An answer. Not a very good one, but still...

We wrote to Sainsbury's to express our frustration at their new carrier bag policy. And we have a response. It is quite dry, no spit on it at all, so we can assume that Jamie didn't write it in between takes.

Thank you for your email which I read with interest. It is good of you to take the time to let me know your views about removing carrier bags from our checkouts.

Well the pleasure is entirely ours.

We take our commitment to reducing our effects on the environment very seriously. We want to make it easy for all our customers to reduce the number of bags they use. Free carrier bags were introduced in the early 1970s and customers have become used to receiving them.

Yes, nearly 40 years of providing customers with an essential part of the shopping experience.

We recently announced our plans to reduce the number of free plastic bags we give away by 50% by April 2009. To help us to achieve this new target we are working with our customers to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic bags.

We already reuse our plastic bags. As bin bags. We told you this in our email.

We are focusing on reducing the amount of packaging we use wherever possible. Indeed, we are confident that we will meet our target of a 5% reduction in packaging relative to turnover by 2010. So far we have achieved a 2.6% reduction. We now use 14% less plastic on our prepared salads than we did in January 2007, which will save 20.8 tonnes of plastic a year. We are also reducing the packaging on our crisps, snacks and nuts by 20%, which will save 85 tonnes of plastic a year. By May 2010, we will have reduced our produce packaging by 25% and 50% will be recyclable or compostable.

Ah, here's something interesting. We will examine this in more detail later.

Thank you for taking the time to contact us. I hope this information is useful to you.

Not really, but thanks all the same.

So, at least its a response. The part about reducing packaging is very interesting, and oddly unbelievable. We're sure we bought some tomatoes recently that were sat in a plastic tray, wrapped in a plastic sleeve, with a nice label on it. But we can't have a plastic bag. Some gathering of evidence seems in order, then.