Carrier bags popular questions
It’s everybody’s concern
Do you know...
...how many years it takes for a standard plastic carrier bag to break down naturally?
We've all seen them lying around discarded carelessly, which makes plastic bags a highly visible form of litter. Most carrier bags tend to be discarded as waste just after only one use and this rubbish can take more than 100 years to break down!
Our plastic carrier bags are made from 50% recycled material
They’re made from 50% recycled material that saves around 6,500 tonnes of raw plastic (about 53,500 barrels of oil) each year.
Re-use this bag and when it’s no longer needed dispose of it in our recycling unit available at our main stores. If you're an online customer you can hand them back to your delivery driver who will take them away for recycling.
Here are your most popular customer carrier bags questions and our answers:
Unfortunately, it's not possible for us to stop providing free carrier bags for our customers as it’s now considered a trading critical item in our stores. We are however looking at a number of ways in which we can reduce our impact on the environment from the use of carrier bags.
We did a 'pay-for' trial some years ago where we did charge the cost price for carrier bags to our customers, but our customers where not happy and complained. So what we did next to solve the issue was to introduce a different policy - if our customer was purchasing a large amount of shopping they were given the carrier bags for free, but again we received complaints about the inconsistencies of our new policy.
From these trials we decided to stop charging our customers for carrier bags and fall in line with other retailers.
What does the UK competition law say? Well, they don’t permit retailers to work together to agree between themselves to charge for carrier bags. Why? It would be considered to be controlling part of the market for carrier bags, which is worth a lot of money to a number of UK companies.
In order our priorities are re-use, recycle and biodegrade. We're encouraging our customers to re-use carrier bags rather than use new ones each time they do their shopping.
Firstly, biodegradable means something that is made from organic material that completely breaks down into organic matter leaving nothing behind. Degradable carrier bags are something different; they are made from fossil fuel derivatives, but contain chemical additives to help them decompose more quickly.
These degradable carrier bags do not break down completely and tend to leave a powdery residue, which usually requires light, heat and oxygen to decompose.
What are the Friends of the Earth saying? They have campaigned against degradable carrier bags as they can contaminate the recycled waste material and this activity detracts from the main issue of carrier bag re-usage.
- Reduced our environmental footprint through increasing our recycled plastic content from 33% to 50%
- Ensured our recycle units are visible to our customers to actively encourage and make it easy to recycle
- Encouraged customers to reuse their bags by giving them a Nectar point each time they reuse either their own bag or one of ours
- Removed free carrier bags from the end of our checkouts
- Our free carrier bags have been designed so their final usage can be as a pedal bin liner
- We have continued to give out free ‘Bags for life’ on our make a difference day
- Our sales of our ‘Bags for life’ are doing well and a some of the money now goes towards a central fund, so Sainsbury’s stores can apply for donations for their local charities
- We regularly communicate to all our colleagues about carrier bag usage and the need to think greener
- Our large reusable ‘Super shopper’ carrier bag has been reduced in price to 40p from 75p.
We monitor our stores for their customer’s carrier bag re-usage and the stores that are not going very well actively encouraged them to raise awareness.
We've an environmental team currently working on improving communication, education and sales of our ‘bags for life’ and recycling of our free bag.
For information about our approach to:
If you don't need your plastic carrier bags, don't throw them away. Our Sainsbury's online drivers will be happy to collect your old bags. Simply give them to our driver when they next deliver your shopping, and we'll then recycle them for you.
