Your victory over the plague of plastic bags

TEN years ago, this paper launched a major campaign to rid Britain of one of the great needless pollutants of the modern world – the plastic supermarket carrier bag.

Under the front page headline ‘Banish the Bags’ were two pictures, one of a family on their weekly shop laden with free bags and the other a rare turtle in a distant sea, slowly dying from the bag lodged inside its gut.

Used once briefly and then discarded, each bag could take 1,000 years to degrade. Now was the time, we argued, to do something about this plastic plague fouling our seas and defacing our landscapes.

Millions of readers, senior public figures, the prime minister and major retailers took up the challenge. Marks & Spencer imposed a small bag charge the following day. But it took years of dogged campaigning before ministers imposed a 5p bag levy on all large stores.

The impact of this law has been nothing short of extraordinary. The average Briton now uses just 19 plastic supermarket bags a year, down from 140 – a fall of 86 per cent. Billions fewer are in circulation, and plastic bag pollution in our seas has halved.

Of course, plastic bags were only the start of the Mail’s globally-acclaimed crusade against plastic pollution caused by microbeads (now banned), plastic straws (due to be banned) and plastic coffee cups (which also face a levy).

Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people helped to clear streets, beaches and parks in the Mail’s Great Plastic Pick-Up.

So while Left-wing virtue-signalling environmentalists talk up their green credentials, this paper has actually been

doing things to help make the planet a better place. However, it is not us who should take the credit, but our magnificent readers, who have been with us all the way.