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Martin Hardwidge, who runs MHA Marketing Communications, a PR agency specialising in the packaging industry, and is chair of The Packaging Society East Midlands, talks to Packaging News about Tesco's Sustainable Consumption Institute.

Earlier this year The Times published an exposé of Manchester University's Sustainable Consumption Institute (SCI) being funded to the tune of £25 million by Tesco. In the SCI's latest report, it favourably mentions Tesco's green point scheme for reusing carrier bags while ignoring the Irish compulsory bag charge scheme.

Now, while I realise that university departments have to develop industry links for funding, and while £25 million is an awful lot of money, quite frankly it's a pretty poor return on PR investment if The Times is suggesting that this is all about spin. How for example did the newspaper find out about this terrible slush fund? Presumably by reading the company accounts, or looking on the Manchester University website (though the fact that Sir Terry Leahy was at the launch might also have been a giveaway).

It seems to me that Tesco is damned either way – it makes an investment in a sustainability organisation, which will give it information, but also a great PR benefit – the halo effect and all that – then it puts its mouth where its money is and introduce a green points scheme, praised by said organisation and all hell breaks loose.

I assume Tesco didn't pay £25 million just so a university department would promote a substandard bag scheme – no, not even in a Green's worst dystopian nightmare would that actually happen (though if the funding had come from a plastic bag manufacturer there might have been more questions!) – if in fact Tesco did charge 5p for a carrier bag, that would be a profit of about 4.9p, so I applaud it for rewarding people rather than milking it.

For what it's worth, I would much rather see carrier bags reused than see people charged for them. In environmental terms, the problem of single use carrier bags is one of litter, not of resource use, and while it may be true that they generally end up in landfill, they are almost always holding other rubbish, having been, er, repurposed as domestic waste aggregation units.

People need to put their kitchen and domestic rubbish in something, otherwise the bin smells, so if they are charged for carrier bags they will buy black bin liners, which are heavier gauge and presumably more of a problem. If people use single-use carrier bags twice, that halves the usage of carrier bags and people still have something to take to the dustbin. The people in Manchester are right, this is a much better scheme than the Irish one.

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