A plastic plague

10:07am Friday 29th February 2008

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We only use the 15 billion plastic bags we throw away every year for about eight minutes each. But the devastating effects on our planet and wildlife are much more long lasting. As Marks & Spencer becomes the first major retailer to bin free plastic bags, Ruth Campbell talks to campaigners

LIKE most people, mother-of-three Joanne Pleasance used to carry her weekly shopping home in a multitude of plastic bags. On her next trip to the supermarket, she would get more, the time after that, another stash. And so it went on. Most ended up in the bin.

It was her children who made her stop and think.

Talking to them about the devastating effect of plastic bag litter on marine life and other animals, as well as the environmental impact of the 100,000 tons of bags thrown into landfill in Britain each year made her determined to change.

"When you see discarded bags blowing about in the street, caught in tree branches and flapping from fences or hedgerows, it makes you think. It is so unnecessary.

We can all do something about this. We can all make a difference.

It is so easy."

In Britain alone we used 15 billion plastic bags, around 250 each, last year. Ironically, while they are not made to last - ripping and tearing so easily that we only recycle one in 200 of them - the bags, manufactured from petrochemicals, are virtually impossible to get rid of.

While each is used for eight minutes on average, they take many hundreds of years to decompose, and will still be oozing their chemicals into the ground and polluting the world's oceans long after we are gone.

The fact that they are so light and airborne, often blowing out of landfill sites even after proper disposal, makes them a particularly hazardous type of litter.

Birds feed them to their young, farm animals choke on them and marine animals easily mistake them for food.

As Joanne, from Helmsley in North Yorkshire, researched the lasting damage caused by our convenience- obsessed society's addiction to plastic bags, she decided she had to do more than just stop using them herself. Even though she is single parent on a tight budget, she has invested £1,000 of her own hard-earned cash to have 500 reusable Helmsley cotton shopping bags made to sell in her town.

"Local traders and shopkeepers have all been very supportive, I am confident the bags will sell. I just want people to see they don't really need plastic bags if they just take a second to think about it."

Joanne is one of a growing band of people campaigning to make their towns plastic bag free. Modbury in Devon and Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire have already banned plastic bags completely. Across the UK, some 50 towns and cities - including Harrogate, Knaresborough, Berwick and Kirkbymoorside - are planning action.

In Durham, student Stuart Morris, 22, is a member of the Sustainable Living Action group, trying to lower plastic bag use in the city: "This is a single issue people can do something about. It is not complicated. We aim to meet with the big supermarkets to discuss ideas."

He, like Joanne, was inspired by BBC camerawoman and farmer's daughter Rebecca Hosking who was the driving force behind turning Modbury into Britain's first plastic-bag-free town.

She started her campaign 18 months ago after returning from filming the consequences of pollution in the Pacific Ocean, where she saw animals entangled in plastic, dolphins trailing plastic bags and seals trapped in plastic debris.

There was so much colourful plastic rubbish floating on the water that adult birds mistook it for brightly coloured squid and were feeding it to their chicks, whose stomachs filled up until they died from dehydration or starvation.

"It was the birds that finally made me break down and weep," she explains, recalling the moment she stood on a remote Hawaiian beach, surrounded by thousands of dead and dying albatross chicks.

As she waded into the middle of this horrific albatross soup, fishing out dying fledglings from among the carcasses in a hopeless attempt to revive them, Rebecca decided she must do something.

"Two years ago I thought I was environmentally aware. Today I feel as if I was just sleepwalking then. I had no idea how desperate our situation really is."

And animals are not just dying in far-flung places.

The Marine Conservation Society, which monitors the coast around Britain, reports increasing numbers of leatherback turtles washed up on UK shores with plastic debris in their stomachs.

"White or clear shopping bags resemble jelly fish, their primary prey. Swallowing the bags can result in blockages, internal infections, starvation and death,"

explains Dr Sue Kinsey of the MCS.

She points out that there has been a significant increase in plastic litter on the UK coast since 1980. A recent MCS survey, carried out over one weekend, found around 7,500 plastic bags littering our beaches - over 39 bags for every kilometre of beach surveyed.

The MCS is now calling for a plastic bag tax in the UK, in line with the nine pence per bag charge imposed in Ireland in 2002, which led to a 95pc reduction in plastic bag use. Some stores, such as Marks & Spencer - which announced yesterday that it would be charging customers 5p for each bag - are following Ireland's lead.

Others, like Ikea, are only offering reusable bags for 30p each.

While councils don't have the power to change the law, most are actively supporting anti-plastic bag campaigns.

In North Yorkshire alone, more than 19,000 of the reusable cotton bags many councils are now selling and promoting have been distributed since June.

"It is such a visual problem. If we banned plastic bags, we could drastically reduce our litter problem overnight," says Durham County Council's waste minimisation officer Daniel O'Connor John Brown, recycling officer for Ryedale Council, points out that, until the mid-70s we all coped perfectly well without plastic bags and can easily do so again.

"Most people think plastic bags are free. But there is always a cost. It costs us about 6p per bag to cart it around and put it in a landfill site. Then the site has to be managed for 50 to 100 years. If every bag was 10p, I doubt many would leave the supermarket check-outs."

Rebecca Hosking argues communities must make the changes themselves. "If you wait for the Government to do it for you the chances are little will be done,"

she says.

Which is where people like Joanne come in. A local printer is producing leaflets for free about the damage plastic does to put inside her bags. And all the money she makes will be ploughed back into making more bags.

Rebecca is thrilled at the momentum the campaign has gathered. But she says her heart sinks when she sees the amount of plastic still littering her local beaches.

"It takes Nature 300 million years to form crude oil.

We use much of the plastic made from that oil for just a few moments before discarding it. It then takes another 400 to 1,000 years for that plastic to degrade back into the environment. Is that not utter madness? What a waste of our planet."

■ For information on starting your own campaign: www.plasticbagfree.com ■ Marine Conservation Society: www.mcsuk.org

DID YOU KNOW?

Each bag takes between 400 and 1,000 years to degrade, while slowly leaching small amounts of toxic chemicals into our soils and waterways, toxins that are then ingested by the farm animals we eat