Eco responsibility (From The Northern Echo)

Eco responsibility

10:31am Tuesday 7th July 2009 in

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RECENT Letters from Angela Hilton (HAS, July 1) and Wally Walker (HAS, June 30) repeat much of the greenwash surrounding plastic bags, but sadly neglect important facts.

The best environmental practice is reduce, re-use and recycle. Plastic bags do all of these things very well. They have far fewer environmental impacts than paper in manufacture, are far lighter to transport and bring no risk of decomposing to create damaging greenhouse gases like paper bags.

Major UK retailers now have a highly successful voluntary code for reducing the impacts of bags.

They also now have about 4,000 recycling collection points for such bags so that we have the chance of recycling the plastic – which, incidentally, uses a tenth of the energy needed to recycle paper.

Mr Walker is, however, right to point out that buying bin bags defeats the object. Some 80 per cent of households use thin supermarket bags for hygienic disposal of rubbish. So let’s use our bags wisely before allowing the politicians another excuse to tax us.

Peter Woodall, Carrier Bag Consortium, Nottingham.