I'm happy to hear that it seems to be having an effect. Where I live the charge is 8 cents per bag, which I've never found to be very persuasive when I'm already spending $100 to $200 on...
I'm happy to hear that it seems to be having an effect. Where I live the charge is 8 cents per bag, which I've never found to be very persuasive when I'm already spending $100 to $200 on groceries. The best thing to come out of it in my own experience has been that the expectation of bringing your own bags seems to have changed because of it, which has encouraged me to do so.
It's five pence per bag in England which is analogous to the eight cent charge where you live. As you say, presenting a barrier to obtaining plastic carrier bags is the principal 'nudge': it's not...
It's five pence per bag in England which is analogous to the eight cent charge where you live.
As you say, presenting a barrier to obtaining plastic carrier bags is the principal 'nudge': it's not the cost that dissuades people per se but rather the fact that you now have to approach a store worker or walk away from the checkout to obtain one. To some extent I think there's also a social stigma towards plastic bags (instead, reusable jute and/or bags are very popular across the country).
Actually in England the minimum charge for a single-use carrier bag is ten pence. It was raised from the original minimum of five pence in 2021. In practice most supermarkets in the UK don't sell...
Actually in England the minimum charge for a single-use carrier bag is ten pence. It was raised from the original minimum of five pence in 2021.
In practice most supermarkets in the UK don't sell any single-use carrier bags anymore. It may be partly due to reporting requirements for single-use carrier bags that apply only to "large retailers".
Instead they sell "bags for life" which are considered multiple-use and must be replaced free of charge when they wear out. From my personal experience: in 2023 all bags for life cost a minimum of thirty pence.
Just goes to show how effective the plastic bag charge is — can't say I've bought one since the initial levy was introduced so the increase completely swept by me! But yeah, it's a nominal sum....
Actually in England the minimum charge for a single-use carrier bag is ten pence. It was raised from the original minimum of five pence in 2021.
Just goes to show how effective the plastic bag charge is — can't say I've bought one since the initial levy was introduced so the increase completely swept by me! But yeah, it's a nominal sum. The cost isn't itself the salient part of the nudge.
It's been 10p for a couple of years now... most large shops (ie supermarkets) don't even sell them anymore and only sell the thicker reusable/replaced for free bags now.
It's been 10p for a couple of years now... most large shops (ie supermarkets) don't even sell them anymore and only sell the thicker reusable/replaced for free bags now.
My experience aligns with the change in social expectation due to this change rather than it being a real financial incentive, at least in the US. When a small percentage of people have reusable...
My experience aligns with the change in social expectation due to this change rather than it being a real financial incentive, at least in the US. When a small percentage of people have reusable bags, you can see how it slows down the process just by being different or unexpected. There's implicit social pressure in that case not to be the outlier slowing everyone else down. However once enough people start doing so, it's no longer slowing down the process it is the process and the expectation completely shifts.
I bought a set of reusable bags probably 2 years before the tax started in my area, but due to convenience and not wanting to slow down the process for others I hardly used them. My personal want to be more environmentally friendly just wasn't enough to overcome the idea that I was being an inconvenience. As soon as it became normalized, I use them all the time and have completely cut out single use plastic bags from my life. The tax is only $0.05/bag so it's certainly not a barrier on its own, but it's been enough of a nudge to change behavior.
The habit formation is the key thing. Before my city passed a plastic bag tax cashiers wouldn't even ask to bag things up for you, they just would. Once the tax was instituted they were forced to...
The habit formation is the key thing. Before my city passed a plastic bag tax cashiers wouldn't even ask to bag things up for you, they just would. Once the tax was instituted they were forced to ask, which gave me (and I assume many other shoppers) an opening to say "no thank you." All those cases where I'm only buying 1 or 2 things and getting a bag now no longer have a bag involved.
Curious if you have further reading on this: Is there some organization keeping track? Sounds like by your estimation those bags would only have to be used 20 times to break even, and anecdotally...
Curious if you have further reading on this:
Those super thick plastic bags they carry now have led to a massive increase in plastic usage overall.
