Frequently Asked Questions

·  Some plastic packaging is probably inevitable, but we can manage quite well without plastic shopping bags with alternatives such as hessian or cotton “bags for life”. Campaigners pick on them because they are so easy to do without, and because we hope that thinking about plastic bag waste will encourage people to think about reducing other plastic and packaging waste.

· Plastic bags do not biodegrade, they photodegrade – breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits, contaminating soil, waterways, oceans and entering the food chain when ingested by animals. In the marine environment plastic bag litter is lethal, causing severe pain and distress, and killing at least 100,000 birds, whales, seals and turtles every year. After an animal is killed by plastic bags, its body decomposes and the plastic is released back into the environment where it can kill again.

· At the moment the world uses over 1.2 trillion plastic bags a year, which comes to around 300 bags for each adult on the planet per year, and over one million bags being used per minute. More than 17 billion are handed out in Britain every year.

·  Plastic bags become unsightly litter. On average we use each plastic bag for about 12 minutes before disposal. 47% of wind-borne litter escaping from landfills is plastic and much of this is plastic bags, which can last in the environment for decades. We see plastic bags littering our neighbourhoods all the time.

· Plastic bags are an oil-based product, made from a non-renewable and declining resource. The Scottish Executive recently calculated that the oil used to manufacture 8 plastic carrier bags would power an average car for 1 kilometre – if we all gave up plastic bags we could save enough oil to drive 2,125,000,000 kilometres.

· It has been estimated that reducing the number of plastic bags in the UK by just 25% would eliminate 58,500 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year - the equivalent of taking 18,000 cars off the road.

· Plastic bags aren't really free - we pay for them in our shopping and if shops stopped giving them away they could pass on their savings to us, as sometimes they do, e g in extra Nectar points.