We’ve put our 15-cent plastic bag where it belongs - in the archives!
We have officially stopped selling soft plastic shopping bags at our supermarket checkouts nationwide, in a change that will see thousands of tonnes of plastic saved every year.
In fact, we’ve literally made our 15-cent bag history by adding it to the Woolworths Group archives, where it joins other relics of the past - like the first ever cash register used in a Woolworths store. Last week, our historian Stephen Ward officially inducted the bag.
These bags had a short, but impactful life - and they may even be living on in your home, stuffed into your ‘bag of smaller bags’ to be reused for grocery shopping. Good on you! You must be one of the eight in ten customers who now bring their own bags to shop.
The 15-cent reusable plastic shopping was introduced in 2018, and made from 80 per cent recycled material. It was brought in to help customers adjust to the removal of the thin grey single-use plastic bags that used to pile up with every grocery shop.
While the message to customers was to bring your own bags to help the environment, we know especially in the early days, it was easy to forget to bring your own, and the 15-cent reusable plastic bag made was there to help you. Since then, we’ve seen a big shift in shopping habits and it’s become second nature to bring your own shopping bags for many of our customers.
Now, we actually want to sell less bags. The best bag for the environment is the one you bring from home - plastic, fabric, netted, a bucket - whatever works for you! Together, we’re saving new materials from going into more bags, which we don’t need if we can reuse the ones we already have.
Of course, we know people still get caught out from time to time without a bag, and that’s why we’ll continue to offer our paper shopping bags made from 70 per cent recycled material which can be easily recycled at home.
Later this year, our reusable soft plastic bags will also be removed from all online orders.
We’re excited to now see other supermarkets following our lead to help make soft plastic shopping bags history!
