Bags Bags and more Bags

So San Francisco supervisors (the kind of equivalent of our Town Councils) have voted for the banning of petroleum-based sacks in the city. The Mayor needs to approve it but it looks likely that he will. This is great news and a step that I hope will begin a massive backlash against the plastic bag culture around the world.

What is our obsession with the polluting, littering, oil consuming plastic bag? Why is getting rid of it such a big deal? In the UK we apparently use 10 billion plastic bags each year a staggering amount by any standards.

The Anya Hindmarch bag being offered in Sainsbury bemuses me further and illustrates the bizarre nature of our relationship with plastic bags. Hindmarch comes up with a bag that says "I'm not a plastic bag", it sells for a fiver, and people go crazy and it sells out. What is the deal with this - we have numerous opportunities to reuse old bags, buy cloth bags, use boxes. Instead the new bag causes a rush of yet more consumerism. I wonder how many will actually get used for shopping?

A secret-shopper survey run by the Grocer magazine, a food retail trade publication, found that Asda used 13 bags to deliver 29 items on a trial of their home-delivery service. With the large supermarkets committing to reduce usage of plastic bags by 25% by the end of 2008 it seems that it is attitudes and habits that need to change first. Consumers seem to pick up plastic bags without thought while retailers issue them without thought.

Maybe we need to follow the San Francisco example and simply ban them - that might concentrate the minds of retailers and consumers alike.