The mainstream media seemed to have picked up on Professor Hugh Pennington's recent comments about the bacteriological risks of using 'bags for life'. For example the Daily Mail announces 'How your bag-for-life could POISON you'. It's the sort of headline you'd expect from the Mail, but the same kind of thing has been carried across the rest of the media to a certain extent. Of course there's no hint from the Mail that it could be responsible for the push to 'bags for life' as a consequence of its 'banish the bags' campaign.
The risks that Pennington highlights are not a new finding, but it was one that I did not cover in my recent essay on Carrier Bag Scepticism simply because the argument against plastic carrier bags is fundamentally weak. But the fact is that the argument isn't about facts or science, like many greenist causes, the campaign against carrier bags is about punishing us for our consumerist and materialist ways.
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