Seven of the UK’s top 10 supermarkets have increased the amount of plastic packaging they use in the last 12 months, a damning new report has revealed.
Of the 10 retail giants – who represent 94.4 percent of the grocery retail market – only Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury’s have managed to achieve small reductions to their plastic footprint in 2019.
The report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) and Greenpeace revealed that the amount of plastic produced by UK supermarkets has risen to more than 900,000 tonnes a year, despite public commitments to reduce the figure.
This includes sales of an astonishing 1.5 billion bags for life – an increase of 25 percent on last year based on market share.
Bags for life were designed to be used repeatedly until they are worn out, at which point supermarkets would replace them but, with the 1.5 billion figure representing around 54 bags per UK household, the title ‘bag for a week’ would be closer to the mark.
EIA ocean campaigner Juliet Phillips said: “It’s shocking to see that despite unprecedented awareness of the pollution crisis, the amount of single-use plastic used by the UK’s biggest supermarkets has actually increased in the past year.
“Our survey shows that grocery retailers need to tighten up targets to drive real reductions in single-use packaging and items. We need to address our throwaway culture at root through systems change, not materials change – substituting one single-use material for another is not the solution.”
Since the introduction of a 5p carrier bag tax on traditional ‘single use’ carrier bags came into effect in October 2015, the number of carrier bags given out by supermarkets dropped from 7.6 billion in 2014 to two billion in 2016.
Many supermarkets no longer give out the old ‘single use’ carrier, but the rise in use of ‘bags for life’ suggests that many people have now switched to using these thicker bags, which contain far more plastic than their lighter counterparts.
A 2011 Environment Agency study found that ‘bags for life’ needed to be used at least four times to ensure they contributed less to climate change than the lighter, single-use bags, yet many supermarkets have drastically increased their use in the past year.
Iceland’s sales of ‘bags for life’ have risen tenfold in the past 12 months – from 3.5 million to 34 million – whilst Tesco’s sales rose from 430 million to 713 million – an increase of almost two-thirds.
The Greenpeace and EIA report calls for a total government ban or a minimum ‘bag for life’ charge of 70p. It references a cut in sales of 90% in the Republic of Ireland, following a similar price hike in 2017.
“I think it’s clear from this that customers are using them [‘bags for life’] as a single-use option. Clearly the five to 10p charge is not enough to incentivise customers to stop using these just once,” said Phillips.
“‘Bags for life’ actually contain more plastic than single-use carriers did, so they are having more of an environmental impact if people are just using them once.”
