The Carrier Bag Consortium (CBC) was responding to news that Asda is to place its free bags under the counter and Marks & Spencer’s well publicised move to start charging for bags from today.

The CBC added that retailers were entitled to take a range of options to meet voluntary agreements under the Courtauld Commitment to reduce the environmental impact of bags.

CBC spokesman Peter Woodall said: “All of these things are perfectly valid ways of reducing usage in line with the voluntary code.”

However, he added: “We feel the big issue is around the demonisation of plastics by politicans who think bans and taxes are the way forward.

“The most important environmental issue is that plastic carrier bags unlike any other alternative offer the opportunity to reduce, re-use and recycle and the other options don’t offer anything like this. We still think it’s the very best option the consumer can choose.”

Over the past month M&S has handed over 15m free bags for life and from today will start charging 10p for them and 5p for its standard food bags. The charges exclude stores that don’t sell food.

M&S added that it will be the first UK food retailer to use a standard food carrier bag made from 100% post consumer waste across all its stores nationally. The highstreet chain plans to reduce carrier bag usage by one third and send no waste to landfill by 2012.

Meanwhile Asda announced that from 1 June all standard plastic bags will be removed from view. At the same time the store plans to introduce a range of bags for life. The store also plans to trial money-off incentives to reward customers for using bags for life.