bags

i am all for reusing carrier bags. i always try to remember to carry a canvas shopping bag with me.
call me green.

one of the advantages of entering my dotage is that i can tut and mumble under my breath as i stand in checkout queues. one of the things that irks me (and there are many. many i tell you, oh yes there are) is the shoppers who can't seem to get more than four items into any one carrier bag, so a shop that would fit into one bag ends up in six. what makes this a doubly annoying thing is that they are so obviously doing their regular shop so over the course of a year they end up with hundreds of bags.
plastic bags. lots of them. none of them pretty and none of them rare.
apparently though they are all single use.
of course i can say this because i have a bag i can use again and again and again and again.
call me smug.

last year supermarkets gave up 13 billion bags.
look at that number again: 13 billion bags.
that is a lot of bags. that is a hell of a lot of bags.
in 2009 the supermarkets are hoping to cut that number in half. so 7.5 billion bags. that is still a lot of bags.

another bag irk is that when i am buying stuff in supermarkets the till jockeys are practically throwing the bags at me rather than asking if i need a bag. (ok this might not happen as much in my local sainsburys where the checkout staff would rather eat their own vomit than help anyone pack anything into a bag, no matter how infirm the shopper maybe or how long the queue is).

quite why supermarkets are not more active in encouraging shoppers not to use plastic bags is beyond me as it strikes me as being an obvious way to save on the overheads. though the same could be said of all the over packaging that goes on for food.

so gentle readers make a stand, carry your own bags around with you. each bag you reuse is one less that will be floating around the streets as a bit of rubbish.
go on you know it makes sense.