On Monday, English shoppers join the rest of the UK in having to pay for carrier bags. That’s great in theory, but a mess of confusing exemptions makes it hard to predict the impact

How many plastic bags have you got at home? I ask because I have just counted mine. They are sprawled across the kitchen table, my own personal, slippery, shiny bag mountain built from my own personal landfill site, otherwise known as the cupboard under the stairs. And they just keep coming. It is almost magic, the way you can go on pulling plastic bag out of plastic bag out of plastic bag, like rabbits from a hat. There are 82 in total. I didn’t know I liked department stores quite so much. Or, judging by the dozen blue bags from the corner shop, that I ate so many frozen desserts: they’re just too cold to carry in bare hands.

Slowly but surely, this bag mountain is going to shrink and slide. On Monday, anyone in England who shops at a retailer that employs 250 or more full-time members of staff nationwide will have to pay 5p for a single-use carrier bag. The charge will apply in all kinds of outlets, from fashion chains to DIY stores as well as supermarkets. There are a few exemptions, such as aquatic creatures - though it would be interesting to watch people get goldfish home without a bag. But mostly, this is the start of a new life. One in which you must remember your own reusable bags every time you go shopping, or pay.

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You do not need to look far to understand why a charge is needed. You can see the reasons blowing across windswept playgrounds, puckering on railway tracks, crumpling in gutters, catching in the wheels of bicycles or snagged in the branches of trees. The cheap, tatty carrier, plain or printed, in white or bright colours, has become the emblem of consumerism gone wrong. It is the embodiment of wastefulness, glaringly out of place with its surroundings. The cheap carrier, says Andy Cummins, campaigns director of Surfers Against Sewage (SAS), “is the poster boy of litter. They are really easy to spot. And you have the emotional impact. You know turtles and whales and dolphins will mistake them for jellyfish.”

According to Wrap, the waste reduction body, 8.5bn thin-gauge plastic bags – the ordinary, free ones – were used last year by customers of UK supermarkets. That amounts to more than 23m a day. Most of these are not biodegradable, but over centuries break down into smaller and smaller pieces of plastic. We think. It is too soon to tell. And since 2009, when usage figures troughed, the number of single-use carriers handed out has begun a steady upward creep. Perhaps the crisis of conscience has eased and people have got used to the idea of their wastefulness again. The charge is clearly needed. But will it work? And does it go far enough?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Plastic bags are a very visible form of environmental pollution. Photograph: Roger Whiteway/Getty Images

The precedents suggest the levy is a stroke of genius. After a similar 5p charge was introduced in Wales in October 2011, in Northern Ireland in April 2013 and in Scotland last October, all three reported significant reductions in the number of bags taken from shops. Wales and Northern Ireland have seen a 78% and an 81% decline in plastic bag use respectively. There has been a small blip in Wales, but overall the levy seems to be working. More than that, it is popular with consumers.

In many ways, the levy is a brilliantly simple invention: a token fee that won’t break anybody’s bank, but instead will place a small, cool silver marker against your conscience. It will give you pause, jog your memory, hold you up at the checkout, and make you ask: do I need this? The charge is not about the expense – you could buy a year’s worth of bags for about six quid if you wanted to – it is about reforming habits, making people think. (Although stand by for a rise in the sale of bin liners.)

“A bag charge works,” says Cummins. “It works in Wales and it works in Scotland and it works in Northern Ireland. It will work in England too. But not as well.”



If that sounds unnecessarily downbeat, Cummins has a point. The bag charge that comes into force in England on 5 October differs substantially from the levies that operate elsewhere in the UK. In Wales, the charge applies to all single-use bags, including those made of paper or starch-based materials, but in England, the charge applies only to single-use plastic bags of a thickness of 70 microns (0.07mm) or less. In Wales, the charge applies to all retailers, but in England, it applies only to those that employ 250 or more full-time staff.

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These complications have created a lengthy explanation – 1,600 words, according to the Daily Mail, which must have counted – of the rules and regulations and exemptions of the charge. Unfortunately, this doesn’t contain guidance on how to identify a bag of 70 microns. The case is particularly complicated for smaller outlets, which are free to voluntarily charge. According to research by the Association of Convenience Stores, about 8,000 of its members plan to adopt the levy. Expect bag warfare between rival corner shops trying to profit from each other’s decisions. “We’re the eco one!” “We’re the free bag one!” For stores that operate franchises, such as Spar, Londis or Budgens, there will be no consistency across their branches. Some will charge. Some won’t. Shoppers will find out whether they are shopping in a free-bag or pay-bag Spar only when they reach the checkout.

