The real single-use bag survives
The apparently universal ditching by supermarkets of ‘single-use’ plastic shopping bags, ahead of a pending government-imposed ban, has barely scratched the surface of whatever problem they might have been responsible for according to one Northland Age reader, who described it as “selfrighteousness abounding in genuflection to the watermelon men” (green on the outside, red on the inside).
“Like almost everybody, we have found umpteen uses for the plastic shopping bags, especially as bin liners. These fruit and vegetable ones are too small for that purpose, so are, in fact, single-use plastic bags,” he said.
Meanwhile he had offered to relieve his local New World of some of its piles of soon to be redundant plastic shopping bags over Christmas, but was told that was not permissible.
“We wonder now what we’re going to do for free domestic rubbish bin liners. Just another watermelon project that will most impact on the poor,” he added.
“And how ironic, but not surprising, that we’ll all now have to purchase plastic bin liners from New World to replace the ‘single-use’ plastic shopping bags that we used to use. Those plastic bin liners are necessarily single-use. Perhaps to overcome this new problem New World will now begin to use bin liners to pack our groceries in.”