Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.

Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.

    •  mayonaise_met   ( @mayonaise_met@feddit.nl ) 
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      11 months ago

      Metal tires and metal roads. Kind of slippery, so we might need to make some sort of ridges to guide our vehicle’s direction. Stopping will still be hard, but if we just lock cars together and do it all at once it might be feasible.

      •  Polar   ( @Polar@lemmy.ca ) 
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        11 months ago

        I see your from feddit.nl, which makes your comment make sense, but you really need to realize that in many places in the world, the way the town’s and cities were built, it’s just impossible to implement public transit, and biking isn’t really an alternative.

        Or places where public transit is a thing, it is really inconvenient.

        My girlfriend can drive to work in 30 minutes. Taking the bus takes her over an hour. So instead of a 1 hour drive each day, she’s on the bus for 2.5 hours + waiting + the inconvenience of the buses not being on schedule + the buses shutting down at midnight

        It’s great if you can commit an extra 1.5 hours every day just to sit on a bus, but she can’t. Not to mention that’s just going to work. If she needed to stop by for groceries, pet food, doctors appointments, etc, she’s adding an insane amount of time in between by having to switch buses.

        I know cars are bad, but going to work + running errands legit wastes a good 3+ hours vs taking a car. That’s a massive chunk of wasted time. She has shit she needs to do at home, she can’t spend a quarter of her day sitting on public transit.

    •  Blackmist   ( @Blackmist@feddit.uk ) 
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      311 months ago

      When the petrol car ban comes in, this could take care of itself as everybody finds themselves priced out of driving.

      We’ll need a really good public transport system to replace it, but we won’t get that either because we’re too poor to care about.

        •  Blackmist   ( @Blackmist@feddit.uk ) 
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          211 months ago

          With petrol you can always get a £500 banger, run it into the ground over the next year or two and repeat.

          With electric it starts at about 5000-6000, and you’ll be paying £500 a year just to rent the battery. It’s the batteries that are going to keep that out of reach of the poorest.

          • And you still need insurance, fuel etc on top of that, and your £500 banger isn’t going to be very reliable.

            You can get a decent bike for £50 or a bus ticket for £2. The problem is in a lot of the country it isn’t safe to cycle and the buses are shit, so we need to fix those things to have transport that works for everyone (and doesn’t create microplastics).

      • @Blackmist @mondoman712
        It isn’t a ban, there are huge numbers of them, of which less than a tenth are new any year.

        That tenth of new car buyers can keep last year’s car, or buy a second hand car, but these are new car buyers, they’ll buy a new EV, mostly, or their firm will.

        2,3,4…10 owners down the line, look forward to a used EV coming your way, a couple…10 years after no new petrol cars are made.