will have to deal with the impact of these bags, which rot very slowly away.The Daily Mail has launched its Banish the Bags campaign in an effort to rid the country of these single-use plastic bags and encourage people to use alternative such as those made from cloth and the traditional shopping basket.There is some change, but it is small beer. Marks & Spencer has run trials in Northern Ireland and the South-West, where shoppers are charged 5p for each carrier bag. Still not enough. Ikea and discount outlets Aldi and Lidl also charges, but it means nothing if Tesco or Sainsbury's don't get off their highly profitable backsides and act.Tesco could use the saved bags to bury the loot that it has apparently been tucking away.It has apparently, according to a report in The Guardian today, created an elaborate corporate structure involving offshore tax havens centring on the Cayman Islands, which enables it to avoid paying what could be up to £1bn of tax on profits from the sale of its UK properties.
Gordon Macmillan
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