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We’ve decided it’s time to do something about it.

So we're now charging 5p per food carrier bags, which we hope will encourage our customers to use fewer of them. Those that we do sell will raise money for local environmental projects, run in partnership with charity Groundwork UK.

Before we began the nationwide charge, we trialled it in a number of our stores: in July 2007 our trial in Northern Ireland saw a 66% reduction in the number of carrier bags used, as well as raising £40,000 for Groundwork Northern Ireland – click here to read about the projects that this money helped to fund.

In February 2008, we began charging for carrier bags in our 35 stores across Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Gloucestershire. In the first two weeks of the trial, usage was cut by over 80%, with close to £3,000 raised for Groundwork UK. You can read more about our Groundwork projects in the South West here.

With the 5p charge now underway in all our stores, we've now announced 5 more groundwork projects that we're he;ping to fund, across the country. You can read about these here.

Our aim is to reduce carrier bag usage by a third and send no waste to landfill by 2012. Please help us by using a Bag for Life, or any reusable bag, instead of a plastic carrier.

Just think…if every single one of our customers cut the number of bags they use by 70%, we’d save over 330 million bags a year! That has to be worth aiming for.

*All the 1.85p profit from the sale of standard food carrier bags, plus .76p from cake bags, will be donated to Groundwork.