Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.
Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.
A reusable plastic bag only needs to be reused ~40 times before it is better than single use plastic bags. Are people really using them so few times that they can’t hit that?
All the data says that no, people are not reusing them.
Anecdotally, it makes sense. You left your bag in the trunk, or at home, or it turns out you got slightly too many groceries, or you’re staying at a friend’s house and you pop out to get some groceries and don’t have your bag…
Well that’s a shame. I guess living in a car-centric region it’s easy for me to just throw them in the trunk so I always have them, but I could imagine if I was taking public transit more often it would be easier to forget them.
40 times is fucking wild, I maybe get 5-10 if I really go hard before I forget to bring it one time and have to buy another one
Even in that scenario, it’s not like the first one goes away. Now you have two reusable bags.
