So I was at Colesworth today buying some groceries and I was forced to buy plastic bags to put my stuff in. It made me realise that I don’t actually use fewer plastic bags, it just means I’m paying for them instead of the supermarket. Nice little scam they’ve got there btw. Have you cut down on the number of plastic bags you use at the supermarket?
Do You Actually Use Fewer Plastic Bags Now We Have to Pay for Them?
Comments
You get Little Shop and Marvel stickers instead.
The old bags didn't cost much, maybe a a cent or two at most. I could see giving a 1 cent discount if you bring your own bag but that's more hassle than it's worth and would result in idiots arguing they bought 3 bags and they're being scammed that all their groceries fit in 2.
Woolworths uses the money from the "bag for good" green bags to fund junior land care grants - https://thesector.com.au/2022/02/28/woolworths-junior-landca…. Coles was donating some of the profits to landcare when I used to shop there.
Nice thanks for the info I didn’t knew
The paid bags are getting thinner so soon we’ll be paying for the same bags we used to get for free. Massive con job.
Plus it’s virtue signalling because most people: buy over packaged processed food; drive a big SUV; buy heaps of crap made from plastic; drive to work even when near PT etc.
I just get the bags from fruit and vegetable isle.
LOL!
Worrying about plastic bags whilst going to the shops in a humongous diesel guzzler vehicle …Nothing beats distractions
Idiotic comment.
Same label can be slapped to one driving EV but still eating dead animals and tossing plastic bags in red bin daily.What makes a difference is combination of efforts. Just doing one thing has little impact, that’s why we need to change habits across several areas of consumption (transport, food, travel, packaging, household heating and cooling, energy generation, reuse)
Not as idiotic as your own comment.
Combination of efforts my foot. One puny little plastic bag versus a monster vehicle pouting every kilometer traveled.
It is just an idiotic "feel good" using and equally idiotic shopping bag … pathetic.
Cannot see the forest for the trees, isn't it?
Or walking/public transport is too hard versus the little carry bag?????Feel good an nothing else.
Can you imagine if we reduced our energy dependence on fossil fuels, preserved rainforests, increased sustainability, made greener jobs and manufacturing, created environmentally friendly habitable cities, ensured clean water and air, reduced pollution all for NOTHING?!
omg, bury your head in the sand much?
Telling from your own deep experience?
Whilst we should be aware of multiple angles to attack this, Land rovers don't end up as litter, down drains, in the ocean, etc. Plastic bags do. Saying 'oh something else causes more harm' isn't a logical excuse not to do something.
They will end as litter. Eventually.
And plastic bags, the old ones, had multiple uses up until their usefulness was gone.
Doing something has to be worth of doing it. Otherwise is just a distraction, a feel good act.
Reminds me of the old Centrelink "customers" forced to sweep sand …
No, because sometimes I forget to put the reusable bags back in the car for the next shop and end up buying more. I also used to use the thin single use bags as bin liners, now have to buy those separately.
I use a foldable plastic crate - been doing it for years now. Something like this:
https://www.costco.com.au/Home-Improvement/Storage-Organisat…Crate goes from trolley, into the boot, then into the house. No bags required!
We end up buying more liners for bins. It's just a stupid scheme for corporates to make more profits and appear to be greener.
I was able to reuse them for other purpose
I shop at Aldi mainly, and stack from trolley to boxes in my car. However, I have now purchased every size imaginable of garbage bags for every possible situation, which technically means I've purchased 900% more plastic than before, where I'd reuse plastic bags for a billion things - often twice. Somebody has won but I doubt the environment.
- Reuse 5 gram plastic bag.
- Burn 5 grams of fuel driving 62.5 m in your Land Rover discovery
Durrh, I'm an environmentally conscious.
Don't forget driving around and around a car park trying to find a spot close to the door when car parks 30 seconds more walk away are readily available.
Convenience is a hell of a drug
No, but at least you're closer. Progress doesn't mean you're there yet.
