Spar Austria has launched a special offer on reusable carrier bags, selling them at a 50% discount to discourage shoppers from using plastic bags.
Less than a year since it introduced a plastic bag levy of €0.21 per bag, Spar Austria has reported that it has saved a million plastic carrier bags so far.
Only around 7% of Spar Austria customers still buy a plastic bag at the till, which means that 93% of customers bring their own shopping bag, or do without one.
The company sees the reusable carrier bag as the most sustainable solution, as single-use paper bags don’t offer a sustainable alternative to plastic bags, but merely waste different resources.
Across Europe millions of plastic bags are still ending up in the environment, where they gradually fall apart and enter the food cycle as micro-plastics.
For this reason, the member states of the European Union have committed to lower the use of plastic bags to 90 bags (per person per year) by 2019, down to 40 bags by 2025.
© 2017 European Supermarket Magazine – your source for the latest retail news. Article by Martha Sparrius. Click subscribe to sign-up for ESM: The European Supermarket Magazine
