Plastic, paper or cotton ... what’s a shopper to do for a bag these days?

The bag for life is not a synthetic comrade, with you until your last breath, it turns out – more an acquaintance briefly entertained before being roundly ditched. Or so says Morrisons, which has begun phasing out its plastic offerings in favour of reusable paper ones over concerns that a bag for life had, in fact, become a “bag for a week” habit among shoppers. A trial at eight of its UK stores has introduced a 30p paper version instead. If it is adopted at all of its 494 outposts, this could apparently stop 3,510 tonnes of artificial nasties choking the sea turtles each year.

Waitrose, too, has announced plans to do the same in the next few months. All of which sounds like a veritable environmental win, given that customers have proved more prone to stashing and forgetting about their paid-for plastic stockpile than actually reusing it. But, oh, it’s not easy being green.

According to a 2011 report, paper bags take four times as much energy to manufacture as single-use plastic ones and need to be used on three trips to beat one-time-only bags for eco-friendliness (bags for life need four).

The Morrisons version is reportedly durable enough to hold up to 16kg of goods, though after a weekend of clutching paper bags from other stores in various downpours, I do question how this idea quite literally works on paper.

If thicker plastic isn’t saving the planet, then, and paper is unreliable, what’s an eco-minded shopper to do? For those thinking they’ve dodged the bagshaped bullet with a cotton tote, dream on. It takes 131 uses to make them equal, damage-wise, to their single-use cousins, due to the high energy levels required to make cotton yarn. That’s before you’ve put it through the wash (at 30, obviously – trying to save the planet here) enough times to counter the effects of inadvertent tomato leakage. Nobody saw a pandemic coming, sure, but nostalgia for those wispy things you used to load up on at the checkout feels a more remote concept still.

The bag issue may seem small, but if the nation is indeed destroying the Earth under the guise of saving it, the overall impact is anything but. The Blue Planet effect, named after Sir David Attenborough’s 2017 series, led to environmentally motivated behavioural change among 88 per cent of viewers. Waitrose’s annual food and drink report, released the following year, cited the desire to combat overuse of plastic as the number one trend, hailing “a new era of environmentalism” in which attitudes towards single-use products would “never be the same”.

But this plastic being not-fantastic-but-notactually-as-bad-as-wethought situation, during a pandemic in which singleuse face masks, Perspex and visors are ubiquitous and reusable cups verboten, means a rethink is required. Nobody wants to reach pariah status on account of a bloomer loaf, after all.

A return to planetarydamage-induced anger might feel like a quaint reprieve from the current rage cycle of mask and quarantine-shaming. But environmental scientists, the Government, supermarkets – anyone – needs to ascertain the least nefarious means of grocery transportation. We’re getting used to leaving the house with a full arsenal each day: face mask, anti-bac, bag of apparently environmentally ruinous description. Clarification on the battle tools required would help.