Sir, - I was interested to read that Oliver O'Connor had accumulated 30 plastic bags on a recent shopping trip to Quinnsworth at Nutgrove (Business This Week, September 25th). He clearly found a lot of what he was looking for in our store!
I would like to reassure Mr O'Connor, and your readers, that Tesco Ireland takes its environmental commitments very seriously. Like Mr O'Connor, we are conscious of the widespread use of plastic bags in our business, and we have launched a number of instore initiatives to tackle the issue.
Under our re-use bag scheme, Tesco gives 1p to a nominated local school every time a customer brings back a plastic bag to re-use for packing their groceries. The pennies do add up. If Mr O'Connor were to re-use his 30 bags every week for a month, Tesco would donate £1.20 to Ballinteer Community School, which has been nominated by our Nutgrove store. If a sizeable proportion of bags were re-used in this way, the school would earn even more, and fewer plastic bags would be discarded as rubbish after one use.
Tesco's Bag for Life is a new initiative whereby customers buy 10 extra-strong re-usable plastic bags for (pound) 1. These are used and reused for grocery packing, and, once they have reached the ends of their natural life, we replace each, free of charge, at our checkouts.
When Nutgrove is relaunched as a Tesco Ireland store later this year, Mr O'Connor will see that we have introduced our Blue Box packing alternative, as part of the re-fit. These boxes fit securely to a specially designed shopping trolley which can hold up to six blue boxes - allowing customers to sort their groceries as they shop. Each box holds the same amount of shopping as five bags. At the check-outs, groceries are scanned as normal and re-packed into the blue boxes which are then easily transported to the car, and into the home and the kitchen. This scheme has been highly successful in every store where it has been launched.
At Tesco Ireland we are continuously examining new alternatives to packing groceries, and are determined to play our part in responsible environmental management. - Yours, etc., Patricia Moroney,
Environmental Manager, Tesco Ireland, Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin.