Bags
Phew, about time! At last I should be able to stop whinging about carrier bags soon. Gordon Brown has promised that supermarkets will be expected to impose a levy of at least 5p a bag. OK, so 5p isn’t much, but it will at least make people stop and think before they take a bag from now on.
Did you know that around 13 billion plastic bags are given free to UK shoppers every year?
The bags can take from 400 – 1,000 years to break down, and like all forms of plastic they do not biodegrade. Instead they photodegrade, breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits that contaminate soil, waterways and oceans, entering the food chain when ingested by animals.
(Thanks to the Guardian for these statistics)