“So, have you guys always charged for bags here in the UK?”

The young American girl was sincere and made no effort to sound cynical or derogatory in any way. She just wanted to know; so I told her. I said:

“No, actually – it’s something that’s only really happened in the last decade. It’s part of a national effort to curb the sheer number of carrier bags that are used by encouraging people to reuse theirs or only take them when they absolutely need to. Plus, I think some of the funds go towards environmental causes or something. That’s £8.94 please.”

Since I started working hours at the campus Co-op, I’ve had a lot of people question the compulsory charges levied on access to carrier bags. Admittedly, it is a rarity that a shop charges for every form of carrier; canvas bags, yes; bags-for-life, of course; but not many shops charge for their lowest common denominator of bag. So a lot of confusion is generated among customers – particularly foreign language students – when in our shop, they are forewarned of a 6p charge per regular carrier bag.

I say regular carrier bag, but that is a bit of a misnomer if I’m honest. For in the campus co-op, there are no regular bags. In the campus co-op, the regular carrier bags are actually made out of a soft, mysterious, biodegradable plastic-like substance that apparently decomposes like normal food and plant waste, making it ideal for depositing on your compost heap that every household should have. When I attempt to explain this to customers that contest the compulsory bag charge of six pennies, I receive – mostly – blank expressions and stony silence. Particularly from the foreign language students who, only beginning to grasp the basics of English and originating from (predominately) America – are blissfully unaware of what a compost heap is or what it would even be used for. My efforts to educate customers are usually quelled by the pressing concern of the growing queue behind them and their own efforts to prise their change from my hands and leave the store.

But as uncomfortable as it often is, demanding a separate 6p payment on someone’s credit card before they can have access to a flimsy, fragile carrier bag that can barely contain itself, I am not embarrassed about our nation’s conscious effort to stamp out needless carrier-bagging. Far from it – I am proud.

Many of my now-contemporaries who were born in the 1990’s might even think that it has always been this way, but I’m old enough to remember a time when carrier bags were never charged for, and I am loathe to regress back to such mindless frivolity.

I have no shame in admitting my own family to the roll-call of persons guilty for this bold movement being inflicted upon the masses. In our house we threw caution to the wind as well as many of our carrier bags; we were reckless. In supermarkets, my parents would do the weekly shop and on top of acquiring sufficient baggage to contain the household goods, they would often tuck a few extra bags into the shopping ‘for the bins’. In shops, when purchasing myself a CD or something equally as worthless by today’s standards, I would request not only a bag to contain my now-valueless commodity, but one to contain other junk I had acquired on my visit to town: newspapers, leaflets, crisps, sweets and other carrier bags usually. The feckless part-timers of HMV Jersey would always comply, throwing a bundle of beautifully printed carrier bags in my direction with wild abandon.

Scenarios like the ones I have painted above and others like them meant that things quickly grew out of control at home. Soon we had to give up entire drawers to the things; later on, whole areas of our kitchen succumbed to the need for more carrier bag space. My mother crafted a long tube of material with elastic openings either end into some sort of carrier bag depository, which hung in the corner by the garden door.

However soon, not even my mum’s skilled craftwork could contain the glossy, multicoloured excess of our consumerist lifestyles. These carrier bags, whose corporeal presence on this globe would vastly outlast our own – decomposing millennia after our own skulls had become homesteads for worms and beetles – were starting to take over the house. Soon, they were wrapped around books and magazines in my bedroom, stuffed under and behind the couch, stowed away in the shed with the unused tools and hidden whisky bottles and laid across the floor of our loft for cheap insulation.

But it wasn’t enough. The irresponsible habit still plagued us and with our rented house gradually yielding to an ever-growing moss of Spar, Safeway and HMV logos, a conscious effort had to be made by all to restore us to some form of normality.

So that winter, with Christmas a recent memory, we bundled as many of the plastic sacks as we could stuff into a car and we drove out to a landfill to throw them away. We did it under cover of darkness, because even in those days, with absolutely no understanding of the environmental impact our actions might’ve had, it would’ve been embarrassing to have been seen throwing away – what would’ve been viewed as – several thousand perfectly serviceable bin liners. My mother burned the carrier bag disposal sack she had crafted and – to further prevent a similar incident happening in the future – filled all of the then-empty drawers and cupboards she could with cutlery, slow-cookers and bread-makers.

Soon, it became apparent that we hadn’t been the only household enjoying the excesses of what we can now look back upon as the ‘boom’ period for carrier baggage. A movement against the use, accumulation or even bare mention of carrier bags gathered speed. The idea of charging for their use was floated, but retail outlets needed a fresh angle. Marketing gurus, buoyed by the success of their campaign against the gifting of puppies at Christmas, created the ‘bag for life’ and a new, more responsible era was ushered in. Strong, robust and composed of enough plastic to produce around 50 regular carrier bags (my estimate), ‘bags for life’ changed the way people looked at carrying their shopping. Many, that absolutely needed a bag to carry their heavy goods, parted with their 10 pence happily, knowing their souls were safe. Others, aware that a regular carrier bag was perhaps a little surplus to their requirements, resorted to carrying their goods out of stores in their arms – doing their bit for the environment and perplexing shop security for many years to come.

So as I watched that young American girl awkwardly assemble her groceries into the sturdiest pile she could muster on top of her arms and cautiously stumble out of the shop with tins tumbling from her breast – all rather than hand over the required 6p electronically via her credit card – I tipped my hat to her. (figuratively speaking) We’ve come a long way from the dark, thoughtless days of unconstrained carrier-bagging – and I’ll be damned if we ever go back.