This supermarket charge for plastic bags..

..has got to be the most bollocks attempt at extra revenue under the guise of environmental reasons since the carbon trading scheme was cooked up.

I cannot believe the line is now "Stores under pressure to match rivals' bag charge"

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&;
objectid=10567482

Since when did your competitors charging for something you provide already be something you need to match? That is your advantage already? I'd choose the shop with free bags over one which charges any day.

Add this to the list of crock-of-shit schemes with basically no chance of achieving anything meaningful other than being a revenue scoop for the people implementing them.

Correct link
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10567482

Agree the headline is absurd at first presumptive glance but when you read the story it's 100% factually accurate - they are specifically being pressured by a pressure group to do it!

I support it only if there is 100% revenue recycling of the money from the charge into some kind of environmental program or whatever.

Yeah its balls. I bet they screw the fuck out of their suppliers and get them practically for nothing in the first place, now they want to charge customers on top. Probably be making .5c profit on their plastic bags now.

yep bollocks to make people feel like they are saving the world.... but not

I was reminded of this when I saw the British government’s new green initiative, the “Get a bag habit” campaign to encourage reuse of bags, which it launched yesterday with the British Retail Consortium. Not just because the slogan almost rivals Hindmarch’s for naffness, but also because it highlights our fetishisation of the plastic bag as the root of all environmental evil.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t like plastic bags either. We use too many of them, just as we use too many of all the earth’s resources. They litter the countryside and cause problems for wildlife when they end up in the sea. But their total impact is microscopic by comparison to almost anything else we do. As environment writer George Marshall records in his excellent book Carbon Detox, our annual average consumption of bags produces 5kg of carbon dioxide a year. Total average emissions are 12,500kg.

Plastic bags aren’t even a very large component of domestic waste.

- snip -

So why this fetishisation? Because dealing with plastic bags is easy. Easy for the government, easy for retailers, easy for shoppers. It threatens no one, makes money for the shops (if they charge for their bags) and ensures that everyone feels better about themselves, while continuing to trash the biosphere just as we did before.

sorry that is a quote (bar my first line)

www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/04/08/plastic-fetish/

The key is they are just trying to cook up ways to make money under environmental guises.

If they were being genuine about it they'd offer a discount to those who chose not to have their stuff put into plastic bags... say 10c per $20 spent. Instead they are creating a penalty which they know will be paid for in the vast majority of shopping scenarios - family/household shopping, where they probably are using six or more per visit and spending upwards of $100.

Failing that, it is pretty simply to make bags out of biodegradable plastic nowdays apparently. The supermarkets just want to pre-empt it as they don't want to be footing the higher cost of them..

You've kinda made that up though - the Warehouse give away ALL proceeds to community groups, Foodstuffs have promised to give it to environmental causes (yet to be determined because the launch is still a few months away). I don't know of anybody actively making money off these schemes.

So none of them are making money - I fully support a market-driven incentive to reduce the use of "things we don't want" with the subsequent money gathered redirected else where.

Bollocks. They will be selling the alternative bags... they've not said anywhere that the money from those will go to any environmental causes that I've seen. So, in many situations, they'll basically be swapping a free plastic bag for a reusable mesh bag which costs a couple of dollars... and which they'll sell millions of a year as people forget/lose them.

= major income stream painted as helping the environment. The reality, as has been pointed out elsewhere, is the bags are a minute portion of the waste created in shopping. They'd have a better effect on the environment by changing the paint they use on their buildings, how they clean the car-park or the methods their commercial cleaners they use.

any incentive is a good incentive if it leads to a reduction in plastic use... and the added bonus of money going to environmental causes is a extra plus

now if supermarkets really cared they would start to force their suppliers to reduce all the plastic packaging that is common place and introduce other 'green' measures to reduce theirs and their customers carbon footprint

will they - fuck off... commerce is still KING

See, this isn't an incentive.. it's a punishment/penalty. An incentive would be giving a discount for those who chose to not use plastic bags.

People seems to get incentive mixed up with penalty too often in their marketing guff in NZ. Vodafone did it with the 'incentive' to move to online billing (see other thread) and councils raised parking rates in the same silly notion that they're actually achieving anything other than just increasing their revenue.

