As many remember, over a year ago supermarkets turned to charging 10p for plastic ‘bags for life’ in a bid to decrease the usage of plastic in the UK. However, this has not been the case, and we have seen an increase of 17,000 tones in the total plastic packaging used by the UK’s ten biggest supermarkets from 2017 to 2018. This only highlights that the 10p price point for plastic ‘bags for life’ is ineffective, and it is clear that we are still not helping our environment. There must be an immediate change and we should therefore call for an increase of the price to 70p in hopes of decreasing the sales of the bags. With this increase I believe that shoppers will start to think more before buying a plastic ‘bag for life’, because they would rather spend that money on something else. This could also encourage shoppers to buy cotton shopping bags which would save them more money in the long run.
Supermarkets could also help by slowly introducing paper bags which are currently being used in stores such as whole foods and planet organic. Furthermore, they should also aim to decrease the use of single-use packaging and look for alternative reusable packaging.
