Is the single-use plastic bag dying or evolving?

The single-use plastic bag is heading towards its demise — if the month of July is anything to go by. Never before has there been such a united worldwide effort to drive awareness around singleuse plastic bags.

Here in South Africa the #RethinkTheBag campaign, as led by the Two Oceans Aquarium (working with the Beach Co-op), who ran a nationwide awareness campaign to challenge South Africans to rethink choosing single-use plastic bags.

Celebrities and influencers — including models, musicians, actors, comedians and journalists — pledged to stop using single-use plastic bags and challenged South Africans to join them.

Retailers like ourselves have made various public commitments. As Woolworths, we’ve pledged to remove all single-use plastic shopping bags by 2020. It’s a tall order, but it’s doable as we have various plans in place to make it easier to drop the habit.

So what is the habit? We have had a lifelong relationship with plastic bags to transport our purchases from the store safely home. They are convenient. No pre-planning is required and they make shopping easy.

The problem, though, is how they are disposed of — which results in littering our beautiful country, rivers and oceans. Tens of thousands of whales, birds, seals and turtles are killed every year as a result of plasticbag litter on our beaches. In the ocean, plastic is often mistaken for food such as jellyfish. Once ingested, plastic bags cannot be digested or excreted by an animal so it stays in the gut, leading to starvation.

Recently, a number of alternatives such as paper bags and compostable plastic bags have been tested or introduced and it is encouraging to see so much attention being placed on finding alternatives.

There are no easy solutions though, as many of these alternatives involve trade-offs that we are not comfortable with. For example, some compostable plastic bags are made from raw materials derived from staple food sources such as corn. We prefer not to use staples for things like carrier bags.

We have rather opted to drive change by educating and encouraging customers to use reusable bags. We

It is encouraging to see so much attention being placed on finding alternatives to single-use plastics

plan to increase our reusable-bag range by introducing cheaper options, making it even easier for customers to invest in a durable bag that they can reuse over and over again.

By using locally-made reusable bags, ideally made from recycled waste products like plastic bottles, we are creating new life for waste products that would otherwise end up on a landfill or in our rivers or oceans.

So what is next for us? Over the next few months we will be running various in-store trials to drive and encourage this behaviour change. We hope this will result in the demise of the single-use plastic bag.