Plastic Bag Confusion.

Woolworths claims that implementing that ban on single use plastic bags has seen sales volumes slip in its New South Wales stores.  It reports that customers who arrive to shop without bringing a bag of their own have a tendency to buy far fewer items and this slows the progress through the checkouts. As a consequence, more staff are needed to open more checkouts, adding to store overheads.

Those grey coloured, single use plastic bags were usually dumped the moment we unpacked the groceries at home.  It has been the custom for years for shops to supply a free bag to contain the items purchased and we regard them as valueless.  Unfortunately, they are contaminating the oceans and being mistaken for food by many marine creatures who die as a result.

New South Wales is now the only state to make the supply of single use plastic bags optional.  A ban is in place in Queensland, Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the NT.  Victoria will ban them in 2019.  This is generating a degree of confusion about just what constitutes the difference between a " single use " and the bags that both Coles and Woolworths now sell for fifteen cents each to contain customer purchases.

This is a bigger, more heavily constructed bag with thicker wall strength and it can easily be returned to the store for another use when we shop. What seems to be confusing shoppers is that this bag ban seems to be entirely concentrated on the sale of groceries.  Exactly the same type of bag now sold by Coles and Woolworths is given free in stores that sell merchandise such as clothing, shoes and similar items, and this has been the practice for many years.

To add to that confusion, many small independent stores have what amounts to single use bags of added wall strength printed with their advertising message and use these to collate purchases and promote their business.  Apart from Coles and Woolworths, very little has changed in the average shopping centre.

We are seeing a return to those sturdy canvas green bags that were all the rage several decades earlier and that will probably become the custom of ecology minded shoppers but there is also a danger that many people will simply accept that  fifteen cent bag charge as the cost of grocery shopping and dump the bag after use in the same way that they disposed of single use bags.   We may soon see these bags over-represented in landfills and finding their way into the oceans.

What we are seeing is really just a change in the size and type of plastic bag in use.  If we are to heal the ecology we need to make more use of paper bags which can be repulped and reissued in new form.  The paper bag can ideally collate small item purchases and at the same time be kind to the ecology.  The starting point might be Coles and Woolworths offering free paper bags where purchase size suits that style of packaging.