Plastic packaging & plastic bags

Good one. You might alternately take an esky into the store. Really easy to handle at the car. Of course the check out staff could not work this out at the loading station. We just popped the plastic bags of cold stuff into the esky. We did this with our monthly shopping trips to the city.

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Mogo goes plastic bag free, with a message for the chain-dragging NSW government

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I was not impressed with Woolies answer to the plastic bag ban - only 80% recycled material, and imported from Germany!

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As an industrial chemist with 20 year’s in management of plastics recycling plants , it is scary how much fake news there is. The Coles process uses an extra process to agglomerate light film for processing and is good. Biodegradable film is a contaminant in recycling.Have shopped at Aldi for 10 years and supplied my own reusable bags. Unpack the bags on the kitchen bench and return to car glove box. How easy is that! Infrequently went to Woolworths for odd items and to get free bin liners. Plastics, despite fake news are non toxic and in fact enhance shelf life of food compared with some third world countries where spoilage is high. Plastics offer many benefits. The main disadvantage is human beings who litter. If there was no littering then there would be no photos of distressed animals bound in plastics. We didn’t ban cars because people were killed by drunk drivers. Don’t ban plastics because of littering. Penalise the litterers and shame them in the press.

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I don’t know what the fuss is about…but suppose in the days of social media, it is easy to blow ones top when there is a change to something which has occurred for decades.

We are like @johno1 and many other who take their own shopping bags each time we shop. We principally use calico/cotton ones for the main weekly shop, but also carry nylon ones which roll up into something not much bigger than a golf ball when we go say to a large shopping centre or when travelling (in our day packs). Once one has done it for more than 28 days, it becomes a habit.

My own view is they should ban all plastic shopping bags irrespective if they are single or multi-use (like many places in the world) and then one would need to adjust to the new way, no differently to when boxes were replaced with brown paper bags or brown paper bags replaced with plastic bags.

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The reusable plastic shopping bags I have seen to date do not impress me whatsoever.
I have some from Coles and Supa IGA I received whilst they were not charging for them as well as from Chemists Warehouse who still provide them for free when customers purchase prescriptions or spend over $40.
In comparison to the old “single use” singlet bags, they are not as easy to carry and do not easily lend themselves to tying closed if filled with rubbish.
I have been getting extra fruit & veggie plastic bags by placing less items in each one which I then use for food scraps and the like.

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They aren’t designed for being thrown in the bin/used as rubbish bags. They are designed to be reusable shopping bags. :slight_smile:

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Yes…but they also have a finite life. The ones I have seen being sold by a number of different retailers would have a limited life expectancy, and far less than that required to offset the resources used to manufacture the thicker bags (where there have been reports up to about 200 uses to then be ahead of single use bags).

If one is concerned about the government policy of allowing retailers to use thicker potentially less environmentally friendly thicker ‘multi-use’ plastic bags, one still has the choice to purchase quality cloth bags (preferably cotton or hemp) for a few dollars and which will last for many years. Our own oldest calico cloth bags are over 10 years old…noting some have had minor repairs to maintain their usability.

It is worth that using a bag twice before disposal, still qualifies for the multi-use term bandied about.

It would be better if the legislation defined multi-use was defined as having a life expectancy of say 50 uses (which would correspond to a year uuse based on a weekly shop). This would remove the thicker bags as currently supplied as a option as they would not meet the multi-use definition.

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was more than symbolism at its heart.

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Sometimes I feel that governments are more about leaving some sort of cobbled together legacy (they can use for election campaigning) rather than implementing good policy for long term betterment of the country as a whole. This is possibly another example that fits into this category.

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Are too many of us too fashion conscious and keen to stay on trend?

Where are the tied net like string bags. Natural fibre or synthetics that seemed to last forever?

Have I forgotten no one wants to have all their shopping contents on show as we push the trolley to the car :red_car:?

Or is it that you’re there is no room for retail logos? And all those chocolate bars will be the first to poke thru.

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Coles will give away reusable bags indefinitely so now instead of thin bags polluting the environment we will have thick ones. Whatever happened to encouraging re-use?

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A perfectly acceptable outcome for Coles and many of their customers. There is no limit to stupidity.

Did the brains trust who created the legislation make a mistake in allowing reusable bags to be made from materials that are not readily recycled or environmentally sustainable? Did they have some help from the major retailers affected?

I should declare there is a conflict of interest here? We don’t shop at Coles.

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Hopefully this will be the trigger for all state governemnts to also ban the thicker multi-use (or better called couple-of-use thicker) plastic bags as well.

If they don’t, the banning of single use plastic bags and the claimed environmental benefits was hollow.

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…and as well thought out as most government programs these days. If it is not pasted inside their eyeglasses they could not see it, and inside their eyeglasses it is fuzzy anyway. :roll_eyes:

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Indeed. What is wrong with people? It is just pathetic that they can’t manage without plastic bags.

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Coles flips again on plastic bag ban, puts end date on freebies

Speechless.

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The Queensland Government regulation was too weak from the get-go. It’s not surprising something like this has happened!

Soft plastics can be recycled in the Redcycle bins in most supermarkets around Australia. They are in every Coles nation-wide, and are being rolled out in Woolworths over the next year or so.
There is no such thing as sustainable single-use plastics. Reuseable is key!

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Or perhaps something other than plastic. How does paper stack up in comparison?

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It would appear that Coles cannot take a trick over the plastic shopping bag controversy.
Firstly they were attacked by customers for no longer providing free single use plastic bags when, at least in Qld, they were merely complying with State Government legislation.
Then they were attacked by claims of profiteering because they were charging for reusable plastic shopping bags.
And now they are being attacked because they are providing the same reusable bags for free to customers who need them.
Talk about a “no win” situation.