Have the balls to tax plastic bags and be done with it

Saw this story in the Guardian yesterday. It is a laudable endeavour that echo's a genuine desire to do something for the environment unlike supermarket giant Sainsbury's bandwagon-hopping bag amnesty on April 19 which had more than a faint whiff of marketing stunt about it.

A story in the Guardian a couple of months ago about an initiative by a group of retailers (one of which is Sainsbury's rival Tesco) to cut the number of bags they hand out by 25% by 2008 puts the problem into perspective:

For every 1bn plastic bags produced, 9,000 tonnes of plastic is used and 18,000 tonnes of CO2 produced. The new initiative could reduce CO2 emissions by 58,500 tonnes a year - the equivalent of taking 18,000 cars off the road for 12 months.

Again very laudable and yet I look at Ireland where a 10p tax on plastic carrier bags was introduced five years ago.

The €0.15 (10p) tax on every bag saw the number taken by shoppers fall from 1.2bn a year to 85m. Although that number has started rising again, it is still well below the pre-tax figures.

Carrier bags use less plastic now than they did 20 years ago but they still contain non-biodegradable polythylene which can take 100 years to break down. They are a scurge on the environment, not just in the energy and resources used to produce them but the place they inevitably take up in landfill. They are also a menace to the visible environment, littering public spaces.

Taxing carrier bags is a relatively quick and easy way of raising awareness and making people be a bit more environmentally friendly, so why can't we follow in Ireland's shoes and stop leaving it to the big corporates to pay little more than lip service to green issues?