Is there some organization keeping track? Sounds like by your estimation those bags would only have to be used 20 times to break even, and anecdotally I'm pretty sure I've had the same set of (mostly) synthetic reusable bags for a full 4-5 years (aside from one that I accidentally left raw chicken in in my trunk overnight 😬 ), getting used about 30 times a year.
I mean, obviously there are better potential solutions but a 98% reduction in the use of disposable plastics does seem like step in the right direction even just from a cultural standpoint. A society packed with disposable convenience objects with no solid infrastructure for reliably recapturing the materials can't possibly be sustainable.
Many of us are drowning in reusable bags — cloth totes or thicker, more durable plastic bags — that retailers sell cheaply or give away to customers as an ostensibly greener alternative to single-use plastic. (I have 15 cotton totes and 12 heavy-duty plastic bags stashed in a kitchen drawer, only a few of which see the light of day.)
Campaigners say these bag hoards are creating fresh environmental problems, with reusable bags having a much higher carbon footprint than thin plastic bags. According to one eye-popping estimate, a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to make it a truly environmentally friendly alternative to a conventional plastic bag.
The answer to what’s the greenest replacement for a single-use plastic bag isn’t straightforward, but the advice boils down to this: Reuse whatever bags you have at home, as many times as you can.
[...]
The cotton tote has become a cheap status symbol for anyone — brands and individuals — wanting to eschew plastic and show off their green credentials.
But cotton is a resource-intensive crop that requires lots of water and uses a substantial amount of pesticides and fertilizers, which introduce nitrates to land and waterways and results in the creation of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas. This means its environmental footprint is bigger than many people appreciate.
According to the UNEP report, a cotton bag needs to be used 50 to 150 times to have less impact on the climate compared with one single-use plastic bag.
A 2018 Danish Environmental Protection Agency report suggested that a cotton bag should be used at least 7,100 times to offset its environment impact when compared to a classic supermarket plastic bag that’s reused once as a trash bag and then incinerated. (If that cotton is organic, the figure is an eye-popping 20,000 times, with the report assuming a lower yield but the same input of raw materials.)
I believe SciShow also did an episode on this several years ago.
My city has banned plastic bags for several years and I see way more cloth bags than anything else. They don't rip like the plastic ones, and they last basically forever.
My city has banned plastic bags for several years and I see way more cloth bags than anything else. They don't rip like the plastic ones, and they last basically forever.
Worth noting (and probably adding to the title) that it’s single-use plastic bags that’ve more or less disappeared, and the term has a very specific definition. Plastic bags of any kind, with a...
Worth noting (and probably adding to the title) that it’s single-use plastic bags that’ve more or less disappeared, and the term has a very specific definition.
Plastic bags of any kind, with a few minor exceptions, have to have a 10p minimum charge. Makes sense, gives a psychological nudge, so far so good. For single use bags specifically (the very thin, crinkly plastic ones like the photo at the top of the article) this is a government levy and the retailer isn’t allowed to profit from it: they’re expected to deduct the costs and then donate the rest to “good causes, particularly environmental causes”.
If a bag is reusable, they still have to charge more than 10p and must offer free replacements if it wears out, but it’s considered a normal sale rather than a levy. Which means the only bags any UK supermarkets offer anymore are classed as reusable, because they can profit from them - depending where you go that’ll be anything from slightly thicker plastic for 20p, to fairly solid fibre reinforced things for 50p.
I can only assume this was an intentional way to de facto ban single use bags without pissing off the retailers, and if so it’s entirely worked, but it means the success of the policy as a whole depends on two key things: what’s the relative environmental impact of a reusable bag vs a single use one, and how many times are they actually being reused on average?
This is what I want to know, not just for plastic bags. For example, I’ve been drinking water out of reusable metal bottles for years, but the thought recently occurred to me that the production,...
what’s the relative environmental impact of a reusable bag vs a single use one, and how many times are they actually being reused on average?
This is what I want to know, not just for plastic bags. For example, I’ve been drinking water out of reusable metal bottles for years, but the thought recently occurred to me that the production, materials sourcing, shipping, etc. is going to be significantly more costly than that of a single plastic bottle. It makes me wonder if I’ve actually done more harm than good, and I wonder the same for tote bags and other similarly positioned reusable products.
