Supermarket Rap Over Plastic Bags
Major supermarkets are failingto live up to their green credentials by cutting the number of plastic bags they use.
An online spot-check by the food industry’s trade magazine found Asda was the worst offender, using 13 bags for 29 items.
The Grocer 33 survey is a quarterly test of the online shopping services.
Five shoppers are asked to order the same 33 items from Asda.com, Tesco.com, Sainsburys.co.uk, WaitroseDeliver and its partner delivery organisation Ocado.
The results showed that Tesco.com, Asda.com and Ocado used more plastic bags than in the previous survey in November.
Tesco.com brought 11 bags for 32 items, five more than before; Asda.com brought one bag more than before and Ocado brought 10 bags for 32 items, three more than before.
WaitroseDeliver received a pat on the back as this quarter’s Star Order, using just eight plastic bags brought to the mystery shopper’s door by a “helpful and polite” delivery man.
“There’s a lot of good intentions from the supermarkets to reduce plastic bag consumption for the environment,” said Richard Clarke, news editor at The Grocer.
“But this shows there are still some areas which they have to look at and home delivery appears at the moment to be a very tough nut that they’re failing to crack.”
But a spokesman for Tesco slammed the survey as “insignificant” since its results are based on a single shopping trip.
He said: “We are very alive to the issue, but I don’t accept these findings. Eleven bags is perhaps too much, but it is certainly not representative.”
Asda admitted that using more bags than its rivals in the shop “isn’t great”, but added it was not an indication of its green credentials.
An Asda spokesman said: “We’re working our socks off to cut waste in every part of our business and hopefully next time we’re tested we’ll be more frugal.
“Any of our home shopping drivers are happy to take our plastic bags away with them and return them to our stores for recycling.”
Ocado highlighted the same bag return service, adding: “We are always looking to reduce the number of bags that we use, for example segregating cleaning or non-food products from food.”
