A leading retail chief has said the environmental lobby’s obsession with plastic bags has detracted attention from more pressing green issues at hand.

Sainsbury’s chief executive Justin King said in an interview with The Observer: “Plastic bags are iconic, I accept that. But they are iconic - not material. In overall environmental terms, food waste is a much bigger issue. If I were to rank them it would be food waste, packaging - then plastic bags. Tackling the plastic bag problem does not solve the wider issue of how we are consuming limited resources.”

Chancellor Alistair Darling said he would impose a plastic bag tax during this year’s Budget if supermarkets did not cut down the number they handed out. But King said he had “shifted the goalposts”, The Observer reported, as in February 2007 the country's biggest retailers agreed a two-year plan to reduce use of virgin plastic by 25 per cent. At the end of the first year, a reduction of one billion bags had been met - 14 per cent.

King said a charge would make no difference to consumers. “Sainsbury’s customers re-use 20 to 25 per cent more bags than our competitors’, because they are engaged about the difference they can make,” he told The Observer.

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