Unexpected item in bagging area!

Single-use plastic carrier-bags are making a comeback when they should be obsolete. We broke this habit, so who is responsible for bringing back the poster-child for needless plastic pollution?

In the biblical realm, there are a few people who rise from the dead thanks to interventions by higher-ups (like Jesus). But the most A-list of all of these is Lazarus of Bethany, dead for four days, who makes a quite remarkable comeback—miraculous, some might say. Well, I’m afraid to announce that Lazarus has been eclipsed by the comeback of the single-use plastic carrier-bag. However, this is not a miracle I feel like celebrating.

This morning I was a guest on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme (you can listen back here if you’d like to hear it ‘in the wild’, at about 8.40am). A few people have already shown an appetite for a bit more detail. This is laudable for a Bank Holiday and I’m here to serve. So here we are:

The Levy That Turned the Tide

First, let’s get some context. The story (which you’ll find in the Times, the Guardian and many others) hinges on DEFRA figures. These are released every July and cover around 100 retailers who are subjected to the Plastic Bag Levy (PBL). That levy is sometimes called a ‘tax’ even though it isn’t, it’s a levy. It was finally introduced in England in 2015, four years after Wales. It placed a 5p charge on single use carrier bags, paid by us—the shoppers. The charge was suspended during Covid when everything was wrapped in plastic, but upped to 10p in May 2021. In Northern Ireland it stands at 25p (since 2022). The retailer collects the levy, apparently ringfences it and then spends it on ‘good things’ including ‘environmental works’ (data on this is sketchy). But the point—for our purposes here, right now—is that it requires over retailers to report how many bags they are using.

Levy’s Limits: the plastic bag comeback begins

Yes, for the first time in ten years, the DEFRA figures show an unwelcome reversal in sales of single-use plastic carrier bags. This is seriously disappointing because they’ve been in freefall since the Plastic Bag Levy was introduced. I’m old enough to remember this island awash with placcy bags. We got through 7.6 billion a year, rounding out at around 140 per person. They hung from trees like ghoulish lanterns, blocked drains, bobbed around on the coastline, entangling seabirds, and blew down windy streets so the handles hooked around your shoes (I used to wear heels, back then). At the supermarket cash-till, retailers used to spew them out like coins from a rigged slot-machine. If you didn’t obtain 20 from your weekly shop, you wondered how you would cope.

But as our environmental consciousness rose, so did our understanding of single-use plastic bags (defined as under seven microns in thickness—much thinner than a human hair) as a pernicious force. The Break the Bag Habit Coalition was formed, including the Marine Conservation Society, Surfers Against Sewage and others, to push for change. The name of the coalition was prescient. It was clear that we needed a collective nudge to break this habit.

The plastic industry agreed and did all it could to facilitate a once-in-a-generation shift away from its polluting, pernicious product. I’M JOKING. The plastic industry lobbying groups fought tooth and nail to delay, distract and reject the data and science. Countless reports were funded that showed plastic bags were actually helping the environment (there is no eye-roll big enough). Up until the eve of the Plastic Bag Levy being introduced the plastic industry lobbyists were promising certain doom like the Witches of MacBeth. Plastic bag use would in fact soar because people would no longer reuse their supermarket bags as bin liners and on and on it went. On the morning of the introduction of the PBL I was invited into the Sky News studio. The host wondered how people would cope if they’d forgotten their tote bags? What was I going to do about this? I said I thought they’d cope fine (as they had in Ireland; that nation introduced a plastic bag levy back in 2002 which had proved to be highly successful). I added that I would carry a few extra totes with me, and if anyone was stuck at the same checkout as me, I’d happily loan them a bag. This was never required.

So the levy came trundling in, and nobody died in a surge of bin bags. In fact carrier bag use dropped by over 95% in the first few years, and has been going down ever since. There was reason to believe that we were close to making the single use carrier bag obsolete. Even the industry lobbyists began to say they’d always been a big fan of the levy. While other nations had success eradicating the plastic bag through regulatory means—notably Rwanda, which completely banned it—the UK achievement was considered sacred because it worked through behavioural ‘nudge’ rather than legislation. By adding a small charge, it effortlessly shifted millions of consumers away from single-use plastics, driving a dramatic drop in plastic bag use and reducing environmental waste without heavy-handed regulation. It’s probably our greatest achievement in environmental nudges.

