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.
Reminder that the biggest by far source of micro plastic in the air we breathe comes from tires. And there is zero research being done to find an alternative
We already have a way to solve this, just don’t drive so much.
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.
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You just described how bad the public transport where you live is, not why it can’t be better. We 100% can and should be building better public transport & active transport, as well as building places with better land use for these.
Then your (presumably Canada) country needs to start re-doing the cities so they aren’t dependent on private cars. NL was also going that way in the 1970s until they changed direction. The best time to do it would have been back then, but the second best time to do it is start now.
It can be done.
It will not be cheap.
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Damn u had me confused till the last line. Well played.
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.
A lot of people are already priced out of driving. We need to be building that public transport network, along with active transport infrastructure and better land use anyway.
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
I only know of Renault leasing the battery in the Zoe.Otherwise, the battery is part of the car and sold as part of it, with a guarantee.
I think your £500 banger has to be years older than any large number of BEVs, and will cost you more to scrap after you ture of repairing it.
@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.
@Lemmylaugh @Emperor
The tire companies researched and innovated for EV tyres, and that reduces shedding.
It’s heartening to see that a small change can make such a big difference. Good luck trying to get the Tories to take that message onboard though.
I was surprised myself, 10p a time adds up. Being so cheap it was easy enough to carry 2 large clothe bags in my backpack everywhere. Saved a fortune over the years over paying for plastic bags.
Kind of interesting statistic proving people will adapt when forced too, at a time lots of people with dodgy agendas are claiming people won’t go for environmental policies that inconvenience them.
I honestly don’t even usually want a bag.
But it’s the default and I’m too lazy to tell them I don’t need one every time. Making it not the default is plenty.
I honestly don’t even usually want a bag.
But it’s the default and I’m too lazy to tell them I don’t need one every time. Making it not the default is plenty.
Does this mean everyone who goes shopping, goes in a car, or do they buy paper bags? and if you are walking there or taking the bus are you not being penalised for not taking the car ?
I’m not sure I understand - I often walk to the shops and will stuff a plastic bag or two in my pocket. If I was buying any more than that, I’d be taking the car.
I’d rather have my plastic bags reused for garbage, than have to always remember to carry around plastic bags, I like to shop after work on my way home. reusing them make them very easy to tear sometime and have to deal with a mess in the middle of the road
I’ve been doing this since they were free (as it seems very wasteful to get new bags each time) and you just get into the habit of always having a bag to hand. It’s not a big deal.
The motto “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is an order of operations.
Recycling is great, but avoiding the item in the first place is even better.
At least where I live in the US, the plastic bags that they charge for are usually significantly stronger than the old ones and can easily be reused over and over. Not quite at the level of canvas bags, however.
Call me skeptical, but I seriously doubt the accuracy of these claims. This is the kind of study that the supermarket would pay for to justify their for-profit decision to start charging people for something that has always been free.
It’s a government study.
Well… they’re only counting ‘single use’ plastic bags…
All supermarket plastic bags now are ‘bag for life’ aka. reusable (I’m not sure what was stopping people reusing the other ones, but that’s the way it’s done) so they don’t count in the statistics.
So the statistic isn’t useful - I’d like to know the real numbers (including all bags) as I expect there has been a drop, but it isn’t 98%
Thank you! They did the same crap here where they stopped giving away plastic bags and started charging for paper bags which were always free before. Then they put plastic bags in the stores which are like 20x thicker than the previous plastic ones and use way more plastic, and they charge for those now. They’re like “problem solved!”. But nobody actually re-uses those. They just buy new ones every trip. So the outcome is that they stopped giving away thin plastic bags and started selling thick plastic bags, and they think it’s a win. It’s not a win for anything except the grocery store pocketbook. That study is completely pointless like you said. Of course there’s a massive drop of the single use bags if they completely stopped offering the single use bags. But if it’s anything like over here, they’re actually producing more waste now, and costing the consumers money to do so.
Edited for a bunch of phone typos