So why is the charge in England being differently applied? “I think a sensible compromise was made,” says a spokesman for the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (Defra). “It was about getting the balance right, looking at small businesses and start-ups, making sure they got support. And really focusing on where the vast majority of bags are coming from – which is big supermarkets.” The government estimates that, over the next 10 years, up to £730m will be raised for good causes. The levy is not a tax; retailers may decide what to do with it, but must report their actions to government (there will be no obligation for voluntary adopters to report the whereabouts of all those five pences). The leading supermarkets have pledged to donate the money to charities. In addition, a £60m saving on litter collection costs is forecast and carbon savings of £13m.

But small businesses, of the kind the government was purportedly considering, are not happy. “We are in support of a universal scheme, such as in Wales and Scotland,” says Chris Noice of the Association of Convenience Stores. “The government has exempted small businesses from something they want to be included in. We raised this as soon as the legislation was put forward. Unfortunately, the government has ignored us and the Federation of Small Businesses, basically shutting everyone out and saying: ‘We’ve made the call.’”

The vest or T-shirt carrier – so-called because when it is laid flat, its handles resemble straps – is the classic single-use carrier that the charge is aimed at. Credited as the invention of a Swedish company, Cellplast, in 1965, its precursor was the polythene bag made after polyethylene was discovered in the UK in the 1930s. Colin Williamson, a founding “plastiquarian” of the Plastics Historical Society – owns a packet of 40s polythene bags. “Very plain, very simple. They even have instructions for use and how to wash them and hang them on the line to dry,” he says.

By the late 50s, polythene bag manufacture had commenced in the UK. Plastic-bag-making machines were advertised in the journals of the packaging industry. Geoffrey Davies, whose company Polybags still makes bags in Middlesex, bought one in 1961 for £525. “Polythene and plastic films were regarded as a product with a future,” he says.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A bag machine operator moves a roll of plastic film before being processsed into plastic bags at a manufacturing plant in Milesburg, Pennsylvania. Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

It must feel strange to have watched something so gloriously modern and hopeful turn, over the decades, into such a curse. Does Davies have a view on the plastic bag charge? “I have a view on the precise nature of the regulations, which are absurdly complicated,” he says. “It would be much better to have a straightforward 5p charge. And to apply it to everyone.” He carries a bag for life, “when I remember to take it out the car”.

Hearing Davies’s description of the moment when plastic emerges from the machine, blown up through a tube like a bubble, expansive and changeable, it is easy to see why plastic bags exert such sway over the popular imagination. They convert our transaction at the till into waste with a rapidity that can seem almost poignant. (Think of that scene in American Beauty where Ricky films a plastic bag blowing in the wind.) The whole process of using thin bags and then hiding them inside another thin bag inside another at the back of a dark cupboard is, for the perpetrator, degrading. The average household hoards 40. No wonder people are shamed by their bag mountains.

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Maybe all these feelings, packed into bags, help to explain why plastic carriers are so often singled out as the worst environmental villains.

“Plastic bags are visible. They’re everywhere,” says David Powell, economics campaigner at Friends of the Earth. “But they are about 2% of all litter in the UK. Two per cent is quite a lot, but it also means that 98% is something else.” In terms of marine litter, 94% of all sea birds in the North Sea have been found with plastic in their stomachs. But bags represent only 2% of all litter found on the beach too. Smaller forms of plastic detritus – such as nurdles, used in injection moulding – dangerously resemble fish eggs and are harder to stop entering the environment. Curing the bag problem will not cure everything.

“The charge is a welcome move,” says Powell. “But we are concerned that the government will think it’s job done. If you go into a supermarket, any food you buy will be wrapped in layers of plastic. If you order something from the internet, it will turn up in a massive box full of plastic. Now retailers must surf the wave of consumers doing their bit and start to clamp down on all that packaging.”

This sounds like a great idea. But just one, final note of caution, before the people of England enter this new single-use bag-less world. Beware of salving your conscience by buying too many pricier, reusable carriers. During my audit of the cupboard under the stairs, I found 23 bags for life.