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.
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.
Yeah this is why I find Keir’s pushback on Khan over ULEZ odd. By the next GE the ULEZ expansion would have been in place for nearly a year and the residents would have gotten over it - based on previous evidence (especially since most of the pushback is based on misinformation about what the scheme will do anyway)
I don’t understand anything Keir is up to at the moment. I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt right after the disastrous end of the Corbyn era, but he seems to be pushing all the right buttons to put me off in theast year or two.
But yeah, I remember people moaning about the bag coat when it came in, and lo and behold a year later everyone knew what to do and got on with it. ULEZ will be the same, you may have a few white van men and taxi drivers moaning still, but most drivers will realise it doesn’t effect them and move on.
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.
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
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
What is missed in this article is bags for life purchases. We saw the same article more or less in 2019 and once you factored that in there wasn’t much of an improvement in plastic use or disposal. Expect the same to appear after this article at some point.
A reusable plastic bag only needs to be reused ~40 times before it is better than single use plastic bags. Are people really using them so few times that they can’t hit that?
40 times is fucking wild, I maybe get 5-10 if I really go hard before I forget to bring it one time and have to buy another one
Even in that scenario, it’s not like the first one goes away. Now you have two reusable bags.
All the data says that no, people are not reusing them.
Anecdotally, it makes sense. You left your bag in the trunk, or at home, or it turns out you got slightly too many groceries, or you’re staying at a friend’s house and you pop out to get some groceries and don’t have your bag…
Well that’s a shame. I guess living in a car-centric region it’s easy for me to just throw them in the trunk so I always have them, but I could imagine if I was taking public transit more often it would be easier to forget 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.
