Plaggy Bags

Will our kids or our kids' kids look back in time and think, "Yuck, they used those plaggy bags and actually put food in them!" Here (at least in the UK) we are wedded to the plastic shopping bag. We use it for carrying our shopping home, we use it for our rubbish and we use it for carrying things when we go away from home visiting friends and family. The plastic bag certainly is flexible. However though plastic bags are generally free they do have a cost to the environment. In societies increasing encouragement to be greener (including providing us with green plastic bags!!) we should all do our bit to work out how we reduce the demand for more bags. Wouldn't it be good if supermarkets found that these bags at the end of their checkouts simply were not being used? Would it be right for to have an eco-tax on plastic bags? Well, London (UK) looks like one place that might end up with less plastic bags. The Telegraph reports that in some supermarkets their will be a ban on the supply of new and free plastic bags for shoppers. Thirty-three London councils have a bill before Parliament set to be debated on November 27th this year. Read more here. For me, I think this is the wrong way to go about it. Legislation is never as good as education. Here's an idea. Why not ban advertising on shopping bags? The government enforces the tobacco industry to put deathly caveats on cigarette packets. Since many companies use shopping bags as a reinforcement of their brands if we remove that then we remove their incentive for distributing these. Essentially if plastic shopping bags are bad for the environment then robust steps must be made to counter the lethargy of that shopper who goes to the supermarket to get, say just one bottle of wine and a box of chocolates - and then pops them in a new shopping bag.