And let's say it's all for nothing (which right now, I agree is very likely). At least I'll have done my bit to minimise my impact.
What I'm saying is that the loudest environmentalists drive the largest SUV's.
Source?
I cycle between Buderim and Noosa up the Sunshine Coast. Noticed way less plastic bags and empty bottles on the side of the road after the bag and bottle refund change came in.
What this does sound like is plastic bags are way too cheap with pricing not reflective enough of the environmental damage it causes. Thus people like OP still couldn't be fk'ed bring his/ her own bag for shopping.
everytime i go to cw
cashier: would you like a plastic bag for 10c
me: nope 🙄
cw?
Colesworth
chemist warehouse :D
Yeah I tell that cashier who looks like jerk every time no. Meanwhile only he does it no other staff would charge you
Not a scam
People are not responsible and forget to take bags with them or not enough bags.
I have been using the same 2-3 fabric bags for 5+ years now. It's a habbit now to take bags when I go shopping, even if I go non-grocery shopping, I take my bags and put the items in my bags if I can.
Not that hard. People just need to take responsibility of their own actions and stop blaming others for their shortcomings.
The people complaining about having to purchase bags are probably the same people who place a bunch of bananas in a produce plastic bag!
More because instead I order online and things come in those plastic satchels.
That is true, I order more from Amazon these days.
like most people i do forget to bring re-usable bags on occasion. I have built up a massive pile of plastic bags, resuable bags and paper bags that takes up a full shelf in my garage. We do try to avoid waste, but i feel the amount of plastic we've been using is far more than what it was before the change over. More recently, to avoid the guilt, we've been paying more for paper bags to avoid plastic.
I have never cared about minimising plastic bag usage and i still don't care about it. I get how many bags i need before and still now. Screw the hippies and giving corporate an excuse to line their pockets while pretending to virtue signal.
Who hurt you?
It’s not hippies or corporations lining their pockets you idiot. It’s people caring about the environment and thinking of future generations. Just because we weren’t taught to use less waste when growing up doesn’t mean we should educate our kids now! Oh sorry you obviously don’t have kids but hopefully you do understand one day…
It literally is hippies and corporations lining their pockets, pot meet kettle. Typical of that useless lot that in attempting to help caused more damage instead since the bags that replaced the free bags are many times worse for the environment then the ones that were free beforehand. They are classified as reusable instead of the single use free ones from before so they used strong, longer lasting plastics that degrade slower.
Honestly don't worry about educating kids, you should probably do the best thing you can for the environment instead which is live as short a life as possible and don't reproduce since you care about it so much.
What if everyone reused bags and never bought another plastic bag from colesworth again? Would that be bad for the environment, and would they stick it to them by not buying the 15c bags?
@DiscountForThee: What if plastic degraded into gold? Since you live in a fantasy world why stop your bullshit scenario at something so lame?
Honestly what plastic bag reduction there has been from the bags you get at the shop has more than been made up for by the increased usage of bin liners and increased amount of plastic packaging in store. Australians use more plastic per annum then ever so in real terms there has literally not been an improvement.
I didn’t think your comments could get any worse. I’m glad you don’t have kids and it sounds like you never will, so that’s even better for everyone.
I noticed less plastic bags floating around on the streets lately. It is good news.
Yes. It's taken me a few years to get my shit & a routine together, but i have a bunch of reusable woolies bags in the car. Still, now and then i forget, pay the 15 cents, get a plastic one which reinforces my need to remember!
From the votes, ~67% of users have reduced the amount of plastic bags used.
Regardless of it being a scam or not - looks like it worked.
You assume these people use less plastic because of the change to pricing rather than because they believe it to be their moral obligation or some other nonsense the younger generation have been brainwashed into believing.
It doesn't matter why people have changed their behaviour. What is important is that they have.
Certainly it matters in terms of the context of the way the poll was phrased. It implies the change is due to the price.