It's a good thought, though I would be hesitant to post it because people hijack that sort of thinking and go "see, can't do it right anyway" to justify doing whatever is convenient for them. I...
It's a good thought, though I would be hesitant to post it because people hijack that sort of thinking and go "see, can't do it right anyway" to justify doing whatever is convenient for them.
I don't know the answer, but from looking around a little, I found this pie chart saying that a glass bottle production is 29% of the carbon footprint of you having a wine. It sounds like too much tbh, like the watering of the vineyard or whatever ought to be more, but let's go with this as a ballpark number. Melting and molding glass has pretty high energy costs and thus climate impact currently, or so I've heard in the context of single-use plastic containers versus recycled glass. (This is why I buy my joghurt desserts in reusable glass containers ever since finding out this is an option in my local supermarket. No recycling needed! They go back to the factory and get refilled :D Some other products are tastier but they're in single-use plastic so fuck that)
I don't know what metal melting is like, but let's assume ballpark similar to glass melting. The pie chart says that 13% of the footprint is transportation, and we can mostly discount the rest if we're talking about empty bottles, so that's a ~2:1 ratio of production to shipping footprint (29 to 13 %). Let's say for argument's sake that plastic production footprint rounds down to 0% (it almost certainly wouldn't), then it's still better to go for a metal bottle if you drink out of it three times: otherwise you'd incur the shipping footprint every time you buy a throwaway plastic bottle.
Also consider microplastics leaking into your drink. That's why plastic bottles have a use-before date. And consider waste: plastic recycling is not really possible, you'll only get weaker polymers afaik and not something the quality of the original product (not that most plastic is recycled anyway: it's too dirty, the wrong type, a mixed kind, or some other excuse). Metal you can remold without problems, and if it lands in nature that's also much less of a problem, also because it doesn't break down into micrometals under UV light the way that plastics do.
Not sure this random pie chart in an image search is the most reliable thing, but at least I've convinced myself that it's very probably correct to continue to recommend avoiding plastic bottles
TL;DR: with low confidence, I'd estimate that 3 times reusing a metal bottle should outweigh a single use plastic bottle, plus all the other associated issues with plastic besides global warming impact (off the top of my head: plastic can only be downcycled and often lands in landfills; tiny particles leak into your drink; if it lands in nature, it breaks down under UV into more tiny particles)
It's fundamentally going to come down to how long you use the reusable option for. While it presumably requires a lot of specific research to get a specific number of uses, over a long enough...
For example, I’ve been drinking water out of reusable metal bottles for years, but the thought recently occurred to me that the production, materials sourcing, shipping, etc. is going to be significantly more costly than that of a single plastic bottle
It's fundamentally going to come down to how long you use the reusable option for. While it presumably requires a lot of specific research to get a specific number of uses, over a long enough lifespan it will inevitably end up replacing enough single-use plastic bottles to be worth it -- it's just a question of whether the ones you're using are sufficiently durable to last up until/past that point. Prioritizing getting ones that you'll use and keep using for years is the best epute forward here.
Anecdotally, I think you're probably underestimating how many plastic water bottles you'd use by comparison. But then I live in Germany, in which people tend to be psychotically obsessed with buying bottled water.
Singapore just instituted charges for plastic bags at supermarkets. A lot of people here feel it's greenwashing in our context since people have always reused the bags for daily waste disposal and...
Singapore just instituted charges for plastic bags at supermarkets. A lot of people here feel it's greenwashing in our context since people have always reused the bags for daily waste disposal and will now have to buy plastic garbage bags for that purpose. I guess the theory is that it'll cut down consumption since people will only buy what they need to use.
Even if most people used some of their shopping bags as garbage bags, some will still be tossed. Besides, buying garbage bags outright is probably better for the environment because they are...
Even if most people used some of their shopping bags as garbage bags, some will still be tossed. Besides, buying garbage bags outright is probably better for the environment because they are thinner and use less plastic (I think)
Oh I agree. It's just interesting to see the reaction people have had. The problem here was also that it wasn't introduced as a tax but rather a straight up mandated charge from supermarkets which...
Oh I agree. It's just interesting to see the reaction people have had. The problem here was also that it wasn't introduced as a tax but rather a straight up mandated charge from supermarkets which they are 'encouraged' to put toward charitable causes (Singapore tends to be prone to this sort of neoliberal nonsense).
