Say no! to carrier bags

Cut back on your carrier bag usage when you're out shopping.

Consider using large canvas bags, cardboard boxes or other re-usable containers to carry your shopping.

It would seem that the humble plastic bag has been a little persecuted recently. First a 9p tax was introduced on the fragile-handled menace in Ireland, and there have been various rumbles of a total ban on the bags in the past few years.

However, with UK supermarkets handing out an estimated 17.5 billion plastic bags every year (that’s more than 290 per person), and many of them ending up littering our streets or blocking the drains, it’s easy to see why the plastic bag is having such a hard time of it.

Plastic bags are an environmental enemy. Made of polyethylene - more commonly known as polythene - they are hazardous to manufacture and are reported to take up to 500 years to decompose.

Walk down any inner city street (and most suburban ones too) and you’re very likely to see at least one plastic bag clinging to a tree or squatting in the gutter.

The plastic pain may have made its film star debut in American Beauty, but in real life bags don’t float gracefully in the air; they clog up our roads and make a mess. Unless you want to live in a polythene-coated world now is the time to cut back on your bag usage and invest in an environmentally-friendly carrier instead.

Carrying one large canvas bag is much easier than trying to transport seven small plastic ones. However, the main benefit of making this switch is the huge eco-ego boost you can feel by lifting out your environmentally friendly re-usable container, watching others struggle to manage an armful of plastic pests.