Plastic bag madness

A Mail campaign forced ministers to bring in a 5p charge on plastic bags, starting next month. But meddling civil servants have turned a simple law into a bureaucratic nightmare

One of this newspaper’s most admirable campaigns in recent years has been to stop the proliferation of plastic bags. It may sound trivial to some people, but it is a serious issue, not only for our environment and wildlife — but for our own well-being.

Following the Mail’s ‘ Banish the Bags’ campaign, ministers agreed on a 5p levy on supermarket disposable bags.

A similar charge has been successful in Scotland, northern Ireland and Wales — with bag use in the principality dropping by 78 per cent and £22 million raised for good causes.

In england, the law comes into effect on October 5. It is hoped the new charge will reduce bag use by between 75 and 80 per cent.

But with typical bureaucratic stupidity, a 1,600-word diktat has been issued by the Department of environment which threatens to make the reform much less effective.

It says that only individual stores which employ more than 250 people will have to charge. Also, any bag that is 70 microns thick and reusuable is not affected — as long as it measures at least 404 mm by 439 mm.

Defra rules state that reusable bags must be between 50-70 microns thick — although they can be thinner as long as they are thicker than the store’s single-use bags.

‘You can’t count the gusset,’ adds the statement, somewhat amusingly, ‘or the handles, unless they’re wavy top bags.’

Does anyone know what they’re talking about, or what a micron is? (It’s actually a millionth of a metre.) It’s mind-boggingly mad. I dread to think how many civil servants knocked their heads together to cobble up these complicated rules.

TRAGICALLY, these crazy stipulations risk scuppering the whole idea. And they must be as much of a nightmare for shop staff as they are for shoppers. cashiers will have to check if shopping qualifies for a free plastic bag. The long list of exemptions to the charge includes purchases of uncooked fish, meat and poultry, razor blades, flowers, unwrapped food for human or animal consumption — i.e. take-aways — and food sold in containers that could leak.

You will not, however, be able to mix these different items in one bag. So, if you add something to an exempt item (such as a banana alongside razor blades) you must pay for the bag.

As the Whitehall advice states: ‘ For example, you wouldn’t charge for a bag containing an unwrapped blade and unwrapped loose seeds, but adding a box of cornflakes means you’d have to charge’.

This reminds me of Humpty Dumpty in lewis carroll’s Alice In Wonderland, who instructs poor confused Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

However difficult, we should stand back from such nonsense and remember exactly why the levy for plastic bags is such a good idea.

Until recently, checkout staff didn’t even ask if we wanted a bag and dished them out willy-nilly.

My mother, who lived through World War II, would have despised such unnecessary waste. She always took her own bags to the supermarket. Her generation would not countenance such profligacy.

As a writer on marine issues, I spend a lot of time on or by the sea. It distresses me to see Britain’s beautiful beaches littered with plastic bags. Washed up by the tides, they appear as an unsightly harvest overnight.

This morning, as usual, I picked up another handful of the bags. Others were caught in the branches of nearby trees, where they blew in the breeze.

In 2014 supermarkets gave out a staggering 8.5 billion single- use plastic bags — 200 million more than they did in 2013.

These shopping bags are used by customers for only 20 minutes on average — yet they take up to 1,000 years to degrade.

last week, scientists said that 90 per cent of all sea birds have ingested plastic.

like other creatures, they often mistake plastic bags for food. Majestic sea turtles, which feed on jellyfish, see a floating bag and think it is edible. even the ocean’s giants, the great whales, can be brought low by humans’ careless littering.

researchers have discovered that 50 per cent of all sperm whales found stranded dead or dying in the Mediterranean had plastic in their stomachs. One young whale was found with a plastic bag printed with the address and telephone number of the greek restaurant from which it came.

The fact is that plastic fragments are consumed by small oceanic organisms such as plankton, which are then eaten by bigger ones like fish and squid.

Slowly, inevitably, these tiny pieces of plastic move further up the food chain.

And, of course, we humans are affected. I fear a future when our fish and chips might contain the plastic bag that someone else has thrown away. What a sickening thought. For that reason, and for so many others, the new 5p charge for plastic bags is a vital reform which could so easily be implemented simply.

That is why the absurd list of exceptions to the rule must be changed — for our good and for that of the animals with which we share this surprisingly fragile planet.

SHOPS won’t have to charge for plastic bags that are used for: • Uncooked fish and fish products; Uncooked meat, poultry and their products; • Unwrapped food for animal or human consumption — for example, chips or food sold in containers not secure enough to prevent leakage during normal handling; • Unwrapped loose seeds, flowers, bulbs, corns, rhizomes (roots, stems and shoots such as ginger) or goods contaminated by soil (such as potatoes or plants); • Unwrapped blades, including axes, knives, and knife and razor blades; • prescription medicine; • Live aquatic creatures in water; • Anything considered to be sealed packaging for mail order and clickand-collect orders; • Giving away free promotional material; • Dry cleaning or shoe repairs.