403

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] BrightCandle@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago

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.

[-] raptir@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

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?

[-] Pyrozo007@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

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

[-] raptir@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Even in that scenario, it's not like the first one goes away. Now you have two reusable bags.

[-] Pyrozo007@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 1 year ago

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.

load more comments (4 replies)
load more comments (4 replies)
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
403 points (98.3% liked)

United Kingdom

4092 readers
101 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