A plastic bag for life or Not a plastic bag?

Plastic bags are the green talking point of the moment, what with Anya Hindmarch's designer bag 'I am not a plastic bag' hitting the headlines, courtesy of Kate Moss and other celebrities.

The bags and publicity campaign were developed with the group We Are What We Do, who arranged a high profile launch with Sainsburys supermarket: last Friday, Sainburys offered limited supplies of the bags for sale at £5 in 450 of its stores, resulting in the predictable queues, headlines and discussion of trends.

Sainsburys also used that day to give away free its reusable Bags for Life, available to all for those not prepared to get up and queue from dawn.

I certainly wasn't one of the dawn shoppers for the Anya Hindmarch bag but I did go along to claim my Bag for Life. They wouldn't let me take photos in my local store, so you'll have to take my word for it that shoppers were going out with trolley loads of bags for life, treating them in much the same way as the normal plastic bags. How many will be used more than the once remains to be seen.

Both campaigns were good for raising awareness, but neither the designer bag nor the Bag for Life addresses people's underlying behaviour or the roots of the problem of plastic carrier bags. I can think of a few factors:

- people now mainly travel to the shops by car, so they don't think about how they are going to carry their shopping home when they set out (as they used to do when they were carrying everything home by hand - what happened to the string bag, by the way?)

- shops which use bags as advertising are not geared up to encourage a reduction in the amount of bags issued (a cynic would say it's no coincidence that Sainsburys changed the colour of their bags to orange now that there's a mainstream discussion around reducing the use of plastic bags....)

Even charging for bags is not completely proven as the answer (in Ireland it is suggested that the sale of black bin bags has gone up since the introduction of a tax on plastic bags - see an article from 2004 on Food Production Daily). I feel that rewards are better - generally, people respond more positively to rewards than they do to restrictions and penalties. Sainsburys could reintroduce their penny back idea, or introduce green Reward card points, like Tesco does.

The free 'Bag for Life' day last Friday would have been a good time to introduce some of these tips and ideas:
- checkout staff could be encouraged to use the approach which Boots the chemist has had for years, which is to ask all customers 'Do you need a bag?' instead of automatically giving them out.

- stores could also introduce high-profile publicity to encourage people to fold and pack a bag to carry in their pocket, wallet or handbag - plus regular 'bring a bag' days with rewards.

There was a debate in the House of Lords in July 2006 which ranges widely across the issues: see the report on They Work For You, or directly from Hansard if you prefer. Here's a sample: "My Lords, was not the noble Lord's mother absolutely right in her reuse of these bags? I certainly reuse them to bin kitchen rubbish before putting it into the black liner. What is wrong with that?" (follow the links above for the response...)

Finally, it's important not to make so much noise about plastic carrier bags that the issue of waste plastic in food packaging gets sidelined. Many people are as concerned about this as about bags - probably more, because everyone says it's someone else's problem (supermarkets blaming suppliers etc), with the consumer being blamed for wanting produce in a particular way - which is very frustrating.