So how devastating (and I get more emotionally distraught every time I think about this) that we’re now experiencing a surge, a swing of seven per cent in the wrong direction. This comes at a point when we should be eradicating single-use plastic carriers for ever. Why, instead, am I now carrying an ‘8 bags per person’ burden on my shiny green conscience?

The ‘Ocado Effect’: how online grocers became Prime Suspect.

The answer comes down to the ‘Ocado Effect’. According to the DEFRA figures, the online grocery giant sold 221 million bags, a 30 million increase year-on-year, accounting for 51% of all bags sold by UK retailers. As a non-regular Ocado customer, that’s pretty galling. Regular customers might not be jazzed about that either. While this will inevitably be cast as the price ‘consumers’ (and remember I hate that definition, and use it regretfully) are willing to pay for super-fast convenience, many are deeply attached to the decline in plastic bags and will be horrified.

Ocado would likely point to the fact that it mitigates its plastic bag consumption through its Bag Recycle Bonus Scheme. Under this scheme, shoppers can hand back any plastic bags to the delivery driver and get a rebate that matches the levy (so, 10p per bag). To be fair, when I have used Ocado on a couple of occasions in the past, the driver asked me repeatedly about the bags and was laudably persistent about me returning them (perhaps he used to read my columns and thought I could up my own game!). Ocado claims an 89% return rate under this scheme. But the data is incomplete. It seems that return rate is just for Ocado’s own bags and doesn’t tell me how many are actually recycled into new bags (via Echo Packaging in Northampton) in the closed-loop-system it boasts of. While this might suggest a neat bag-in, bag-out scenario, it seems that is not the full picture.

It never is. Plastic bags, just like plastic garments (another subject, for another day) are difficult to recapture once put out in the world. A much stronger line of action is to avoid producing them in the first place. But this is not an option for Ocado. Despite its reputation as a tech-savvy disruptor, Ocado has spent the vast majority of its two-decade existence in the red. You probably don’t need me to tell you that retail, especially groceries, is a brutal business. To gain dominance the online grocer has essentially weaponised speed—using slick logistics and rapid delivery to reinvent its place in a brutally competitive grocery game. In fact Ocado has become famous for its speedy fulfilment, picking a 50 item order in under five minutes (something that used to take a couple of hours using in-store methods). The key to this is something called the On Grid Robotic Pick System and a series of robotic staffed fulfilment centres called The Hive. When these opened in Luton and Andover, there were many breathless reports by feature writers bowled over by the automation and speed of it all. If this sounds expensive, it is! But the capitalism experts tell me that the idea is that these high-tech “solutions” will eventually generate huge licensing revenues, potentially surpassing retail profits.

Plastic Pushback: the hidden trade-offs nobody told you about.

What nobody told me (or you) however, is that there was a hidden trade off. While super robots would assemble the nation’s tampons and cup-a-soups at the speed of light, they would also spew out plastic bags, like the ladies (invariably) on the checkouts in actual bricks and mortar stores back in the day. Because Ocado’s Grid Robotic Pick System is apparently completely dependent on single-use carrier bags, using them systematically (I guess robots are quite systematic) to separate product categories—frozen goods, cleaning products, raw meat etc. The placcy bag is back to ensure ‘logistical fluidity’. Thanks Ocado.

Of course, they are not the only dissenter. Co-op, Sainsbury’s, and other major retailers have also driven the recent surge in single-use carrier bag use. Last year the Co-op sold 94 million bags. The Co-op is likely to point out that its bags are all compostable. Unfortunately for the Co-op these are still counted as single-use plastic under DEFRA's rules. Sounds unfair? I think compostable complicates. While the Co-op will point out that they can be used as caddy liners (for food waste bins) many local authorities will not accept them as they have very specific standards. There is contention over whether compostable bags really are ‘home compostable’ and if they get into the recycling system they melt all over the belt and cause havoc. So this is not the way to go, in my opinion.

Not so fast Sainsbury’s either—their carrier-bag problem is up by 2.5 million year-on-year. They say they’ve got ahead of the spike, by changing to paper. We should always remember paper is hardly blameless either. While I don’t buy the ‘plastic is more economical than paper’, ecologically we’re not in a position to be whooping-it-up with any materials.