A tax which is directly put toward national climate adaptation efforts would be much more palatable I feel.
Where I live, plastic bags are just illegal, which led to a 100% reduction instantly. We can still get paper bags for a fee — I rarely see them being used though.
Where I live, plastic bags are just illegal, which led to a 100% reduction instantly. We can still get paper bags for a fee — I rarely see them being used though.
How do you transport your groceries then? I don't know what material the bags are that we use in the Netherlands, but I would bet plastic. It's a sturdy thing and they're bigger than the thin...
How do you transport your groceries then?
I don't know what material the bags are that we use in the Netherlands, but I would bet plastic. It's a sturdy thing and they're bigger than the thin plastic bags, we call them "big shopper". If those were illegal, well, metal bags aren't a thing, and we tried paper grocery bags but they need to be thrown away after a handful of uses from tears, both where you grab it and from pointy products like rice packages or milk cartons. (Single-use paper isn't better than single-use plastic, global warming-wise.) The sturdy "big shopper"s I never saw actually break (they look a bit scrawny after ~8 years of use now, though); paper bags I doubt I've ever managed to use more than a dozen times. Do you use fabric or so?
Interesting, I should look into those when the current things break. Don't see people using them around here, but surely they can be found somewhere. Thanks!
Interesting, I should look into those when the current things break. Don't see people using them around here, but surely they can be found somewhere. Thanks!
I still see this as hypocrisy. Me, the consumer, have to bring one bag to carry home multiple items wrapped to hell and back on plastics. Plastics that are not reusable. The biggest pollutants are...
I still see this as hypocrisy.
Me, the consumer, have to bring one bag to carry home multiple items wrapped to hell and back on plastics. Plastics that are not reusable.
The biggest pollutants are these companies, not us
Interestingly I don't think I've seen a "single use plastic bag" in the last 5-6 years. All major stores charge 10 cents per paper bag. Bring your own reusable bags is the expectation.
Interestingly I don't think I've seen a "single use plastic bag" in the last 5-6 years. All major stores charge 10 cents per paper bag. Bring your own reusable bags is the expectation.
Grocery stores where I live have moved over to paper bags (that are still charged a very small fee). I feel like this is a pretty good way to go; I detest that most places have simply replaced the...
Grocery stores where I live have moved over to paper bags (that are still charged a very small fee). I feel like this is a pretty good way to go; I detest that most places have simply replaced the thin plastic bags with thick "reusable" bags. Who actually reuses those?
Where I live there just aren't any of those old plastic bags around period. If you didn't BYOB, you can usually purchase reusable bags at the cash or opt for paper bags, depending on the store. I...
Where I live there just aren't any of those old plastic bags around period. If you didn't BYOB, you can usually purchase reusable bags at the cash or opt for paper bags, depending on the store. I think SOME places might still have those plastic grocery bags at $0.10 a pop or whatever, but I haven't seen any in a very long time. My personal stash for cat litter and bathroom cans ran out ages ago.
Even before all these attempts to get rid of the plastic bags, I was conscious of plastic waste and overuse and aspired to be one of those people who always brought reusable bags to the store... I say aspired, because my memory is very poor (literally did a study, bottom 10% represent!!) and I'd fail to bring them almost every time. Well, the plastic bags being completely removed at the point of sale has really done wonders for that, one or two times is all it took to encourage me to restructure my environments so that I'm not struggling to carry my things home. I even have a foldable bag in a pouch on my keychain, it's got a cute pattern so it's kind of fun.
Now that plastic single-use bags are basically completely removed from my life I'm almost embarrassed for us that they were so prevalent - even if the impact on the environment is overblown, the convenience they offer is really SO minor that it's essentially a freebie to give them up.
That's literally the point of taxes. You tax things you want to reduce and incentivise things you want to encourage with credits or subsidies. Every government does this to a certain extent....
That's literally the point of taxes. You tax things you want to reduce and incentivise things you want to encourage with credits or subsidies.
Every government does this to a certain extent. That's the reason why cigarettes cost an arm and a leg and you can get a 15k tax credit for putting solar on your house in America.
