Headline bagging!

Brown bags a good idea

Did Marks and Spencer intend to create such a stir when they announced that they intended to charge 5p for a carrier bag?

Unlikely, besides they won’t be the only retailer on the High Street making such a charge, or staking a claim to save the environment, some have been doing so for years (Aldi for example – customers in South Shields now tend to buy the much larger re-useable bag and make it last.)

There’s probably a good case to make for the absolute banning of non-degradable carrier bags completely, let’s face it our parents managed well enough without them, the canvass shopping trolley on wheels enjoyed a heyday! I often wonder how many people take notice of the brand advertising on the wasted carrier bags anyway, we see plenty of them drifting about in the wind or dumped in hedgerows, but do we really care if they came from Tescos or Lidl? At the end of the day they won’t go away and cannot be turned into compost within the next six months, retailers do have a bit of a responsibility here.

Mind you, so does the government. Gordon Brown thinks he realises this, South Shields MP and Foreign Secretary David Miliband attempted to get Blair’s government to think about taxing plastic carrier bags. Writing in his mate Dacre’s Daily Mail, Brown says;

“I praise those shops which have shown a moral lead already – I am thinking of Ikea, which has reduced its bag use by about 95 per cent recently, and Marks & Spencer, which just yesterday announced that it will now charge for bags.

Both deserve credit for showing a lead. And both are putting the proceeds back into environmental causes.

These are the strongest signals yet that shops are prepared to put their collective power behind this.

If they can do it, so can others.”

So right, so right Mr. Bruin, so when exactly can we expect to see your Labour government giving a lead?

Talk about bagging a headline!