18 June 2026

Every carrier bag you buy helps plant a tree on Dartmoor

Here's a small fact that probably won't surprise you: every carrier bag has a carbon cost. Multiply that across a year of customers popping a bag in at the till, and it adds up — for us, to just under 600kg of CO₂ a year. It's not a huge number as these things go, but it's real, and we wanted to do something about it rather than just shrug.

So since May this year, every time you buy a carrier bag in the shop, 10p of that goes straight to Moor Trees — a Devon-based charity that's been restoring native broadleaf woodland on Dartmoor and across South Devon since the year 2000.

Who are Moor Trees?

Dartmoor used to be a far more wooded place than it is today — ancient woodland once filled the valleys and lower slopes, linking the high moor all the way down to the coast. Over thousands of years, most of that has disappeared.

Moor Trees is trying to bring some of it back. Every autumn, volunteers collect thousands of seeds — acorns, hazel, alder, birch, rowan and hawthorn — from local hedgerows and woodland. Those seeds are grown on at two community tree nurseries, with over 100,000 seedlings growing at any one time, before being planted out across Dartmoor and South Devon. Since 2000, they've planted more than 219,000 trees and helped create over 195 new woodlands and hedgerows — almost entirely with the help of volunteers.

It's exactly the kind of local, hands-in-the-soil project we wanted to support — not a faceless offsetting scheme on the other side of the world, but trees going into the ground a few miles from our shop, planted by people who live here.

How the maths works

A native broadleaf tree absorbs around 25kg of CO₂ a year once established. Our carrier bags account for roughly 575kg of CO₂ a year. So our target is straightforward: fund 23 trees, and our carrier bags become carbon neutral.

At £9.50 a tree, and 10p donated per bag, it isn't a quick fix — but it's an honest one, and it's moving in the right direction every single week.

It's a small thing at the till — 10p on a bag — but it's one small thing among many we're trying to get right. If you'd rather skip the bag altogether and bring your own, even better: that's one less bag's worth of carbon in the first place, and a few more pence we can put toward something else.

Want to see exactly how much we've raised, how many trees we've funded, and how close we are to our target? Head over to our Sustainability page, where we keep a running tracker updated every month — along with more on Molly, the driving force behind our whole carbon plan.