And yes, it is a success, the goal was to reduce the usage of wasteful single use plastic grocery bags and it achieved that.
Sure, taxes are more complicated than that, but in this specific situation they're used as a disincentive for people to use plastic bags, it doesn't really go much deeper than that.
Sure, taxes are more complicated than that, but in this specific situation they're used as a disincentive for people to use plastic bags, it doesn't really go much deeper than that.
I mean good riddance to those plastic bags however. Just a pox in any urban setting with how easily people littered them and how the wind would blow them around.
I mean good riddance to those plastic bags however. Just a pox in any urban setting with how easily people littered them and how the wind would blow them around.
I'm happy to hear that it seems to be having an effect. Where I live the charge is 8 cents per bag, which I've never found to be very persuasive when I'm already spending $100 to $200 on groceries. The best thing to come out of it in my own experience has been that the expectation of bringing your own bags seems to have changed because of it, which has encouraged me to do so.
It's five pence per bag in England which is analogous to the eight cent charge where you live.
As you say, presenting a barrier to obtaining plastic carrier bags is the principal 'nudge': it's not the cost that dissuades people per se but rather the fact that you now have to approach a store worker or walk away from the checkout to obtain one. To some extent I think there's also a social stigma towards plastic bags (instead, reusable jute and/or bags are very popular across the country).
Actually in England the minimum charge for a single-use carrier bag is ten pence. It was raised from the original minimum of five pence in 2021.
In practice most supermarkets in the UK don't sell any single-use carrier bags anymore. It may be partly due to reporting requirements for single-use carrier bags that apply only to "large retailers".
Instead they sell "bags for life" which are considered multiple-use and must be replaced free of charge when they wear out. From my personal experience: in 2023 all bags for life cost a minimum of thirty pence.
Just goes to show how effective the plastic bag charge is — can't say I've bought one since the initial levy was introduced so the increase completely swept by me! But yeah, it's a nominal sum. The cost isn't itself the salient part of the nudge.
It's been 10p for a couple of years now... most large shops (ie supermarkets) don't even sell them anymore and only sell the thicker reusable/replaced for free bags now.
My experience aligns with the change in social expectation due to this change rather than it being a real financial incentive, at least in the US. When a small percentage of people have reusable bags, you can see how it slows down the process just by being different or unexpected. There's implicit social pressure in that case not to be the outlier slowing everyone else down. However once enough people start doing so, it's no longer slowing down the process it is the process and the expectation completely shifts.
I bought a set of reusable bags probably 2 years before the tax started in my area, but due to convenience and not wanting to slow down the process for others I hardly used them. My personal want to be more environmentally friendly just wasn't enough to overcome the idea that I was being an inconvenience. As soon as it became normalized, I use them all the time and have completely cut out single use plastic bags from my life. The tax is only $0.05/bag so it's certainly not a barrier on its own, but it's been enough of a nudge to change behavior.
The habit formation is the key thing. Before my city passed a plastic bag tax cashiers wouldn't even ask to bag things up for you, they just would. Once the tax was instituted they were forced to ask, which gave me (and I assume many other shoppers) an opening to say "no thank you." All those cases where I'm only buying 1 or 2 things and getting a bag now no longer have a bag involved.
Curious if you have further reading on this:
Is there some organization keeping track? Sounds like by your estimation those bags would only have to be used 20 times to break even, and anecdotally I'm pretty sure I've had the same set of (mostly) synthetic reusable bags for a full 4-5 years (aside from one that I accidentally left raw chicken in in my trunk overnight 😬 ), getting used about 30 times a year.
I mean, obviously there are better potential solutions but a 98% reduction in the use of disposable plastics does seem like step in the right direction even just from a cultural standpoint. A society packed with disposable convenience objects with no solid infrastructure for reliably recapturing the materials can't possibly be sustainable.
Evidently the environmental impact of reusable bags can be pretty high.
[...]
I believe SciShow also did an episode on this several years ago.
My city has banned plastic bags for several years and I see way more cloth bags than anything else. They don't rip like the plastic ones, and they last basically forever.
Worth noting (and probably adding to the title) that it’s single-use plastic bags that’ve more or less disappeared, and the term has a very specific definition.
