Supermarket joins backlash against plastic waste

British shoppers can take a trip down memory lane on their local high street, thanks to supermarket giant Morrisons reverting to old-fashioned brown paper bags for loose fresh fruit and vegetables.

The chain, the United Kingdom’s fourth-largest, says the change means 150 million fewer plastic bags will be trashed each year. Paper bags will be available in all of its 493 UK stores by the end of the summer.

“We’ve listened to customers’ concerns about using plastic bags for fruit and vegetables and that is why we are bringing back paper bags,” Drew Kirk, a produce director at the supermarket, told the Guardian newspaper.

The company is also urging customers to bring containers from home when buying from its fish, bakery, and deli counters.

The Telegraph newspaper said Morrisons wants to ensure that, by 2025, any plastic it uses is either recycled, reusable, or compostable.

The company is the latest to step away from plastics in favor of sustainable, biodegradable alternatives that were common a few decades ago.

Fast food giant McDonald’s said it will phase out the use of plastic straws in its restaurants in the UK and Ireland, something that will prevent 1.8 million plastic straws a day being ditched in the UK. And the bar and restaurant chain JD Wetherspoon has already stopped using plastic straws.

Pizza Express is also moving away from single-use plastics, and retailer Iceland, which specializes in frozen foods, said in January it will phase out plastic packaging for its own-brand products within five years, replacing it with paper and pulp trays and paper bags. Department store Marks & Spencer says it will ensure its packaging is “widely recyclable” by 2022.

The moves away from plastics follow a shift in public opinion following the screening of the documentary Blue Planet II, through which people became more aware of the huge volume of plastic in the world’s oceans.

In addition, China has closed its borders to the world’s garbage. In the past, it had processed and recycled a huge volume of such waste but, after years of warnings, it has stopped accepting such waste on environmental grounds and has urged nations to either process their own recycling, or produce less waste.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, who has described plastic waste as “one of the great environmental scourges of our time”, says the country will ban “avoidable” waste by 2042.