Asda has announced it is to ban single-use plastic carrier bags from its online grocery orders, after growing pressure from campaigners about the unnecessary use of plastic packaging.
The supermarket giant said the move was expected to remove around 85 million plastic bags from production each year.
The scrapping of online delivery plastic bags follows a trial period in south west England.
Asda said it would remove the option to have a ‘bagged’ delivery on all grocery home shopping and click & collect orders nationwide from 31 July, resulting in a saving of over 500 tonnes of plastic.
The decision makes Asda the first supermarket to eliminate single-use carrier bags from its dotcom operations, having stopped offering single-use bags in its stores in 2018. In total Asda will now produce 375 million fewer plastic bags each year.
Asda said its delivery drivers would offer to unload home delivery customers’ shopping for them in a place that is convenient, to avoid any disruption from the move, whilst for health and safety reasons fresh meat or fish items would still need to be placed inside small plastic flow bags, although it said it was training staff to keep these to a minimum.
Since 2018 Asda has removed 6,500 tonnes of plastic from its own-brand packaging.
“We’re working hard to reduce avoidable plastic wherever we can,” said Simon Gregg, Asda’s vice president, online grocery. “Helping to reduce its impact on the environment matters to us, and we know it matters to our customers too. This is a simple change, but will have a significant impact on the amount of plastic we use as a business.”
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