Quick Clicks, Big Bags: the plastic toll of Fast Grocery Delivery

Sharing some of the blame across other retailers moves us on to the next umbrella culprit—ultra-fast, on-demand grocery delivery services. Fancy a custard cream or a Müller corner? God forbid you’d wait for a booked Ocado delivery or pop to the shop yourself—now you can get such delicacies within the hour. Most of the grocers now partner with Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and Just Eat but some are also evolving their own rapid delivery service: Sainsburys operates Chop Chop, Tesco Whoosh and Ocado has its own spin off service, Zoom. All look slow compared to Getir that will deliver within 10 minutes.

I think you’ve guessed the punchline here, but all this Whooshing and Zooming of grocery staples has a secret, uncosted (at least to the planet) enabler. Yes, it’s the single-use plastic carrier bag. These models have been shown to rely heavily on placcy bags for speed and convenience, often over-packaging even small orders.

As often happens, when questioned, retailers and the plastic industry will lean heavily on the hygiene and safety requirements of plastic. The classic product that MUST-be-bagged on its own being bleach (I’m not entirely sure why you’d need this within 10 minutes unless you’d just committed a murder). But bleach has a cap and container which is pretty much impenetrable.

Tesco has done well by some metrics. One of three retailers to stop selling single-use plastic bags at all. It uses humans to fulfil online orders (resulting in fewer plastic bags with deliveries). But Tesco still has a plastic problem, not least in the form of the red bags made from very thin plastic used for raw meat and fish. While it claims to recycle a large amount of soft plastics, a study by Everyday Plastic tracked 40 bundles of returned soft plastics and found that 70% were incinerated for energy recovery, 15% were converted into fuel pellets, 10% were downcycled overseas, and only 5% were downcycled within the UK. This is an example of hidden plastics. Another example of hidden plastics that is mushrooming is the plastic that houses online fast fashion brands. On top of the fact that the ultra-fast-fashion found inside is likely plastic too. But let’s leave that for another day.

Perhaps we are luckier with the highly visible, single-use plastic carrier bag. It’s coming back into focus at a point where we still recognise it as a totemic symbol of environmental degradation. A turtle killer, a needless ecological pollutant, we can recognise that it is highly undesirable. We also have very recent collective experience of getting on fine without it. It’s a horrible old bit of design that has outstayed any welcome and it’s clear that it is mainly here to enable intense retail capitalisation by businesses that do not have our consent, or assent, to reintroduce pollution that we’ve battled hard to take off the table.

Standing Firm: keeping plastic bags where they belong - Out

I’m conscious that I’ve written a very long piece about a very small issue, but I can’t stress enough how important it is to resist a backslide in progress against plastic. As evidenced by the recent collapse of the Global Plastics Treaty, the plastics industry (for which you can substitute ‘fossil fuel industry’) has no intention of capping production. For them, any avenue for expansion for plastic is not just welcome, but necessary. The plastic industry lobbying arm is extensive and very well funded. It can mobilise at a moment’s notice. It might seem unlikely now that you would end up with 140 plastic bags next year, but it could happen.

To keep the single-use plastic bag at bay requires a more robust, re-engineered Plastic Bag Levy. It needs to be fit-for-purpose and legislation needs to keep up with the pace of innovation in e-tailing. I’d also like a bit more transparency about the funds generated by the Plastic Levy and where they end up. Should retailers be allowed to keep that information hidden? Also, isn’t it a bit awkward that some of it goes to funding organisations that are supposed to be working with retailers to power-down on plastic packaging. At the very least the online grocers should try their own nudging of customers. Many have made the point that you should have to opt-in to bags rather than opt-out when placing an online order.

Retail brands that jettison hard-won, cherished progress should be answerable. But how do we get online retailers to show restraint when their business models are all about more and faster? That is not completely obvious. But just like AI or any other technologies that leach power, wealth and environmental resilience away from citizens, we can vote with our feet. In the old days advising on action here, I would’ve petitioned you to swap the supermarket for a farmer’s market. Now I suggest you boycott online and rapid grocery deliveries in favour of an in-person visit to the supermarket with your own reusable tote bags. Is it my standards that have slipped, or am I just more realistic and adapting to a different landscape?

As ever, I would love to know what you think, suggest, know and want to share. Please message me with any thoughts. Outside of Substack, you’ll also find me on Instagram @theseagull and LinkedIn @Lucy Siegle.