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Because they sometimes choked foraging cows, plastic bags have been banned since 2003 by several states in India under pain of seven years in the slammer or a 100,000-rupee fine. Kenya is expected to ban them next, following Nobel prize winner Wangari Mathaai's claim that they are breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitos. Denmark, Switzerland and Ireland have put a "plastax" on them, and France recently announced it would rid its country of plastic bags by 2011.
Still, since 1977 when they were conceived as a replacement for paper bags, plastic bags have become pervasive in the UK. By 1982, Safeway was using them widely. Their use in the UK now saves 12 million trees and more than 150,000 refuse-lorry journeys. Britons "carry out" about 8 billion a year. That's 133 for every man,
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john hind discovers the fate of the millions of plastic bags used to carry our shopping |
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woman and child. Each carries shopping for 19 minutes. But then what?
About five per cent are re-used. The most common re-use is as a bag to store other plastic bags. Each household is said to have about 40 tucked away at any time. When the figure reaches about 60 these get thrown out with general household rubbish, or sent for recycling.
The bags thrown out as rubbish go into landfill sites, where they won't degrade properly because air and light can't get to them, unless they manage to escape before being compacted and a top soil added. Almost half of wind-borne litter escaping from landfills is plastic, mostly bags - contributing significantly to the 0.7 per cent of bags (280 tonnes a year in the UK) that live on as litter. The British coastline is said to be decorated with 65 bags a mile. 
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