Of course banning free plastic bags is going to reduce the total number used lol
The overall impact is harder to measure though. The bags which are now used instead are much thicker for example.
The best thing about the free plastic bag ban is that the reduction in bags floating around shopping centers, parking lots, and streets. Would be willing to pay double for that.
Agreed there aren’t many that think like you unfortunately, the common person is selfish.
I meant this as a selfish calculation ;) Shitty looking shopping centers, having to avoid rubbish on the ground, bags flying around while you're driving, are things that annoy me personally.
Yeah same here. If everyone wasn’t so selfish we wouldn’t have half the problems we have. If I see rubbish I pick it up it’s not hard but lost on most people. Even my sister who doesn’t think like me, was shocked when I took recycling home when no recycling bin was available. It’s little things like this that we as human beings need to change our ways.
Get a foldable shopping bag and keep it with you: https://www.amazon.com.au/Shopping-Reusable-Grocery-Foldable…
They should jack up the price of all those in-store fabric/plastic bags to like $10 each, so lazy people like this OP carry bags, and stop making unnecessary wastes.
Agreed although make it like $5 and then they’ll or should think twice. If it’s too high they’ll find other means that aren’t environmentally friendly.
Alright maybe $10 was too excessive, so $5 is ok.
But what other means were you thinking? Like, load up the whole trolley on their ute tray and take it home, then dump it in the drainage parks? lol
Yeah I reckon $5 is enough to try to get them to change their bad habits. At the end of the day that’s what it’s all about is changing poor habits. It took me awhile before I remembered my reusable bag every time. Although in saying that you have to want to change, so lazy people like OP will continue to do what suits them until it’s too late!
Don’t know as I don’t think like a lazy selfish person when it comes to environmental matters. I think of my kids and future generations to come…
Then OP could just buy a roll of 25 bags for less, and probably bin the unneeded 24 bags on the way out.
No, now that I’m buying rolls of plastic rubbish bags for the first time in my life
my thoughts if you buy alot of food goto IGA if possible when at the checkout ask for bags they sometimes will give you about 50 bags so u dont have to pay for them at woolies
Why bother. Even if i used 300 new plastic bags in a year I would be down less than $50
I don't understand why supermarkets don't just offer a free alternative like a paper bag, this is how things used to be done.
They probably cost more to produce and people would abuse the use of them too. Times change unfortunately and most companies don’t care about doing what’s right they just want to make a profit.
A paper bag robust enough to hold groceries costs a lot more than a plastic supermarket bag.
Also supermarkets can make ~15c a bag selling the plastic ones now anyway,
Less supermarket bags are used for sure.
But rolls of bags are now purchased for jobs that would have previously be done by re-purposed supermarket bags.
I prefer the durability of these new 15c bags but iffy about reusing them with chicken breast etc. feels like there could be a cross contamination risk but I could be wrong
If its sealed i dont see a problem. The moisture is just water. like cold milk cartons
Beat me to it, so good
lol that's hilarious, thanks for sharing!
I have to buy bin liners now.
I haven’t seen a plastic bag in my household apart from the bin liner for years now. So yeah, I use less plastic bag.
Yes if my bloody household stops stealing my bags from the car.
Forced you to buy bags? Did you know you can push your trolley to the car and unload directly to the boot of your car? Or you can put it into your backpack if you are taking PT?
Buy bags for bin-liners.
Just plan better. You forget, you pay. No one forced you.
It's often the same people that don't make the effort to reuse or recycle that complain about stepping on rubbish/broken glass at the beach
the federal government should tax the business 99.99% of the sale price of the bags if they have advertising logos on them.
Yep
Yes, because I am slightly organised, and take bags with me to the shop. Not hard.
This. I'm convinced the people here who are constantly buying bags have brain worms.
Nah just ceebs walking back to the car or remembering to bring bags. Much easier just grabbing new ones and not scanning them
Much easier just grabbing new ones and not scanning them
Sounds like a good way to get arrested.
