The great ‘bags for life’ betrayal
They were meant to cut plastic waste and help the planet. But as shoppers now buy more than 1.5 billion ‘bags for life’ a year, they’ve become just another way for supermarkets to fleece us at the checkout — with the millions in profit going straight into their coffers
ONE of those great British sh unifiers is that sinking ng feeling at the supermarket et checkout when you realise se you’ve forgotten your reusable le shopping bag.
Short of making a quick dash home — rarely a realistic option — there’s e’s nothing for it but to fork out for yet et another ‘bag for life’.
The trade in these bags, which range ge in price from 30p for a reusable le plastic number to £25 for a designer er tote, is now big business for Britain’s n’s grocery giants.
And — as the Mail can reveal today — behind the boom is an unseemly tale ale of corporate greed and profiteering, ng, disingenuously presented as a campaign gn to help save the planet.
Charging for bags began in 2015 with h a modest and well-intentioned levy on single-use plastic bags — a notable ble success for a powerful Daily Mail ail campaign. But it has since ballooned ed into a multi-million-pound industry, with supermarkets lining their own pockets by preying on the forgetfulness of their customers.
According to the most recent available research from the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Greenpeace, Britain bought a staggering 1.58 billion ‘ bags for life’ in 2019 alone: that’s 57 per household.
The story begins in 2008 with the launch of the Mail’s energetic campaign to eliminate singleuse plastic bags, which were responsible for a host of environmental horrors, including choking and poisoning wildlife, clogging up the oceans and polluting the atmosphere with vast amounts of carbon emissions generated in the course of their manufacture.
Seven years later, David Cameron’s Conservative government, in a bid to nudge shoppers into being more environmentally responsible, finally introduced a compulsory 5p levy on each bag.
The scheme was an immediate success. Prior to the levy, Britain got through close to 8 billion single-use plastic bags every year.
After the levy was introduced, that figure plummeted to just 1.33 billion in the 2016- 17 financial year.
As the supermarket giants were encouraged to give their plastic bag revenues to charity, good causes benefited to the tune of millions of pounds.
But while the Government’s guidance was that the retailers should ‘donate the proceeds [of the levy] to good causes, particularly environmental causes’, this advice has been widely ignored.
Last year, retailers responsible for the sale of 72 per cent of single-use plastic bags in the UK reported to the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) that they had donated a total of £6.3 million to good causes. But just 0.07 per cent of that money (£4,600) went to environmental causes.
The overwhelming majority (92 per cent) went to unidentified causes or bodies selected by customers or staff.
In other words, supermarkets were using the plastic bag levy to prop up their existing charitable initiatives rather than ring- fencing it for environmental causes in line with government guidance.
At the same time, retailers began the even more insidious practice of selling so-called ‘bags for life’ — any bag that isn’t considered single-use — at a large profit.
As bags for life are designated a
Preying on the forgetfulness of customers
They’re a major new revenue stream
different category to single-use plastic bags, the supermarkets kets can keep the profit they make ake from their sale rather than han donating it to charity.
And over the years they have become a major, but never spoken ken of, new revenue stream.
Waitrose sells almost as many any different bags as it does varieties ties of potatoes. Though the bags are going to cost you a lot more than han the spuds. Apart from the e £1 plastic Durabag — made from rom recycled plastic — that t is ubiquitous across the checkouts, uts, there’s a £2 fold-away pouch bag, a string bag for the same price rice and a small mesh sack for 30p. p.
And then there’s the novelty elty tote bags, which include e a colourful number from the awardwinning British designer Sara Miller, which retails at £10.
When approached by the Mail, Waitrose admitted it keeps 100 per cent of the profits from its shopping bags, unless a specific charity bag collaboration is announced. But it refused to say how h many it sells ll or h how much it makes on the grounds that such information is ‘commercially sensitive’.
However, the Mail can reveal that the John Lewis Partnership, which owns Waitrose, has a supply deal with a number of plastic bag manufacturers in China, including a company called Xiamen Fei Fei Bag Manufacturing Co Ltd.
Xiamen sells bags similar to the Waitrose Durabag for as little as 36p each, while the wholesale price of the £10 Sara Miller tote bag (before it’s been decorated with that distinctive flamingo design) is just 16p.
The UK’s most profitable supermarket, ktT Tesco — which hi h last l t year recorded sales of £58 billion and an operating profit of £ 2.6 billion — shocked many customers in July 2022 by hiking the cost of its plastic bag for life from 20p to 30p.
It appears that Tesco’s motto, ‘Every Little Helps’, applies to its profit margins just as much as its customers’ wallets.
In 2019 — the most recent year for which there is data — Tesco sold 713 million bags for life. At the time, the bags cost just 10p, meaning Tesco made more than £71 million in sales that year from bags alone.
With the price now at 30p, the supermarket’s turnover on plastic
bags in 2024 is likely to be nearer to £200 million.
A spokesman for Tesco told the Mail it treats its revenue from bags for life as general revenue, meaning it is not distinguished from the sale of food and drink. In other words, all that money from plastic bags goes straight into the company’s heaving coffers.
