06 October 2015 - English shoppers to pay 5p plastic bag charge

Carrier bag charge: England has gone into meltdown over the 'plastic bag crisis'
Helena Horton (The Telegraph)
Today will go down in history as the day England changed forever, the day the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury's struck fear into our hearts as the Government decreed that plastic bags, which used to be free, now cost five pence.

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Minimalist Plastic Bag Fee Shockingly Does Not Cause Panic on High Street
A. Siegel (The Huffington Post)
Across societies, relatively small policy changes have led to real change. Getting people off a lazy addiction to plastic bags (and thus reducing plastic impacts -- from use of fossil fuels to produce them, to reduced litter on the streets, to reduced impacts on wildlife) is one example. Over a decade ago, the institution of a 33 cents per bag fee in Ireland led to a 93 percent reduction of plastic bag use within a decade. Washington DC's five-cent per bag fee is credited with cutting DC's plastic bag use (with resulting impacts in terms of reduced plastic bags showing up in annual Anacostia River cleanups and otherwise). The fees spark people to think and have, for many, an impact far greater than the actual price involved. Go to shops in most of Western Europe and you will see the vast (typically nearly 100% each day) majority of people walking in with their own bags and the shopkeepers very used to handling a wide range of size, style, nature of bag for packing up purchases.
Bag use pollution reduction DCAs with so many things surrounding us, plastic bags (and, of course, plastics) are big (BIG) business. Thus, there are plentiful resources for fighting tooth-and-nail against bag fees. This includes money spent to "prove" that plastic bags are better for the environment than -- well -- anything else and to argue for the collapse of modern human society if there is the slightest inhibition created to their profligate (ab)use.
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Plastic bag tax: It's here, and it's green, but retailers will decide where the money goes
Jane Merrick (The Independent)
Six out of 10 people think that money raised from the new plastic bag charge, which comes into effect in England tomorrow, should be used by local communities to spend on environmental causes, an exclusive poll for The Independent on Sunday reveals today.
The vast majority of people do not realise that supermarkets and retailers have the power to keep as much of the money raised from the 5p charge on carrier bags as they like, the YouGov poll shows. And despite government guidance that the money raised should be donated to good causes, it has emerged that the legislation that introduced the 5p charge does not state that the money should be donated to charity at all, and there is no legal requirement on stores to hand over the cash raised. Retailers can deduct costs for administration and staff training from the money they collect, which could further undermine trust in the charge.
The survey figures show that consumers risk being misled in the confusion of the introduction of the policy, with 16 per cent wrongly believing that the 5p charge is a tax collected by the Government. Some 19 per cent wrongly think the Government will use the money for environmental causes, while 36 per cent don’t know where the funds will go. Only 18 per cent correctly believe that the money will be spent on environmental causes decided by the supermarkets and retailers.
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