Sorry for not posting in a while, but I’ve been busy with work, and feeling guilty when I don’t manage to run every day due to tiredness. But that’s not what this post is about.

A bit of background. I work in retail, supporting major chains with things like refits and range reviews. This involves helping to put out the delivery, as we’ve been blocking the store staff from accessing at least one section.

Recently the British government has announced a change to its plastic bag charge. The cost for “single-use” bags is going to double from 5p to 10p, and will apply to all retailers, ending the exemption for ones with under 200 employees. Plastic straws and single-use plastic bottles are also coming under fire, with mentions of bans and/or taxes for them too.

To me, this is placing the blame for plastic use on the wrong group. End consumer plastic use is a small part of the problem. More responsibility needs to be placed further up the supply chain; the manufacturers, distributors, and retailers.

I accept that some plastic use is necessary; as long as deliveries are made on wooden pallets, they’ll need to be shrink wrapped to avoid them ending up all over the floor. But, on the other hand, most things don’t need to come in on pallets, and could be put into metal cages instead. Toilet/kitchen roll, cereal, and crisps are the exceptions.

That’s not what annoys me though. What gets my goat is the totally unnecessary use of plastic in the supply chain.

That’s from one of my trips to the cardboard baler last night. That plastic was from about a dozen boxes of loose cutlery. That was only half of it, there was more of it a few layers down from another load of cutlery boxes.

Loose cutlery arrives at the store in a cardboard box, containing a dozen items, each one individually wrapped in a plastic bag. These bags are removed before the cutlery is put on sale.

So when you’ve got three designs of cutlery, with seven pieces in each line, and two boxes of each piece to put out…maths isn’t my strong suit, but that’s 3*7*2*12=504 pieces of plastic, just from putting out one shelf of items.

It’s not just cutlery. Kitchen utensils, travel mugs, pots and pans, and sports bottles all also arrive at the stores in individual bags inside cardboard boxes. Some also have bubble wrap; quite why a stainless steel item needs bubble wrap I don’t know.

Yes, the government should be encouraging the average person to reduce their use of disposal, single-use plastic, but they should be targeting the rest of the supply chain too. The blame does not solely on the consumer.