The Moore household is doing its best to be a little greener, but I have to say the novelty of two separate bins in the kitchen - one for real waste and the other for recycling - is wearing thin.
With two children, one puppy and a cat, there's plenty to do in the kitchen without having to wash out every tin and packet before it goes in the blue bin. Just this morning I guiltily hid Chinese take-away containers in the bottom of the bin because I couldn't face washing them. In today's society, she who admits nonchalance over the environment may as well be drowning kittens.
This brings me on to supermarket carrier bags. M&S has just announced that shoppers now have to pay a 5p tax for carrier bags. This may well work for M&S because who regularly buys more than a couple of bags of shopping there anyway? But can you really see it working in Asda where 10 or 15 bags are not unheard of?
I'm also wondering how it will work at M&S's Simply Food stores. I regularly pop into the one at London's Marylebone Station, when it is nearly always a last-minute decision based on Mr Moore sending a text to tell me the cupboard is bare. Do I happen to have a spare carrier bag neatly folded up in my handbag? Of course not. I barely remember my purse in the morning.
There's talk about supermarkets offering heavy-duty brown paper bags instead of plastic. There's nothing new in that, and from what I recall the financials don't add up either. Back in the 1990s, when Safeway was considered quite upmarket, it gave shoppers the option of brown paper bags like the ones you get in the States. They didn't have handles and really only appealed to younger customers without children buying houmous, pittas, bananas and a bottle of Perrier. Safeway abandoned the bags because they were more expensive than the plastic ones and disintegrated if someone even said the word "damp".
I also object to Gordon Brown sticking his nose into this. He holds up Ikea as an environmental angel for abandoning plastic bags, but how many of us have to visit there on a weekly basis and buy enough stuff to fill a dozen bags?
I can't wait to see how this one plays out. A plastic bag debate might seem trivial but it's the little things that irritate shoppers and ultimately dictate how loyal they are.
Has the number of customer complaints about the price of goods increased recently?
