Paying the price for plastic bags

M&S have made the first move in what may be a new approach by retailers to charging for customers who want plastic bags at the checkout.

As consumers, we take around 13 billion free plastic bags with us from the checkout. Nearly all those will find themselves in the middle of a landfill somewhere, taking up to 1,000 years to decay. I, for one, am embarassed at my contribution to this environmental legacy for my children and their future offspring.

So I’m not surprised to see that the use of plastic bags is rapidly becoming a prominent news story.

The Daily Mail has launched a campaign against them.

Now Marks & Spencer has announced that it will charge customers 5p for each plastic bag supplied. A trial of this policy in a limited number of M&S stores produced a significant reduction in demand for plastic bags. Here’s hoping the national roll-out of this policy will achieve similar success.

It will be interesting to see whether the other big retailers follow suit. Most of them have launched a variety of initiatives to discourage demand for new plastic bags, but so far only M&S has imposed a charge.

In Ireland, the government stepped in to introduce a plastic bag tax (which I think costs consumers around 17p per bag). I doubt that Alistair Darling is planning such a tax for his March 2008 Budget, but I bet his tax advisers be watching the M&S initiative carefully.