Government disposable plastic bag cutdown

Today it was announced that governmental marketing will no longer continue to buy plastic bags for use in promotional operations.

This statement, by the Central Office of Information, coincided with an article that was published in the Daily Mail by the prime minister that promised a cutdown on plastic bag use.

This fitted with The Mail’s campaign against plastic bag use. Within his article, Gordon Brown made claims that he was willing to legislate to stop supermarkets handing out free plastic bags.

Figures published in today’s Guardian newspaper discredited this environmentally conscious image. The humiliating figures showed that the government bought an approximate 1 million plastic bags in 2007 for promotional and marketing use.

The Central Office of Information today claimed that it would no longer be buying plastic bags when organising government marketing campaigns. In a statement it stated that they were undertaking a large project focusing on sustainable development.

It further stated that COI already advised their clients to consider alternatives such as hemp, and that the initiative is phasing out plastic bag purchases immediately.

A spokeswoman for COI agreed that a connection between media publicity concerning plastic bags and the ban was most probably likely. The same spokeswoman then discussed the reason that the statement spoke of phasing out plastic bags was as some orders had already been organised that involved plastic bags, but that the ban is to take effect as of today.

Whitehall departments do not have to use the COI when they run marketing campaigns. But in most cases they do, as a result of its expertise in this area and its ability to achieve economies of scale.

According to an estimate by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 13 billion plastic bags are handed out to customers by retailers each year. A plastic bag takes roughly 1000 years to decay.

Six government departments and the publicity funded Electoral Commission combined bought 976,106 plastic bags for promotional and marketing use in 2007, calculations in the Guardian estimated.

In the answers to a series of parliamentary questions posed by the Conservatives it was revealed that the government purchased around a total 1,284,040 plastic bags a year.

The questions exposed the Department for Work and Pensions as the worst, with orders in excess of 600.000 plastic bags each year.

The government promised, in its Waste Strategy for England 2007 launched last May, to phase out the giving away of single-use carrier bags. A private bill sponsored by the London Councils thinktank is set to be debated in parliament in either April or May. This will allow MPs to vote upon the issue.