Wal-Mart turns up heat in war on plastic bags

The battle between the world's leading retailers to deliver the deepest cuts in plastic bag use intensified yesterday when supermarket giant Wal-Mart announced it is to cut plastic shopping bag waste from its stores globally by a third by 2013.

The company, which owns Asda in the UK, said that the move would eliminate more than 135 million lbs of plastic waste a year, cut CO2 emissions by 290,000 tonnes and slash energy consumption to the equivalent of 678,000 barrels of oil.

Announcing the target at the Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting in New York, Matt Kistler, senior vice president for sustainability of Wal-Mart Stores, said that the company would seek to change its customers' behaviour by reducing the number of plastic bags it hands out, cutting the cost of reusable bags, and increasing the availability of recycling points.

"We think we can eliminate plastic waste equivalent to nine billion plastic bags per year from our existing stores alone," he said. "If we can encourage consumers to change their behaviour, just one bag at a time, we believe real progress can be made toward our goal of creating zero waste."

The company said that it would aim to cut bag waste by an average of 33 per cent across all its stores with operations in the US delivering a reduction of 25 per cent and international operations cutting plastic bag waste by 50 per cent.

It also said that it was reducing the amount of plastic going into the bags as one means of curbing waste levels.

As well as helping to reduce Wal-Mart's costs the company said that the move should deliver benefits for governments, noting that the State of California alone spends approximately $25m per year to discard plastic bags into landfill.

The move was welcomed by Gwen Ruta, vice president for corporate partnerships at Environmental Defense Fund, which worked with Wal-Mart on the initiative. " Plastic bags clog our landfills, litter our roadways, harm sea turtles and other wildlife, and gobble energy in production," she said. "With this initiative, Wal-Mart is demonstrating that innovation leads to both business and environmental benefits… I look to retailers everywhere to do the same."

Efforts to curb plastic bag use has emerged as a key battleground in retailers attempts to position themselves as environmentally friendly with almost all leading supermarkets implementing a strategy for cutting plastic bag waste.

Most notably, Marks & Spencer recently reported an 80 per cent cut in the use of plastic bags after introducing a five pence charge on all its food plastic carrier bags.