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Not content with pulling a new emissions charge out of the bag, Ken Livingstone is now clamping down on disposable plastic carrier bags by supporting a campaign that's dishing out thousands of reusable shopping bags to plastic-wasting Londoners.
Every week, 37 million plastic bags are used in London, and only one in 200 are recycled. So last Friday, Recycle for London and freebie newspaper thelondonpaper handed out 10,000 reusable cotton bags at the very hub of London's shopping centre -- Oxford Street and Regent Street, where a hefty portion of plastic bags are picked up -- and London's Mayor gave his full support.
"Londoners don't have to reduce their quality of life to tackle climate change, but we do need to change our wasteful habits. Using fewer plastic bags and remembering to carry a reusable bag is a great way to brush-up your green credentials," said Ken. "It is estimated that most of these plastic bags are used on average for just 12 minutes before being thrown away where they end up in landfill sites and take an estimated 400 years to decompose."
Jenny Jones, Green Party member of the London Assembly, also called for more preventative measures: "The public clearly wants a ban, and government must act by introducing a national tax similar to the one in Ireland that resulted in a 90 per cent reduction in usage of throwaway plastic bags."
"Using reusable shopping bags has to become the acceptable way of shopping. The 2.2 billion plastic shopping bags given out by retailers in the capital each year end up in landfill, incinerated, or floating in the sea as an environmental menace to wildlife."
The bags were donated by the Recycle for London organisation and thelondonpaper, but it's reassuring to see the Mayor supporting the move so strongly. It seems unlikely now that a full ban on plastic bags could be on the way, but we would have said the same about an emissions charging zone a few years ago.
25 February 2008 12:05pm
This is all well and good but are the bags made from organic cotton? Conventional cotton production uses a lot of pesticides (16% of the world's total pesticide use) and is very polluting. This giveaway sounds like a publicity stunt for a free paper that is itself creating a lots of mess and waste in London.
26 February 2008 01:09pm
Mayor of London's office have just told me these are organic cotton bags
26 February 2008 01:13pm
and they're SKAL-certified too, which is a credible Euro certification body. There's more on the bags here:
http://www.bags2keep.co.uk/bags2keep/bags2keep-promotional-bags.html
20 March 2008 11:50am
I think reusuable bags are the best way to carry shopping home and lets hope consumer pressure will make retailers make them a less attractive option by charging for carrier bags asap. They have had a 'plastic-bag tax' in Ireland for years and it has cut plastic bag use by 90%
Also, major retailers need to be doing alot more about other types of plastic packaging found in shops. Why does fruit and veg have to be so over-packaged? Why aren't more retailers using biodegradable and fully compostable corn-starch plastic or compressed cardboard trays for holding fruit and other products?
I don't see how we can keep putting more and more plastic into landfill, this issue needs to be addressed now, all the retailers are so slow to implement anything.
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