Is this Britain's oldest carrier bag?

Updated
Oldest carrier bag
Oldest carrier bag



Martin McCaskie, a 72-year-old from Mold in North Wales, has been proudly showing off what must be one of the country's oldest regularly-used carrier bags. It was made in 1981 for Tesco's Golden Jubilee, and in the years since, Martin says he has used it over 2,000 times.

He told the Daily Mail that he always keeps it in his pocket, ready for shopping emergencies. It has come in particularly handy in the four years since the plastic bag charge was introduced in Wales, but he told the paper that even before then he was committed to reusing bags.

He had no idea it was particularly unusual, until he took it to his daughter's house at the weekend to pick up some old magazines. She saw the bag, and posted a photo on Facebook.

%VIRTUAL-ArticleSidebar-shopping-guide%He told the newspaper that he had managed to keep the bag in good condition, partly because it was thicker than modern bags. This has always been a tricky issue for supermarkets. People argue that the thin bags they use nowadays are too fragile to reuse more than once, while the supermarkets highlight that partly as a result of making them thinner (as well as an increase in recycling and a reduction in bag use), they use 50% less virgin polymer in the bags than in 2006, and 4.5% less since 2013.

Too many bags

Unlike Martin, most of us have accumulated thousands of bags over our lives. The latest figures from Wrap show that we picked up 11 new carrier bags each every month in 2014 (the same number as in 2013, 2012 and 2011).

Things were even more extreme in 2006, when we used 17 each every month. Assuming we stuck to 10 a month, we would have picked up more than 4,000 bags each since Martin collected his commemorative plastic bag from Tesco.

And while the plastic bag charge arriving in England has caused something of an outcry, something drastic had to be done to tackle the fact we used 8.5 billion thin single-use carrier bags in 2014.

It certainly had a striking effect when it was introduced in Wales. Back in 2010 they were using 10 bags per person per month. In 2011 that fell to 7, and in the three years since it has fallen to 2 - reflecting how our enthusiasm for reusing and recycling grows when faced with a 5p charge.

Martin was clearly a man who was ahead of his time in 1981. The question was whether he is Britain's most committed green shopper, or whether there are other - even older - carrier bags still out there.

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