BACK in August, we wrote approvingly that the Johannesburg Earth Summit would not be a waste of money if information was shared about what environmental practices worked.

"In Ireland, a 10p tax on each supermarket bag has caused a 90 per cent reduction in the number of bags used, down from 100 million a month to seven million," we said.

"But here in Britain, only one in 200 supermarket bags is recycled. And we wonder why they litter our streets and verges and clog our landfill sites. If all we get from the summit is a similar tax and a cleaner local environment, the hot air will not have been for nothing."

Little did we think that within four months we'd be seriously talking about such a tax being introduced in County Durham - so congratulations to the council for picking up so quickly on an idea that has proved so successful abroad.

The bag tax will, initially, be unpopular - but largely among people who have a kneejerk reaction against what they see as "the nanny state" curtailing their freedoms to abuse whatever and whoever they like, and among the selfish few who do not care for the environment.

There cannot be a household in the country that does not hoard carrier bags thinking that one day they'll come in useful. The bags gather in thousands in the cupboards under the sink or the stairs, breeding as if they were rabbits until, one day during the annual clear-out, they are culled and dumped in the dustbin.

We don't reuse them in the supermarket because we are too lazy or too forgetful to take them with us. A 10p tax on each bag should be the prick we need to remind us to pick up the bags as we leave the house.

In fact, we do already pay a bag tax - we pay about £20,000 in landfill tax to dump the 65 million bags in a hole in the ground each year. This tax, though, is levied at the wrong end of the process: it is levied on the big organisations whose job it is to do the dumping, not on the little people who so lazily create the rubbish to be dumped.

And just think about that figure of 65 million bags a year in County Durham - that's 162.5 bags for each adult.

We hope that the people of Durham will be daring enough to support such a green tax, and we hope that the money that is raised by it will be used to subsidise far greater recycling - like the collection of newspapers, glass and tins from outside people's front doors.