As you might imagine, a planet on the brink of ecological collapse (ie ours) has a number of pressing concerns. The plastic bag issue really is not one of them, and yet in terms of air time and emotion it punches well above its weight, particularly the landfill weight of plastic bags – they take up just 0.3% of landfill space. Other experts like to point out that their impact on wildlife has been over-egged, too. While you'll often hear that 100,000-plus marine mammals are killed every year by ingesting plastic bags, Greenpeace experts say wildlife deaths from plastic bags are few and far between.
But while we can establish that they are not the earth's primary nemesis, they are nonetheless extremely annoying. And, incidentally, there is a link to oceanic pollution: 6% of marine sediment has been found to be polyethylene, implicating them in microplastic pollution of the oceans.
plastic bag illustration The UK uses between 9bn and 17.5bn plastic bags every year. Illustration: Rob Biddulph
The single-use carrier bag also represents an unconscionable use of resources. According to an Australian study, the energy consumed and embodied in manufacturing a conventional supermarket carrier is significant, with 8.7 bags equivalent to driving a car 1km. Depending on which report you read, in the UK we use between 9bn and 17.5bn plastic bags every year (thanks to voluntary schemes and greater awareness and use of non-plastic bags, retailers say they have halved the number of plastic bags they've given out since 2006). The non-production of 800m bags is equivalent to removing 92m car kilometers. So the first thing to do is to make sure you don't accumulate any more.
But as we've acquired the wretched things at a rate of 160-350 a year for many years (again depending on the report you read), we should all have enough by now. Strangely, even zero tolerance of plastic bags does not equal zero waste. Some bright sparks have just transferred their affections to paper bags. A 1991 US study that still appears to stand found that paper bags produced more air pollution, water borne and solid waste and required more space in landfill than plastic bags.
The only benefit being that you might be able to recycle paper bags more easily. Plastic-bag recycling rates remain low and in most normal schemes carrier bags are likely to be a contaminant rather than a valued material stream. Partly this is because initiatives have focused on cloth and reusable bags rather than clawing back some of the energy input from recycling. Recycling is also dependent on market value and there's not much of that in lightweight bags when the world has billions of them.
I suggest you turn this on its head. Plastic bags are undeniably useful – they can carry 2,500 times their own weight – so reuse each one extensively. Hand them down to future generations, turning the fact that a plastic bag might take 1,000 years to degrade into a virtue. Give them as presents. The world's remaining plastic bags should become family heirlooms.★Do you remember that unspeakably naff designer accessory, I'm Not A Plastic Bag? The "design", by Anya Hindmarch, involved thinking up the gauchest slogan ever contrived then printing it on a white shopping bag of the kind old ladies used in the 1960s. Tens of thousands were sold, at mind-boggling prices.
More to the point, does anyone still use one? There still seems to be a small market among collectors – there's one for sale on eBay at the moment for £179.99 – but when did you last see someone shopping with one? This excrescence was supposed to be the antidote to the throwaway society. Perhaps the bags haven't been thrown away, but no self-respecting celeb would be seen dead with one now. They are sooo last year. Anya Hindmarch doesn't sell them any more: now she markets a new range of granny bags (starting at £165), printed with glossy pictures of designer children, dogs and motorbikes.
As Oscar Wilde said: "Nothing is so dangerous as being too modern; one is apt to grow old-fashioned quite suddenly." These bags for life were discarded with all the other eco-bling as soon as something newer came along. But they served their purpose: they permitted the rich and famous to telegraph their green credentials while still running the Aga, the Range Rover, the yacht and the second and third homes in far-flung parts of the world. By buying the bag, they could tick another box: now, among their other attributes, they were environmentally conscious.
I was reminded of this when I saw the British government's new green initiative, the "Get a bag habit" campaign to encourage reuse of bags, which it launched yesterday with the British Retail Consortium. Not just because the slogan almost rivals Hindmarch's for naffness, but also because it highlights our fetishisation of the plastic bag as the root of all environmental evil.
Don't get me wrong – I don't like plastic bags either. We use too many of them, just as we use too many of all the earth's resources. They litter the countryside and cause problems for wildlife when they end up in the sea. But their total impact is microscopic by comparison to almost anything else we do. As environment writer George Marshall records in his excellent book Carbon Detox, our annual average consumption of bags produces 5kg of carbon dioxide a year. Total average emissions are 12,500kg.
Plastic bags aren't even a very large component of domestic waste. Plastics in general – according to a study by South Gloucestershire district council – account for 18% of total household waste. Plastic bags account for 18% of the plastic, which means 3.2% of total waste. Clingfilm (23% of domestic plastic waste) produces a greater proportion than plastic bags.
The British Retail Consortium, in helping to launch this campaign, says that "this is a symbolic step towards using resources more wisely." It's a symbolic step, but not a significant one. By no stretch of the imagination does it justify the hype it generates. We could eliminate every bag in the UK and make only the tiniest dent in our total environmental impact.
So why this fetishisation? Because dealing with plastic bags is easy. Easy for the government, easy for retailers, easy for shoppers. It threatens no one, makes money for the shops (if they charge for their bags) and ensures that everyone feels better about themselves, while continuing to trash the biosphere just as we did before.
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