We have repeatedly heard for the last 10 years or more that the onus is on the general public (that's everyone!) to try and avoid 'single-use' plastic, since this is generally not recyclable, and yet all major supermarkets in the UK are still unnecessarily packaging fruit and vegetables in huge amounts of non-recyclable, single-use packaging, and appear to be totally unaccountable for it.

Why? Visit a French or Spanish supermarket and the vegetables and fruit are stacked loose, rather than bundled into single-use packaging. Are the UK public so lazy, time-poor or germ-sensitive that everything needs to be packaged into bags of 4 or 6? Are we so dim-witted that every single apple needs a plastic sticker on it to tell us what it is and a barcode in case we need to scan it? No.

Sainsbury's actually announced that they were removing plastic bags from fruit and vegetables in 2019, but five years later all the plastic (and perhaps more than ever) is still there. Paying lip service to action that you don't carry out is not action.

According to the Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace UK reports, leading supermarkets are responsible for producing more than 1.2 billion plastic bags for fruits and vegetables, 1.1 billion single-use bags, and 958 million bags for life.

According to the UN Environment Programme, approximately 36 per cent of all plastics produced are used in packaging, including single-use plastic products for food and beverage containers, approximately 85 per cent of which ends up in landfills or as unregulated waste.

This is a total disgrace. We need the UK government to ban this behaviour with immediate effect such that the supermarkets are held accountable for pollution, and have to stop use of these plastics within a very short time frame or pay heavy penalties. Lack of action has led us to the brink of a catastrophe and yet major companies have done little or nothing to reverse course. DEMAND ACTION!