Carrefour eliminates plastic bags in Spain

French owned hypermarket chain Carrefour has decided to eliminate all plastic bags from their Spanish stores, and becomes the first large company to do so in this country.

The use of plastics bags will be phased out gradually, and during the change over shoppers will receive a reusable raffia bag for their purchases.
It has been estimated that a single shopper who uses a reusable bag, saves more than 18,000 throwaway bags over their life. In Spain the average use of plastic bags per resident is 238 a year. These bags take 400 years to decompose and only 10 per cent of them are ever recycled – reports foodinternatonal.net.