Bags of Change meets Zac Goldsmith
28 May 2008
Bags of Change meets Zac Goldsmith, environmental campaigner and director of the Ecologist magazine.
BoC: Bags of Change is offering consumers an alternative to plastic bags with its range of re-useable shopping bags. What’s your position on the plastic bag issue?
ZG: The UK is shamefully wasteful. We generate enough waste every two hours to fill the Albert Hall. The plastic bag is undoubtedly the most senseless waste of all. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy. Thousands of sea turtles, whales, and countless other species mistake the bags for food and once ingested, the bags block the animal’s insides and cause a horrible death.
The figures are shocking. Each year 13 billion bags are used and thrown away in the UK. That’s roughly 800 bags per family, every year. Each bag will be used for an average of 20 minutes, and once discarded will take anything up to 1,000 years to decompose. About 98% will end up in our already overflowing landfill sites. Some 200 million will litter the countryside. To produce the world’s plastic bags, nearly £3billion worth of oil is required, and as they’re largely made in India and China, the bags we use in the UK will have traveled thousands of miles to get here.
Countless other regions and countries have taken the initiative to ban or phase out the bag, and wherever that has happened, it is met with wide-scale popular approval. Ireland for instance introduced a bag tax, currently 16p which has led to a reported 90% reduction in the number of bags used. A similar scheme in the UK would mean 11 billion fewer bags going to landfill each year. China, South Africa, Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Taiwan and San Francisco have all introduced bans. Countries like Belgium, Denmark, Holland, Italy and Switzerland meanwhile have followed the Irish example by introducing levies on plastic bags.
We’re miles behind in the UK, but things are beginning to happen. Some of our best-known companies like Marks and Spencer’s are experimenting with bag taxes. Modbury in Devon has successfully persuaded its 43 retailers to ditch the plastic bag and has become the UK’s first plastic bag-free town. Inspired by their success, towns all over the country are following suit. We have a promise now from the government. We need to make sure this one is honoured.
BoC: Could you tell us more about the Save Our Shops Campaign?
ZG: Across the country, small shops are under increasing pressure. In the past six years, London alone is estimated to have lost more than 7,000.
With ever-increasing rent and business rates, unhelpful parking arrangements, stiff competition from the larger chains and a host of other obstacles, shopkeepers in the Richmond area are far from immune.
But we don’t have to accept decline. Other places have bucked the trend and we can too, but it requires a real effort from the Council.
We’re asking the Council to appoint a full-time Retail Champion, initially to undertake a wide-ranging and radical review of the state of our shopping areas, and then to deliver a clear strategy for revitalising them. He/She would work closely with voluntary local Retail Associations, and would oversee among other things, the establishment and use of a new Civic Pride Fund to improve the appearance of our shopping areas.
BoC: And Zac, we have to ask, what’s in your shopping basket?
ZG: All kinds of things, but always – where possible – local and sustainable.
