403
Supermarket plastic bag charge has led to 98% drop in use in England, data shows
(www.theguardian.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
403 points (98.3% liked)
United Kingdom
4039 readers
256 users here now
General community for news/discussion in the UK.
Less serious posts should go in !casualuk@feddit.uk or !andfinally@feddit.uk
More serious politics should go in !uk_politics@feddit.uk.
Try not to spam the same link to multiple feddit.uk communities.
Pick the most appropriate, and put it there.
Posts should be related to UK-centric news, and should be either a link to a reputable source, or a text post on this community.
Opinion pieces are also allowed, provided they are not misleading/misrepresented/drivel, and have proper sources.
If you think "reputable news source" needs some definition, by all means start a meta thread.
Posts should be manually submitted, not by bot. Link titles should not be editorialised.
Disappointing comments will generally be left to fester in ratio, outright horrible comments will be removed.
Message the mods if you feel something really should be removed, or if a user seems to have a pattern of awful comments.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
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?
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.
Yup, my bus stop is next to the supermarket and I'll often pop in on my way home from work to get some stuff I realised I need. I have a big bag full of reusable plastic bags at home now. But I'm glad it is working for many people
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.
Now I have 20+ until I can't store them any more so I have to throw them out*
There's no real way to get rid of surplus bags, that's the problem. So they just pile up until they go to landfill. If shops let you return bags somehow that would be fantastic.