I’ve been watching BBC News all morning because it’s Saturday and therefore, let’s face it, there’s bugger all else on TV. Aside from the earthquake in China, the other vogue news story on is [this one] about how the Government’s plan for paying for plastic bags is just a diversion from more urgent environmental issues and shifts the blame of this issue onto the consumer rather than the supermarket.

I could pretend I’m actually interested in all this but I do have a view on supermarket’s and other shop’s use of plastic bags. I’ve been using canvas bags since I purchased one of Tim Minchin’s at Edinburgh in 2006 and my collection has steadily grown since then, with me taking them with me whenever I went shopping. Now this was all fine and well when I went to supermarkets where I get to pack my own food, though supermarkets aren’t totally fantastic, especially when it comes to self-service checkouts, which insist that you use plastic bags to pack into, otherwise the machine throws a wobbly and says “unidentified object in bagging area”. How they’re going to get past this when they levy the charge for plastic bags I don’t know.

Anyway, supermarkets are generally good when it comes to stuff like that, giving you a choice. What really bugs me is the amount of high-street shops that don’t give you that choice. Occasionally I’ll get asked if I’d like to use a bag but quite often the assistant will just shove the goods into a plastic bag with no thought as to what you want, even if you clearly have a large bag with you that you can put stuff into. It’s especially annoying if they give you the smallest of plastic bags for a whole one item - it just seems pointless to me.

So while you can blame supermarkets for having them available for consumers, at the very least they give you a choice, unlike the last time I went to the Disney Shop, who seemed very confused with their terminology. I bought a few bits and pieces to take to London with me this Monday and the assistant put them all in one of their plastic bags and then asked “Do you want to buy one of our reusable bags for £2?” Now see I had a problem with this because the Disney Store use quite thick carrier bags to begin with so to ask me if I wanted to buy a reusable bag when they’d essentially just given me one for free seemed a bit daft. So while they did give me the choice to use an eco-friendly bag, it was their own, which is not something that everyone wants.

Clearly it’s the shops and the assistants that need to buck up their ideas regarding single use bags rather than the Government putting the onus on us, the consumers. I’m not saying we’re completely blame-free but I do have to agree with some of the stuff that’s mentioned in that article. Adding a fee to plastic bags has worked for Ireland, yes, but I believe that the supermarkets and shops can be doing more to aid the cause.