Anya Hindmarch teams up with Co-op and Asda in reusable bag campaign
She first made reusable shopping bags chic 16 years ago, now Anya Hindmarch is teaming up with the Co-op and Asda in the latest step of a plan to put fully recyclable plastic bags into every supermarket.
Asda will begin stocking the bag – putting its bright green spin on the large tote which features a smiley face and stripy straps – in 300 stores from the end of February and the Co-op’s turquoise version will appear next month.
The accessories designer’s two latest partnerships with retailers follow from deals with Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Selfridges in the UK before Christmas, as well as CitySuper in Hong Kong, with each brand stocking Hindmarch’s “universal bag” design in their signature colour.
Billed as “the next generation reusable shopping bag”, they can be reused for up to a decade.
The designs are a response to evidence that, while distribution of single use plastic bags dived 95% in the main supermarkets between 2015 and 2020, nearly half a billion were sold from 2020 to 2021 – five years after a government levy on carrier bags was introduced.
The stronger and supposedly reusable supermarket “bag for life” has also not provided the environmental solution hoped for. A number of food retailers, including Co-Op and Morrisons, pulled the 10p bags from their stores in 2021 after learning that most ended up in the bin, with the average household getting through 50 a year.
Some more expensive bags are made from a mixture of materials, such as hemp and plastic, which are difficult to recycle.
“We can do it better,” Hindmarch, whose designs are favoured by the Princess of Wales and is a friend of Samantha Cameron, told the Guardian. “There are something like 8bn tonnes of plastic on the planet and that is really shocking when
Read more on theguardian.com