If this improves the environment I'm all for it - but it wont, it'll just increase their revenue and make it harder and harder for companies out there offering 100% recyclable plastic bag any chance of doing some real good.

I see it as an incentive to take ones own bags to the supermarket so as not to have to use their plastic or non plastic bags... you're punished if you don't

anyway... its a teeny tiny step in the right direction, even whilst we wear our cynical hats (mines made from cabbages)

Cue end of sales of those plastic things you store your supermarket bags in...

We have been paying 10c per bag for a 10 years? Pak n Sav albany.

Have absolutely no problem with it, now we take our own bags in the back of the car for when we unload the trolley into the car.

Supermarkets are pretty cut throat I doubt there will be any change in profit taking or not.

It is however fucking hilarious that we have people protesting the supermarket bags when the food in the trolley has 1000x as much cost/plastic in packaging.

Members of the Packaging Council include:
* The Warehouse
* Foodstuffs
* Progressive Enterprises

"the Warehouse, Progressive, Foodstuffs and other retailers have signed a voluntary agreement with the Packaging Council reduce use of plastic bags",

So... they signed deals with themselves to do whatever makes the most money?

You think they might have disclosed that detail..

(from Editing the Herald)

What? Who will pay for a new reusable bag when they forget one rather than the 5c for a plsatic bag? That's absurd.

Sure, they probably make some money off the first sale of the reusable bags (apparently a third of people already have them though) although it can't be much given that the Warehouse one is only 99c. The biggest thing will be cost improvement on their side for removing the billions of bags they collectively buy - but that's what's sustainable businesses is all about. You remove cost from the business alongside pointless waste. To claim they're going to suddenly make all this money off selling reusable bags misses the point.

Reduce waste = good for cost of business, good for the environment. You use price signals to encourage that behaviour. And when you then recycle any subsequent profits from said price-signal into good causes then even fuckin better.

Rob, honestly what is your problem with this??

They arent going to benefit by this in any significant way and i am absolutely sure that you arent opposed to them making profit as a general rule.

More, of all the things supermarkets do from the economic bullying of suppliers through to low paid staff what the hell is the problem with explicitly charging for something that it a built in cost anyway in an industry with an extremely high level of competition.

I notice that the packaging council is suggesting we should burn plastic to supplement coal fired power stations. I have been saying this for years - there is no point recycling *SOME* plastics when the power/energy to do so comes partly from carbon producing sources.

Instead, burning them in a proper manner like Sweden and Japan do produces power for not much different pollution (and sometimes less) than coal, oil or gas.

Basic - they're dressing a cunty attempt to make money out of something as being environmentally responsible.

What they are doing borders on unethical if you look at it closely.

Lets wait until someone shows how many times those warehouse (or similar) bags get used before replacement, and how much more energy is required to make them in the first place.

Plastic bags are made out of cheap, junk material.. but re-usable bags would be in the order of dozens, if not hundreds (if they're made out of woven material), of times the energy to create so, unless they actually get used at a commensurate rate they are only window dressing in terms of environmental impact.

At a shopping visit per week rough guess a re-usable bag may need to be used for years before it can be said to have had less impact than a plastic bag every week over the same period.

What we should be asking is: why is the collection rate of plastics so behind the 8-ball, and why - since it is available - aren't bio-plastic bags the only ones legally available? (could this be seen as an effort by supermarkets to pre-empt future legislation which would force them to deal properly with the standard plastic bags they supply currently?)

This is window-dressing which will achieve little.

Actually the disposable bags are made out of some fairly high tech resins to be both thin and strong.

Something that has always bothered me is the thickness of pet bottles in NZ, go to Europe and they are about 1/3 the thickness.

MAny are also now made out of corn starch polymers so they break down. Again, I agree this plastic bag thing IS a waste of energy and attention but the effect, while minor is still in the right direction.

Rob: as i said we have had to pay for bags for the past 10 years or so and use stackable boxes and the reusable bags. I cant think we have lost many of them and most are very cheap to buy because they have advertising on them. Of course if they were free guess what would happen to them.

I think they are making a fuss to some degree so that they can placate people like you who will complain in the future when they are asked to pay for the bags.

Storm in a tea cup from both sides really.

