5:06pm Thursday 3rd January 2008
By Ben Parsons
Campaigners hoping for a city-wide ban on plastic bags have praised supermarket shoppers for rejecting the polluting carriers.
Asda's two stores in Brighton saw sales of its reusable bags rocket as the number of customers asking for plastic bags fell by a third over Christmas.
The shop has trialled a system where large numbers of disposable bags are not put out for shoppers unless they ask for them.
The move follows Brighton and Hove City Council's calls last year for plastic bags to be eliminated in the city.
Councillors voted to lobby the Government for the power to ban the bags from Brighton shops.
A spokeswoman for Asda said: "The Brighton trial is going extremely well.
"The council and residents are keyed into environmental concerns and it shows.
"There has been a 30 per cent drop in requests for carrier bags, whilst sales of our Bags for Life have risen from the 100s to the 1000s.
"This shows that our Brighton customers are successfully choosing to reuse and have got environmental awareness in the bag."
The chain spends £25 million nationally every year on plastic bags for customers but hopes to cut the number of bags it uses by 25 per cent by the end of this year.
Asda's move is the latest of a number of moves by traders and activists in the city to reduce the number of plastic bags used by shoppers.
Around 3,000 cotton bags were circulated among 148 shops in North Laine last year as a replacement for plastic bags.
Brighton-based campaigner Chloe Hanks, 33, set up a website, www.plasticbagfreebrighton.co.uk, to support moves towards banning disposable carriers in the city.
Her friend Rebecca Hoskin spearheaded a successful campaign to make Modbury in Devon a plastic bag-free town.
Ms Hanks said she welcomed the measures taken by Asda - and said the kudos of becoming Britain's first plastic bag-free city would add to Brighton and Hove's reputation.
She said: "It's a step in the right direction.
"All companies want to have a green tinge, but all steps are steps in the right direction.
"These things get people to think not just about plastic bags, which are the top of the iceberg, but about all sorts of issues about waste in general."
Ms Hanks is organising a screening of the BBC film Hawaii - Message In The Waves, which inspired the Modbury campaign, at the Duke of York cinema on February 3.
The event also includes two short films by pupils from Balfour Junior School and a talk by artist Lou McCurdy, who exhibited sculptures made from rubbish collected on Brighton beach last year.
An estimated 3.5 million bags are handed out each year in Brighton and Hove alone. Each one can take from 400 to 1,000 years to rot away.
In Britain at least 200 million bags end up as waste on beaches, streets and parks every year. European waste directives require the UK to reduce the amount of waste sent to landfill by more than half by 2013 and to about a quarter of the current level by 2020.
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