Carrier bags popular questions
It’s everybody’s concern
Do you know...
...how many years it takes for a standard plastic carrier bag to break down naturally?
We've all seen them lying around discarded carelessly, which makes plastic bags a highly visible form of litter. Most carrier bags tend to be discarded as waste just after only one use and this rubbish can take more than 100 years to break down!
Our plastic carrier bags are made from 33% recycled material
They’re made from 33% recycled material that saves around 6,500 tonnes of raw plastic (about 53,500 barrels of oil) each year.
Re-use this bag and when it’s no longer needed dispose of it in our recycling unit available at our main stores. If you're an online customer you can hand them back to your delivery driver who will take them away for recycling.
Here are your most popular customer carrier bags questions and our answers:
Unfortunately, it's not possible for us to stop providing free carrier bags for our customers as it’s now considered a trading critical item in our stores. We are however looking at a number of ways in which we can reduce our impact on the environment from the use of carrier bags.
We did a 'pay-for' trial some years ago where we did charge the cost price for carrier bags to our customers, but our customers where not happy and complained. So what we did next to solve the issue was to introduce a different policy - if our customer was purchasing a large amount of shopping they were given the carrier bags for free, but again we received complaints about the inconsistencies of our new policy.
From these trials we decided to stop charging our customers for carrier bags and fall in line with other retailers.
What does the UK competition law say? Well, they don’t permit retailers to work together to agree between themselves to charge for carrier bags. Why? It would be considered to be controlling part of the market for carrier bags, which is worth a lot of money to a number of UK companies.
In order our priorities are re-use, recycle and biodegrade.
We're encouraging our customers to re-use carrier bags rather than use new ones each time they do their shopping. We have run trials for biodegradable bags, which were made from tapioca starch and continue to look at viable ways to progress.
Firstly, biodegradable means something that is made from organic material that completely breaks down into organic matter leaving nothing behind. Degradable carrier bags are something different; they are made from fossil fuel derivatives, but contain chemical additives to help them decompose more quickly. These degradable carrier bags do not break down completely and tend to leave a powdery residue, which usually requires light, heat and oxygen to decompose.
What are the Friends of the Earth saying? They’re currently campaigning against degradable carrier bags as they can contaminate the recycled waste material and this activity detracts from the main issue of carrier bag re-usage.
We have set ourselves a target of reducing free carrier bag usage by 5% for 2005-2006.
In the recent past, we have seen...
- In the last year, a 44% increase in the purchase of our reusable bags
- our free carrier bags have been designed so their final usage can be as a pedal bin liner
- our sales of our ‘Bags for life’ are doing well and a some of the money now goes towards a central fund, so Sainsbury’s stores can apply for donations for their local charities
- we regularly communicate to all our colleagues about carrier bag usage and the need to think greener
- our large reusable ‘Super shopper’ carrier bag has been reduced in price to 40p from 75p
- the introduction of a re-usable jute bag
- reduced free carrier bag usage by 10%
- recycling of 150 million plastic bags through out bag recycling facilities in stores
We monitor our stores for their customers carrier bag re-usage and the store that are not going very well actively encouraged them to raise awareness.
We've an environmental team currently working with the National Compost Association to develop a truly compostable carrier bag. We also are raising the awareness to our customers to reuse carrier bags to discourage the use of the free carrier bags.
For information about our approach to:
If you don't need your plastic carriers bags, don't throw them away. Our Sainsbury's online drivers will be happy to collect your old bags. Simply give them to our driver when they next deliver your shopping, and we'll then will recycle them for you.
