Shopping folly

A few years ago, when the blog and I were young, I wrote about attempts to ban stores from giving out plastic bags to their customers, supposedly on environmental grounds.  As I said at the time, many people (including me) re-use these bags as kitchen bin liners. If stores were banned from giving them out, I'd have to buy bin liners instead.  So who would gain from a ban on free bags?  Most obviously, the supermarkets -- instead of giving bags away, at some cost to themselves, they'd be selling them at a profit. The losers? Consumers, naturally. And the environmental impact? Probably almost neutral.

Alas, the issue hasn't gone away. In England, supermarkets have tried hard to reduce "throwaway" bag use by promoting reusable bags, which you pay for once but which are then replaced free for all eternity.  Supposedly this hasn't worked, and the number of free bags handed out is still about 300 per household per year.    This will come as a surprise to anyone who has watched a very high proportion of the customers  turning up at the local store with huge stashes of reusable bags, but you can't argue with official statistics, right?  In Europe, by the way, the number is even higher -- closer to 500 a year -- which will be no surprise to anyone whose been handed a tiny, flimsy sacchetta at a checkout in Italy.

In Wales they've gone a step further, charging 5 pence for every throwaway bag you take. This has apparently reduced bag usage, though probably at some cost in terms of smashed eggs in the car park, as shoppers attempt to carry armfuls of groceries back to their vehicles. The policy in Wales is very stringent, to an almost perverse degree. In Cardiff just before Christmas,  I bought a very expensive designer perfume as a gift for my wife, but had to pay an additional 5 pence for the bag (which matched the box and had the designer's name on it) to carry it in. The bag was made of paper, but the policy still applied.

Anyway, it looks as though the EU is about to force all member countries to introduce laws banning free bags. The EU claims that the bags are mostly used just for a few minutes but take "100 to 1000 years" to decompose in landfill. Leaving aside the fact that "100 to 1000 years" makes economic forecasts look downright precise, I have a question here: how do they know that? There isn't a plastic bag on the face of the earth that's anywhere close to 100 years old, so how can anyone claim to know that the damned things will take a millennium to decompose?

And one more thing. How much of the rubbish going to landfill do you think these little bags, which seem to worry the bureaucrats and Eurocrats so much, actually account for?  The answer: ONE percent. There must be some more productive way for these people to spend their time.