Plastic bags of any kind, with a few minor exceptions, have to have a 10p minimum charge. Makes sense, gives a psychological nudge, so far so good. For single use bags specifically (the very thin, crinkly plastic ones like the photo at the top of the article) this is a government levy and the retailer isn’t allowed to profit from it: they’re expected to deduct the costs and then donate the rest to “good causes, particularly environmental causes”.
If a bag is reusable, they still have to charge more than 10p and must offer free replacements if it wears out, but it’s considered a normal sale rather than a levy. Which means the only bags any UK supermarkets offer anymore are classed as reusable, because they can profit from them - depending where you go that’ll be anything from slightly thicker plastic for 20p, to fairly solid fibre reinforced things for 50p.
I can only assume this was an intentional way to de facto ban single use bags without pissing off the retailers, and if so it’s entirely worked, but it means the success of the policy as a whole depends on two key things: what’s the relative environmental impact of a reusable bag vs a single use one, and how many times are they actually being reused on average?
This is what I want to know, not just for plastic bags. For example, I’ve been drinking water out of reusable metal bottles for years, but the thought recently occurred to me that the production, materials sourcing, shipping, etc. is going to be significantly more costly than that of a single plastic bottle. It makes me wonder if I’ve actually done more harm than good, and I wonder the same for tote bags and other similarly positioned reusable products.
It's a good thought, though I would be hesitant to post it because people hijack that sort of thinking and go "see, can't do it right anyway" to justify doing whatever is convenient for them.
I don't know the answer, but from looking around a little, I found this pie chart saying that a glass bottle production is 29% of the carbon footprint of you having a wine. It sounds like too much tbh, like the watering of the vineyard or whatever ought to be more, but let's go with this as a ballpark number. Melting and molding glass has pretty high energy costs and thus climate impact currently, or so I've heard in the context of single-use plastic containers versus recycled glass. (This is why I buy my joghurt desserts in reusable glass containers ever since finding out this is an option in my local supermarket. No recycling needed! They go back to the factory and get refilled :D Some other products are tastier but they're in single-use plastic so fuck that)
I don't know what metal melting is like, but let's assume ballpark similar to glass melting. The pie chart says that 13% of the footprint is transportation, and we can mostly discount the rest if we're talking about empty bottles, so that's a ~2:1 ratio of production to shipping footprint (29 to 13 %). Let's say for argument's sake that plastic production footprint rounds down to 0% (it almost certainly wouldn't), then it's still better to go for a metal bottle if you drink out of it three times: otherwise you'd incur the shipping footprint every time you buy a throwaway plastic bottle.
Also consider microplastics leaking into your drink. That's why plastic bottles have a use-before date. And consider waste: plastic recycling is not really possible, you'll only get weaker polymers afaik and not something the quality of the original product (not that most plastic is recycled anyway: it's too dirty, the wrong type, a mixed kind, or some other excuse). Metal you can remold without problems, and if it lands in nature that's also much less of a problem, also because it doesn't break down into micrometals under UV light the way that plastics do.
Not sure this random pie chart in an image search is the most reliable thing, but at least I've convinced myself that it's very probably correct to continue to recommend avoiding plastic bottles
TL;DR: with low confidence, I'd estimate that 3 times reusing a metal bottle should outweigh a single use plastic bottle, plus all the other associated issues with plastic besides global warming impact (off the top of my head: plastic can only be downcycled and often lands in landfills; tiny particles leak into your drink; if it lands in nature, it breaks down under UV into more tiny particles)
It's fundamentally going to come down to how long you use the reusable option for. While it presumably requires a lot of specific research to get a specific number of uses, over a long enough lifespan it will inevitably end up replacing enough single-use plastic bottles to be worth it -- it's just a question of whether the ones you're using are sufficiently durable to last up until/past that point. Prioritizing getting ones that you'll use and keep using for years is the best epute forward here.
Anecdotally, I think you're probably underestimating how many plastic water bottles you'd use by comparison. But then I live in Germany, in which people tend to be psychotically obsessed with buying bottled water.
Amended.