Either:
1. Collectively we use more plastic because some people use thick bags instead of thin
or
2. We use less plastic because everyone can be organised.I think if you live in the "real" world instead of idealising things in your head it's easy to see we changed to a system where stores make a little extra on bag sales and also started putting more plastic into the environment collectively while also disadvantaging people who fail to plan or have short attention spans.
The law was designed to fail but it doesn't matter because the environment was never it's true purpose. What intrigues me the most is whether the politician was actually convinced they were doing the right thing (which would be a bit depressing) or if they were just taking another paycheck when they passed it (at least we wouldn't be getting ruled by morons).
From what I understand the new law dramatically reduced plastic bags going into landfill, so it hasn't failed. Some individuals have.
I'm arguing that the total amount of plastic from plastic bags has increased, the number of plastic bags has of course gone down, when I look online the stats seem to show that effectively we now purchase 80% less plastic bags (https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/news-life/austra…). The issue is that on average we need to use a reusable bag something like 20-30 times. This would mean that just to break even we would need to be using 95% less bags.
Possibly if what we wanted was an environmental outcome, there shouldn't have been reusable plastic bags as an alternative. It should have just been cotton/heshen/etc. at a cost of $0.50 plus per bag. Even then plastic bags were being used previously 40% of the time as a kitchen bin liner and now people just buy them, so perhaps in the real world every person would actually need to reuse something like 100 times. Even then single use plastic bags are very thin compared to bin liners… I'm yet to meet anyone who just doesn't use any bag in their kitchen bin.
I don’t use plastic reusable bags but if I do get one, I will use it a few times and then put it in the soft plastic bins at the supermarket as I have my own cotton bags.
If more people actually used the soft plastic bins at supermarkets we wouldn’t have as many in landfill.
Hell yeah, way less. Basically zero.
The ikea tarp bag is the goat for groceries
it's not a scam
I try to remember bags rather than paying 15c each. When Woolworths runs out of those bags you only have the $1 option which is highway robbery. If they were actually decently sized I might use their green canvas bags. Also have those 4 x Giant ALDI trolley bags, use them now and again so packing is less annoying.
I don't use less plastic bags. Everyone's always gonna need bin liners, now they just have to buy it.
I rarely reuse the bags, either they're wet from frozen items or I forgot to take them to the car or bring them with me to the shops.
I don't scan the bags either, not paying for what used to be free. Inflations a bitch tooI keep a stash of reusables in my boot and if I run out, Coles now has paper bags so I use those.
Im slowly adopting reusable bags. I use good quality cotton bags purchased from general pants co. 20 or so shopping trips so far they look brand new.
The plastic ones from supermarkets proved unreliable a few times so they are stuffed away in a cupboard and reused the same way as the old plastic bags were.
A lot of people in this thread seem to be unaware that you can take your soft plastic to Coles or Woolies. Probably deserves its own thread poll.
Yep I wish more people used it. I think most know about it but to be honest find it too hard to remember to bring it with them. It’s all about creating a habit, took us a while to remember every time but we collect so much it’s so worth doing even if it sits there until we remember 😬
I just have a soft plastics bin and when it gets a certain quantity I go to Coles, which is only a couple of times a year.
Its amazing how little much rubbish you have to put into your non-recycling bin when you keep all your plastic. It gets collected every week, but its practically empty, whereas the recycling bin fills rather quickly.
I think the supermarkets don't promote it actively as they don't want too much plastic.
Exactly we were so shocked how much we collected and the non-recycling bin is always empty. Now we pretty much take a bag full of plastic every time we go to the supermarket.
Yeah true that and most of the time the bins are full. Most stores have 1 but I noticed the busier stores now have 2-3 which is great news.
I have another question as the businesses don’t provide any bags why didn’t they reduce the cost? We are still paying the same but we get an item less which earlier was included in the cost
Are the businesses using that extra income to help environment?