If I were to see someone indulging in antisocial behaviour, such as cycling on the pavement or urinating in a public place, I would roll my eyes and quietly tut. If it were something more serious, such as riding a horse through a supermarket or throwing a baby dog into a ravine, I might even say something.

Strangely, however, when I spot someone dropping litter, I am overcome with a sometimes uncontrollable need to perform experiments on his head involving petrol and scorpions.

Prison? No chance. That’s for rapists and robbers. Litter louts should be peeled and rolled in a barrel full of salt and snakes.

That’s why last week I was delighted when a newspaper called the Daily Mail began a campaign to rid Britain of the carrier bag. Gordon Brown was delighted too as he’s fast running out of other things to ban. “Oooh, goody,” he didn’t say, but you could see he meant it. “I hadn’t thought of that. Yes. Carrier bags. I’ll install a network of cameras throughout the land and anyone caught using one will be fined a million pounds.”

The trouble is that while I support any move to rid the world of carrier bags – and shopping in general for that matter – I cannot think of an alternative. If you have been to the supermarket for your weekly groceries, how else are you supposed to carry them home? Especially if you’ve gone there on a sustainable bus.

Brown paper is one suggestion but it really works only in places such as Arizona. Here, where there is rain, it quickly becomes soggy – and then it has the tensile strength of fog. The Women’s Institute suggests that bags could be made from hemp or wheat so that they would degrade. But while it might be possible for a little old lady to knit a bag from natural fibres while listening to The Archers, I think she might struggle to produce 60m a day.

Some people say supermarkets should charge for bags to encourage people to reuse the one they were given last week. But the figure being bandied about is just 5p, and that, unless you’re a refugee or a coastguard, doesn’t seem much of a financial hurdle: £5,000 would cause us to think twice; 5p won’t.

And besides, a charge presupposes that you have gone on a planned shopping trip. Not that you were just passing and suddenly thought: “God. I wish I had last week’s bag with me because I don’t half fancy some Smarties.”

I fear, therefore, that we are stuck with the bag, but this does not mean we should give up on our struggle to deprive the stupid and the fat of things they can drop on the street because they are too gormless to go and find a bin. And my suggestion is, we look hard at packaging. Three years ago there was much brouhaha about this – and of course the government made lots of threats and noises. Such was the outcry, in fact, that most of the big food producers and supermarket chains promised to clean up their act.

I should have thought this would be a simple thing to do. A cauliflower, for instance, does not need its own Michael Jackson-style oxygen tent. It will not run off if placed on a shelf naked. Nor will it be embarrassed. Can it possibly take three years to work this out?

Evidently yes, because in my local supermarket everything except the spring onions still comes in a packet of some sort. No, really. Those manky-looking weeds that silly women eat at breakfast time instead of food are served under Cellophane. Apples come in polythene on a polystyrene tray. And you should see the Easter eggs. Jesus. Two hundred tons of petrochemicals diverted from where they belong – in the tank of my car – to puff up a chocolate egg so small that it wouldn’t stretch the birthing muscles of a wren.

In just one night at my flat in London – that’s one dinner for one person – I generate enough waste to fill a hole the size of Worksop. And it makes me seethe, not because of the carbon emissions from the planes bringing it here – I couldn’t give a stuff about that. No. It’s the fact that while I will parcel it all up and put it in the right part of the right bin on the right day for the right binmen to take to the right landfill site, thousands will simply drop it in the street.

And have you bought a toy recently? Every single one comes in a steel-hard plastic mould that blunts all your scissors and severs all your fingers. Seriously, you could store Britain’s nuclear arsenal in the packaging used by toy companies and it would be completely safe. And then you have those plastic tie strips used to secure the product to the box. By the time you’re past those the child is 28 years old.

So, what’s to be done? Well, amazingly you are legally allowed to remove all the packaging in the shop and leave it on the counter. But this will infuriate those stuck behind you in the queue. Or you could refuse to buy anything that has been packaged, but I fear that pretty soon you’d be naked and starving.

So how’s this for a plan? Companies should be fined if any of their branded litter is found on the street. This would soon encourage them to remove all unnecessary packaging. And if they found that impossible, they’d have to ensure their products were sold only to people intelligent enough to dispose of the waste properly.

I’m pretty certain that if this scheme were introduced we’d have the makers of milk chocolate Bounty, Flora margarine and Kentucky Fried Chicken out of business inside a week.

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