Singapore just instituted charges for plastic bags at supermarkets. A lot of people here feel it's greenwashing in our context since people have always reused the bags for daily waste disposal and will now have to buy plastic garbage bags for that purpose. I guess the theory is that it'll cut down consumption since people will only buy what they need to use.
Even if most people used some of their shopping bags as garbage bags, some will still be tossed. Besides, buying garbage bags outright is probably better for the environment because they are thinner and use less plastic (I think)
Oh I agree. It's just interesting to see the reaction people have had. The problem here was also that it wasn't introduced as a tax but rather a straight up mandated charge from supermarkets which they are 'encouraged' to put toward charitable causes (Singapore tends to be prone to this sort of neoliberal nonsense).
A tax which is directly put toward national climate adaptation efforts would be much more palatable I feel.
Yeah, a simple tax does sound better
Where I live, plastic bags are just illegal, which led to a 100% reduction instantly. We can still get paper bags for a fee — I rarely see them being used though.
How do you transport your groceries then?
I don't know what material the bags are that we use in the Netherlands, but I would bet plastic. It's a sturdy thing and they're bigger than the thin plastic bags, we call them "big shopper". If those were illegal, well, metal bags aren't a thing, and we tried paper grocery bags but they need to be thrown away after a handful of uses from tears, both where you grab it and from pointy products like rice packages or milk cartons. (Single-use paper isn't better than single-use plastic, global warming-wise.) The sturdy "big shopper"s I never saw actually break (they look a bit scrawny after ~8 years of use now, though); paper bags I doubt I've ever managed to use more than a dozen times. Do you use fabric or so?
Reusable cloth bags. I got some back when the ban went into effect and I’m still using them.
Interesting, I should look into those when the current things break. Don't see people using them around here, but surely they can be found somewhere. Thanks!
I still see this as hypocrisy.
Me, the consumer, have to bring one bag to carry home multiple items wrapped to hell and back on plastics. Plastics that are not reusable.
The biggest pollutants are these companies, not us
Interestingly I don't think I've seen a "single use plastic bag" in the last 5-6 years. All major stores charge 10 cents per paper bag. Bring your own reusable bags is the expectation.
Grocery stores where I live have moved over to paper bags (that are still charged a very small fee). I feel like this is a pretty good way to go; I detest that most places have simply replaced the thin plastic bags with thick "reusable" bags. Who actually reuses those?
Where I live there just aren't any of those old plastic bags around period. If you didn't BYOB, you can usually purchase reusable bags at the cash or opt for paper bags, depending on the store. I think SOME places might still have those plastic grocery bags at $0.10 a pop or whatever, but I haven't seen any in a very long time. My personal stash for cat litter and bathroom cans ran out ages ago.
Even before all these attempts to get rid of the plastic bags, I was conscious of plastic waste and overuse and aspired to be one of those people who always brought reusable bags to the store... I say aspired, because my memory is very poor (literally did a study, bottom 10% represent!!) and I'd fail to bring them almost every time. Well, the plastic bags being completely removed at the point of sale has really done wonders for that, one or two times is all it took to encourage me to restructure my environments so that I'm not struggling to carry my things home. I even have a foldable bag in a pouch on my keychain, it's got a cute pattern so it's kind of fun.
Now that plastic single-use bags are basically completely removed from my life I'm almost embarrassed for us that they were so prevalent - even if the impact on the environment is overblown, the convenience they offer is really SO minor that it's essentially a freebie to give them up.
Care to add that for context? You don't have a bio configured
That's literally the point of taxes. You tax things you want to reduce and incentivise things you want to encourage with credits or subsidies.
Every government does this to a certain extent. That's the reason why cigarettes cost an arm and a leg and you can get a 15k tax credit for putting solar on your house in America.
And yes, it is a success, the goal was to reduce the usage of wasteful single use plastic grocery bags and it achieved that.
I generally agree, but taxes are used for way more than just disincentives.
Sure, taxes are more complicated than that, but in this specific situation they're used as a disincentive for people to use plastic bags, it doesn't really go much deeper than that.
I mean good riddance to those plastic bags however. Just a pox in any urban setting with how easily people littered them and how the wind would blow them around.
I'm not sure why pigouvian taxes, which are ubiquitous across the globe, ought to be considered 'particularly British'. Strange comment.