The problem is that we’re addicted to plastic bags!
The scale of the problem is immense! The typical supermarket shopping bag is made of High Density Polyethylene (HDPE), just like milk bottles. They are recycled but it is almost impossible to separate them out and a lot of them are mixed with other rubbish!
The trouble is that they are so convenient. They are lightweight, compact, cheap and tough. Supermarkets give them away free and when you’re standing there and you’ve forgotten those reusable green bags as usual, you don’t say no to plastic.
What on earth will we do without them? Our best efforts over the last few years have reduced our consumption of plastic bags from an all time high of almost seven billion in 2002 to just under four billion in 2005. But there the fall slowed and stopped. Everybody who was going to ‘just say no to plastics’ was doing it by then. But too few.
The government started to look at desperate measures like bans, bag charges and so on. As we now know, the supermarket plastic bags time has come to an end!
But we are still using about 192 bags per person, every year and about one hundred of those come from the supermarket. People don’t like to change their behaviour unless they are forced, and then they often object very strongly, even when they know it’s the right thing to do. Clearly what we need is not so much a ban as an alternative, an environmentally sound substitute.
becausewecare™ has the answer for our dependency of the retail plastic bag.
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