- cross-posted to:
- news@chat.maiion.com
- cross-posted to:
- news@chat.maiion.com
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.
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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
It’s second to synthetic textiles
Edit. in the ocean
https://www.horiba.com/int/scientific/resources/science-in-action/where-do-microplastics-come-from/
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.
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.
Imagine if the public transport system wasn’t rubbish and your girlfriend could travel in the same 30 minutes?
Public transport isn’t the problem, it’s the solution
Really depends where you are how feasible it is. Where I live we have a great public transport system. Most stations can be reached within 10 minutes when walking and there’s a tram leaving the station every 10 minutes. So getting anywhere in the city is fairly quick and wait times are mininal in most cases.
Travel outside the city and it’s a whole different story and unfortunately there isn’t really a good way to fix it. Just increasing the frequency of busses/trains isn’t feasible because 90% of the rides will be empty at this point which makes no sense.Okay. I’ll tell my city to just tear down half of it so they can build a better system.
Like I said, not all towns and cities were designed for it. It’s not something you can just plop in centuries down the road. The world doesn’t work that way.
Any new development should have public transit in mind. Old development can’t really be retrofitted. It’s like you missed my entire comment.
Car-centric cities waste tonnes of space on parking which sits empty most or all of the time. Improving them requires less knocking stuff down and more filling in the gaps.
Luckily your city doesn’t have to pay for this - since property developers will do it for you to make money for themselves. You just need to fix the regulatory barriers: remove parking minimums and legalise mixed-use zoning.
If you want to accelerate the process, your local government can adopt the Japanese model: build rail or light rail and then develop dense areas around or above it. This is generally profitable but requires taking on a decent amount of initial risk.
So it can be done. But sitting around grumbling about how a better future is impossible because everything has to stay how it is right now won’t get us there.
In many places the cities were retrofitted for car centric infrastructure already, why couldnt it happen again?
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.
Lol just redo the city
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 @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.
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.
@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.
Where are you getting this battery rental from? I only knew of Renault and the very first Nissan leafs that did battery lease.
All the cheapest ones when I searched were Zoe’s, presumably because of the battery lease not being included in the purchase price.
@Blackmist @ChromeSkull
Zoes have been around for a while.
Were the cheaper cars not the older ones?
@Lemmylaugh @Emperor
The tire companies researched and innovated for EV tyres, and that reduces shedding.
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.
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.
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.
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 wonder how Walmart is going to implement and they switched most of their check out lines to self checkout.
The supermarket close to my home has self checkout, you just have to scan the bag in addition to your products.
In Canada we just fully banned plastic bags. Walmart just doesn’t offer any bags at self checkout anymore besides the reusable ones. It’s kind of annoying if you forget to bring bags but it’s not a huge deal. If I’m walking I’ll just fill my personal grocery cart, or if I’m driving I’ll just throw everything loose in my car. If I do need a bag I’ll just spend $0.25 on a reusable bag.
It’s really not a big deal like a lot of people expected
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
