We are getting rid of plastic bags!

Plastic carrier bags are going from Angell Pets very soon so we can do our bit to reduce the amount of plastic finding its way into the environment.


paper bags

We have been trying to figure out how to reduce the use of plastic bags in our shop for a while now. There are only two effective ways to do this:-

1) To charge for the bags to encourage customers to bring their own re-usable bags or

2) Get rid of them completely and try an alternative.

We have chosen to go with option number 2, although this will actually cost us more! Once our current stock of plastic bags has run out we will not be getting any more in.

paper bag and plastic bag comparison

We didn’t want to start charging for bags as this would cause disagreements at the till, with some customers not wanting to pay as it is not yet law for small shops and in any event we would still be giving out the plastic bags.

Instead will be providing small paper bags (one per transaction). Paper bags actually cost us quite a lot more. For example a decent paper bag (shown) costs us around 8-9p each, where as the same size plastic bag costs us 1-2p. However the paper bags we can provide are not very large so we are asking customers to help us reduce non recycleable waste by bringing your own “bag for life” just like you would do at the super market.

We still have a small stock of plastic bags to use up (may as well get a use out of them; if we hand them out or throw them in the bin they are still going to end up in land fill).

For the time being our 1kg bagged up food will still be in polythene bags until we can find a suitable alternative. We are trialing something but it may take a few goes to get the right product.The product we got in to try this week won’t really work so we will use them for frozen rats and mice instead.

The Angell Pets Team