The supermarket does point out that it spends more on ‘ community schemes’ than it makes from plastic bags and stresses it ‘encourages customers to remember their bags to cut down on plastic and avoid paying for bags altogether’.
But surprisingly for a supermarket that trumpets its green credentials, Tesco was unwilling to provide a comprehensive breakdown of its charitable beneficiaries.
Other supermarkets which charge 30p for ‘sturdy’ plastic bags include Sainsbury’s and Asda — respectively, the second and third-highest revenue grocery chains in Britain.
A spokesman for Sainsbury’s said: ‘All profits from sales of our Bags for Life are used to support good causes in the communities we serve and source from.’
And they make sure no one gets away without paying for them.
Just this month, an employment tribunal heard how Sainsbury’s sacked one of its own staff for stealing 30p plastic bags when purchasing items after a night shift over a bank holiday.
Niamke Doffou had worked at the Romford superstore for two decades, but that long service record didn’t cut any ice when he was caught on film by the store’s CCTV.
Meanwhile, Asda — like Lidl and Aldi — retains all income from bag sales. Last year, Asda made a pretax profit of £1.1 billion, a 24 per cent increase on the year before.
Supermarkets justify the rising cost of their bags for life by claiming they are better for the environment than the cheaper single-use alternative, but is this really true?
Ultimately, the two products are very similar. They are both made from low- density polyethylene. So why is the bag for life sturdier? Simply because it contains more plastic than its flimsy counterpart.
A study by the Environment Agency found that a bag for life has to be used four times to be considered ‘ better’ for the environment than a single-use plastic bag.
Plastic pollution remains a leading cause of environmental degradation. Less than one-fifth of plastic produced globally is recycled and, as nearly half of all plastic ever created was made after 2020, this is a major issue. To this day, more than 8 billion kilograms of plastic enters our oceans each year.
And the tragic reality is that so- called bags for life are contributing to this problem, rather than solving it.
Supermarkets such as Tesco argue that their bags for life can be recycled in- store. However, according to Nina Schrank, head of plastics at Greenpeace, such a practice is not commonplace: ‘The supermarket industry knows that the vast majority of plastic bags are not recycled,’ she says.
In 2022, Kit Chellel — an investigative journalist for Bloomberg — placed a tracking device in a Tesco branded plastic bag and deposited it at a Tesco recycling point in London.
He could never have predicted what happened next.
After first being taken to Harwich International Port on England’s east coast, the plastic bag continued through the Netherlands and Germany before eventually ending up in the small Polish town of Zielona Gora, where the tracker’s signal was lost.
According to environmental activists in the region, the Tesco bag was most likely sold to the Lafarge cement factory 144km north-east of Zielona Gora, which burns plastic bags to generate electricity — a practice which releases more carbon into the atmosphere than burning coal.
In other words, when you recycle your plastic bag for life at Tesco, it could travel 700 miles via ship and lorry before being burnt in a Polish incinerator. Not exactly environmentally friendly, then.
So it’s no surprise that some supermarkets are offering plasticfree alternatives.
Morrisons, Marks & Spencer and Iceland all sell paper shopping bags, while the Co- op Group offers compostable bags.
M&S — which also sells a £5.25 felt bag made in China — is thought to source its paper bags from one of Europe’s oldest and biggest manufacturers: Welton, Bibby & Baron. While the bag wholesaler refused to reveal its prices to the Mail, one trade insider says M&S probably pays around 5p per bag. Considering M&S sells its paper bags for 40p, that represents a likely 700 per cent mark-up.
Asked whether this figure accurately reflected its margins,
The vast majority are not recycled
Revenues don’t have to go to charity
M&S insisted, ‘ We don’t make a profit on the bag,’ but would not elaborate on what makes up the 40p price tag.
Furthermore, research commissioned by the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2011 found that ‘it takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag’.
Another revenue stream for supermarkets is higher-end tote bags, typically created in collaboration with a high-profile designer. For example, last summer, Marks & Spencer sold a tote bag for £8 designed by the British artist Yinka Ilori. Such collaborations can be big business.
Back in 2007, Sainsbury’s sold a tote designed by Anya Hindmarch emblazoned with the slogan: ‘I’m NOT a plastic bag’. The bags turned out to be such a phenomenon that 80,000 were sold in a single day. Today, the bags can fetch more than £300 on eBay.
Regardless of whether it’s a 30p plastic bag or a £12 tote, the other big winner from this booming new industry is the Treasury. As a retail item, every bag is subject to VAT at 20 per cent. In 2022-23, for example, Asda sold over 24 million single-use plastic bags at 10p each and paid more than £400,000 in VAT on those sales.
The bag levy scheme was only going to work if consumers reused bags for months on end. That isn’t what has happened. Instead, supermarkets have become even richer, selling us a steady stream of increasingly expensive shopping bags, all while dissembling the environmental cost.
The truth is, bags for life — profits from which don’t have to go to charity — are just another way to fleece customers at the checkouts.