~Break The Bag Habit

Deputy prime minister Nick Clegg has announced plans to bring in a 5p charge on single-use carrier bags in England from October 1st 2015. An unbelievable 19 million carrier bags are given out daily in England.  During the Christmas sales, this figure rises but in the 600 days until the change, says the ‘Break the Bag Habit’ campaign, (www.keepbritaintidy.org) we will use more than 12 billion bags, and spend nearly £2bn on cleaning up litter. The campaign urges people to make a small change in shopping behaviour by taking re-usable bags to the shops, and help reduce the huge amounts of waste, litter and danger to wildlife from 12 billion plastic bags.  This comes as Environment Agency figures show that carrier bag usage may have fallen by as much as 80% in Northern Ireland since a 5p levy on single use bags was introduced in April. The NI executive has also submitted plans to increase the minimum charge for single and multi-use carrier bags to 10p from April 2014. Similar charges are due to come into effect in Scotland from October 2014, while the Welsh Government introduced a levy on thin gauge bags in September 2011 – with results showing that bag
usage in Wales may have fallen by up to 76%. During the same period, the number of carrier bags issued in England had risen by 4.4%. There are plans to exempt small businesses from the charge, and incentivise businesses for using more biodegradable plastic bags. However, plastics recyclers have voiced concerns that biodegradable plastic bags undermine the recycling process by contaminating conventional plastic recycling, and criticised bio-degradable bags as being ‘designed to be waste’, whereas conventional plastic bags could be reused and recycled. A spokeman said: “Even a small amount of oxy-degradable polymer in a carrier bag is a barrier to its recyclability. If significant amounts of this material was to enter the waste stream it could undermine some of the plastics recycling targets going forward because  you would not be able to reprocess this fraction of bags (or separate them from conventional plastic).” Oxy-degradable plastics are made from petroleum-based polymers, usually polyethylene, with metal salts - such as cobalt, iron, nickel and manganese - accelerating degradation when exposed to heat or light