I will never pay for a plastic bag while the use of trolleys is still free and they don't charge a refrigeration levy on cooled good.

heh - they charge extra in Canada for cold beer...
and in California you pay an extra 8% sales tax (govt tax) on toasted subway sandwiches over untoasted.

You dont take the trolley home with you and the brand owners pay for the refrigeration in terms of display stock.

Besides which you end up paying for those things anyway just not directly so what is the problem?

To say it more eloquently - does society want to discourage the use of trolleys and refrigeration?

No,

Do disposable bags have negative externalities? Yes. So charge for it.

It love to see McDs/ KFC/ Wendies etc charged for their packaging that ends up littered all over the place.

packaging... this isn't about packaging - which in itself is a shame cause there's far too much of that shit (from everyone)

It seems to me to be about packaging of some sort.

I wonder if we could have a voluntary packaging fee for meat and fish products and stuff from the bulk food isle.

I don't really see an alternative for that though and you pay for the weight of the bag already.

Pak'n'Save has done this forever ?

North of Taupo for 23 years I think, seems to fit with the Pack it yourself brand really.

Heaps of places charge more for chilled rather than warm drinks. Check your local supermarket / Warehouse next time you're in (same packet size - 1 bottle/can)

do they have different bar codes?

the exception is that the govt of Canada and California decided it was a worthy of legislation.

The reality is you pay for plastic bags already. Its all factored into the price of everything at the supermarket. This is clearly just an attempt to make more profit under the guise of being environmentally friendly.

Haven't read any of the above, so sorry if it's been said (yawn)...

Charging for plastic bags (and offering competitively priced reusable bags) in Germany works wonders, I'd say under 1% (in fact, a lot less than 1%) buy bags, the vast bulk of people there bring their own.
Add to this their great recycling schemes, it works wonders. People can bring back the bottles to the bottle recycling (plastics, and glass) inside these bags, and so they are useful to and from the shops.

Fuck NZ is backwards.

People who are retarded to believe that people have any willpower or intelligence are as bad as the idiots they mock.

Oh, Forgot to add...

[/rant]

Germans do so because they're already well on the recycling bandwagon because it is the law for many products to include the recycling component of a product's life-cycle into the purchase price. They can do this as they produce many more daily items at home than us and because they protect their markets for these products against cheaper Asian items being imported. NZ on the other hand says 'we don't care, we just want it as cheap as possible'.

If we were forced to factor in this we'd change our habits pretty quickly as well.... We can't send our un-recyclable garbage to Turkey or the former Czech Republic and imagine it has disappeared like Germany.



Do you mean 'retarded enough to believe'? If so, I agree.

I've got a whole drawer of plastic bags that I should just transfer to the boot of my car....

Rob I don't think it's really a money making scheme at all, anyone with a good business mind will realise that this is very short sighted (as far as money making schemes go) simply because people will stockpile some plastic bags and start re-using them - the income stream from this will drop down to virtually nil in a few months, so i doubt that they're really doing it for money perse...

I will agree tho that in NZ in general, we don't like to give people in-centives to do the right thing, rather we choose to do it the other way by giving them dis-centives from doing the wrong thing (hence why they charge extra for bags rather than offer a discount for not using bags). It's the same net effect in the end, but it does make you rather suspicious.....

To the nay-sayers.

A leading expert on this subject, George Monbiot, comments on the UK's introduction of basically the same scheme there.

"Dealing with plastic bags is easy. It threatens no one, makes money for the shops and ensures that everyone feels better about themselves, while continuing to trash the biosphere just as we did before."

Supporters of this scheme - As I said before, it's a window dressing painted as a genuine environmental concern but which has little chance of having any effect on the environment.

rob a few posts in and there's a link to monibot's article... its a good read but many here will rubbish monibot (refer to Fisk)

Oh... knew it sounded familiar ha ha... It saw it on the New Scientist website.

Where is my crystal ball again?...

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10594510

What of the shady 'Packaging Council' now I wonder!

Interesting that the Herald today says that the use of plastic bags in supermarkets dropped 22% in the five years to this July. I'd like to know how much it's dropped since this policy was discussed/enacted... another couple of percent? Or was it 4% a year for five years...

Herald cartoon:

Exactly my thoughts... what a crock that they pass this off as environmental help.