Coles caved to shopper complaints and gave its 15c reusable bags away free

On 1 August 2018, about six weeks after Coles removed single-use plastic bags from its checkouts across Australia, the supermarket announced it would hand out its 15-cent thicker reusable bags free of charge, indefinitely, in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Western Australia. Shoppers in South Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and the Northern Territory would keep paying 15c for the same bag. Coles said shoppers needed more time to adjust to bringing their own bags.

The Waste Management Association of Australia called the flip-flop dangerous. 'It's just messy,' CEO Gayle Sloan said, arguing that with Australia producing 64 million tonnes of waste a year, the backflip confused both the public and industry, and that only federal leadership could give companies and consumers certainty. 'I feel like we don't treat consumers with enough respect,' she added, noting container deposit schemes had shown people change behaviour quickly.

Environmental groups were blunter. Greenpeace Australia Pacific's Zoe Deans said Coles had 'caved in far too quickly to a small but vocal minority' and would be punished by customers who did not want bags littering beaches and killing marine life. Campaigner Jon Dee, who started the National Plastic Bag Campaign in 2002, said the decision made 'a complete mockery' of Coles's waste claims — his group's earlier trial of thicker bags had found reuse rates 'pathetically low', and unpriced bags were far more likely to be used once and discarded, taking even longer to break down in waterways.

Indefinite free reusable bags in four states — still charged in SA, TAS, ACT and NT — plus warnings the free bags could pollute waterways even longer.

The charge was the mechanism that made reusables work; removing it turned an environmental policy back into a free plastic handout.

A split national scheme — free in four states, 15c in four others — left customers unable to tell what the rule actually was.

The backflip undercut the sustainability claim the ban rested on, handing the story to critics at Greenpeace and in the waste industry.

A nudge only works while the friction stays: cave to the first wave of complaints and you keep the bad optics of the charge with none of the behaviour change.

Coles called the giveaway indefinite, and the waste peak body urged the federal government to legislate national rules so companies and consumers knew where they stood — with New South Wales still the only state that had neither legislated nor planned a ban on thin bags.