MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

UK government pledges crackdown on plastic bags

The agency in charge of UK government marketing announced this week that it would stop buying plastic bags for use in promotional campaigns. The announcement followed the publication of figures in The Guardian showing that the government bought nearly 1million plastic bags last year for promotion and marketing purposes.

The revelation was particularly embarrassing because it coincided with the publication of an article by the prime minister in the Daily Mail pledging a crackdown on the use of plastic bags. The Mail has been running a high-profile campaign against plastic bags and in his article Brown revealed that he was willing to legislate within a year to stop supermarkets handing out free plastic bags. UK Central Office of Information, which organizes marketing campaigns on behalf of government departments, said that in future it would not be buying plastic bags. In a statement, it said: "COI is undertaking a major project on sustainable development. "We already advise our clients to consider alternatives – such as hemp – but as part of this initiative the purchase of plastic bags will be phased out with immediate effect". Asked if the announcement was connected with the media publicity about plastic bags, and the government's spending on them, a spokeswoman said: "I think that's probably true." She said the statement talked about the purchase of plastic bags being "phased out" because some orders involving plastic bags might already be in the pipeline. But from today the ban would be in force. Whitehall departments do not have to use the COI when they run marketing campaigns. But in most cases they do, because of its expertise in this area and its ability to achieve economies of scale in its procurement. Earlier, when asked why government departments were handing out so many plastic bags, the prime minister's spokeswoman said: "We can expect to see the use of single-use plastic bags being reduced". According to The Guardian calculations, six UK government departments and the publicly funded Electoral Commission together bought 976,106 plastic bags for promotion and marketing purposes last year. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimates that 13 billion free plastic bags are given out by retailers to UK shoppers every year. Each bag takes up to 1,000 years to decay. The figures emerged in answers to a series of parliamentary questions by the Tories. Some departments supplied details for the past 24 months and the annual figure was worked out by halving that amount. In total the government revealed it bought 1,284,040 plastic bags last year. Mike Webster, of Waste Watch, a pressure group, said: "Laid end to end [the bags] would reach 400km [249 miles] - just about enough to reach from London to Paris." The largest commission was by the Department for Work and Pensions, which ordered more than 600,000 branded plastic bags in the last year. Anne McGuire, a junior minister in the department, told parliament that the "vast majority" of these were for campaigns by the Health and Safety Executive. Departments giving figures for the last two years included Communities and Local Government, which spent £19,950 on 300,000 bags for its "Fire kills" campaign, the Home Office, which spent £15,455 on 132,000 bags, and the Foreign Office, which bought 11,000 bags. Neither of the latter two specified why. The government pledged to phase out free single-use carrier bags in its Waste Strategy for England 2007, launched in May last year. MPs are expected to vote on the issue in April or May, when a private bill sponsored by the London Councils think-tank is debated in parliament.