Ditch the placcy bag. Switch to canvas bags or start using ‘bags for life’ instead. Take your rucksack with you when you go shopping, or load up your small children! Anything but accept the plastic bag.

134 plastic bags are produced each year for each person in Britain. That’s eight billion plastic bags produced a year in the UK alone. And it’s hardly surprising because they are a brilliant invention: lightweight, strong, waterproof, cheap, accessible. They make life so much easier. 
In fact, since they overtook earlier carrying devices – the knapsack, the string bag, the paper bag, the cardboard box, the little-old-lady-tartan-box-trolley – we’ve become a plastic-bag planet. Americans use 100 billion plastic bags a year – 99% going straight into the rubbish after one use. Which helps explain why the entire world is tangled up in the things. 
In South Africa the plastic bag is known as ‘the national flower’. In North America it’s called ‘urban tumbleweed’.

Every time one of these hi-tech innovations is thrust at us by an unsuspecting shop-assistant we make a choice, however subtle, about what we think of our planet and those we share it with. Because a plastic bag can be a matter of life and death.

One Indian state is banning them after floods left a thousand people dead. Plastic bags had choked the drains. You see … the wonderful strength of a plastic bag is also its fatal weakness. It will hold all your shopping all the way home … but it will also take a thousand years to disintegrate. And if we use them as if they have no environmental implications, then manufacturers will keep making them – and the pressure to switch to bio-degradable versions will not be increased.

Since Generous began more that four years ago this has consistently been our most popular action. And even the supermarkets are on to this one now. Together we have saved literally thousands of bags.

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