The plastic bag levy may, like the smoking ban, be another piece of atrociously badly written legislation (probably our glorious masters imagined it as a nice positive sound bite to show how well they were doing their jobs) but it should stop and make you think. According to the government we each use three plastic bags a day. At first that seemed like a lot and I thought I couldn’t be using that many – long ago I made a conscious effort to try and reduce the amount of needless packaging I collected and to reuse laundry and supermarket bags. But when I actually counted how many bits of packaging I don’t reuse, I was honestly quite shocked: a cha chan teng small plastic bag for breakfast, a magazine in sealed bag from a newsagent, a bag for lunch delivery, two mail items arrived in plastic, a press kit delivered in a paper bag with plastic bag inside, and a product sample in a plastic bag inside that, two new shirts sealed in plastic bags, pizza delivery for dinner... And none were covered by the levy.

The list was frighteningly long, and I thought I was being fairly conscientious. Yet even if the only visible effect may be slightly smaller piles of plastic trash on the street, I’m certain we can make a difference by changing our habits. It’s not only how many bags we use personally, but also the packaging that brushes through our hands in our roles as consumer and employee. There are many inspirational quotes about how greatness is accomplished by small gestures, and to what higher relevance can those quotes have than to the fate of that featherweight plastic sack gliding outside my office window? While it’s currently impossible to completely avoid plastic bags, my objective this month will be to use at least one fewer per day and to try and recycle more of those I do use. What about you, what will you be doing? sd