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The UK dropped to 500 million bags annually used from 7 billion after introduction of a 5 pence per bag charge. That's just one country albeit one of the world
by technofiend 9y ago
The UK dropped to 500 million bags annually used from 7 billion after introduction of a 5 pence per bag charge. That's just one country albeit one of the world's largest. Still I think we're over due for much more agressive action.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-plastic-bag-usage-drops-85-per-cent-since-5p-charged-introduced https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/30/england-...
- Fifer82 9y agoI have about 20 pound worth of bags in the cupboard gathering dust, 5p doesn't make a difference. They should make it £1 in the UK from now and £5 from 2020. That will make a dent. 2030 is the same as saying "Lets kick the can down the road".
- toomanybeersies 9y agoWell apparently a 5p charge resulted in a 14x decrease in usage of plastic bags, so despite your anecdote, it does make a difference.
- Fifer82 9y agoFair enough but I wonder how much of that has to do with simply being asked? Being given a bag was standard, as normal as expecting the store to be heated. An invisible service. Now, you don't get given a bag for your Sandwich & Water at lunch, and you don't get a free bag with your McDonalds meal to name just a couple of services. 1p or 5p wouldn't make much of a difference? A Family paying 100 pound a week on shopping at a super market, can easily just spend 100.35 on 7 bags and won't bat an eye lid. If that was 107.00 that would make a real difference and I bet the decrease would be much greater.
- barrkel 9y agoBehavioural economics teaches us that the jump from a price of zero to a price of 1 penny has a much, much larger effect than going from 1 penny to two pence. https://market.subwiki.org/wiki/Zero_price_effect https://market.subwiki.org/wiki/Zero_price_effect The same acts in reverse. I personally reuse the same bag every time I go shopping until it is damaged. When I walk to my local, I carry the two or three items I bought directly, rather than in a bag. I could afford to buy over a million plastic bags a year, yet I've changed my behaviour to avoid buying them whenever possible. (In my case, it has nothing to do with being asked, as I invariably use the automated checkout machines. Bags are available for purchase adjacent to these machines, so it's not an availability problem either.)
- 5555624 9y agoHaving spent 18+ years without a car, walking or cycling or taking the bus, I always had a backpack with me. I would often tell a clerk I didn't need a bag and I'd be ignored -- they just automatically put items in a bag. Once a 5 cent bag fee went into effect and they had to ask, I never had a problem not getting a bag. (To be fair, other places knew me and knew I didn't need a bag.)
- mattmanser 9y agoA little thing to bear in mind is that the new bags weigh significantly more than the old ones, so it's not actually a 14x decrease. With the switch all the stores now sell "lifetime" bags. According to my fairly inaccurate kitchen scales the old ones weigh about 10g, the new ones weigh about 25g. So it's about a 5.6x drop, which is still fantastic. I think everyone talks about the number of bags as it makes the decrease look bigger.
- eigenhombre 9y agoThe mass measurement is good to know; however, the lighter bags also take to the air and land in trees, the water, etc., a surprisingly large effect in the Windy City (yes I know it's not called that because of actual wind :-) ). This effect has almost disappeared in my neighborhood with the new tax in place.
- deepvibrations 9y agoVery good point, really good to hear the new bags aren't weighing in at too much more than the old ones! Also worth noting that the heavier bags are better quality and so will last longer. Combine this with the fact that because bags are no longer a 'free commodity', I think people will tend to assign value to them and hence re-use them much more than before.
- cat199 9y ago> the old ones Charging for bags was commonplace in the UK in the 80's ... how long have you been keeping these for??
- mattmanser 9y agoTesco/Sainsbury's (two of the big supermarkets) now only supply "bag for life"s (thicker plastic) and do not have any of the 'normal', thin, carrier bags. That's happened within the last year. I now have loads of "bags for life" because sometimes you forget to bring one, don't bring enough or shop on a whim.
- aninhumer 9y ago
- oldcynic 9y agoThat's broadly where I'd go with plastic bottles - £1 deposit, rising to £5 and compel supermarkets and manufacturers to take the returns. I'm old enough to remember the 20p(?) deposit on glass bottles of fizzy pop. Also when supermarkets were selling milk in glass bottles - and provided crates in the same section for customers to return the empties. This used to be a solved problem.
- emodendroket 9y agoI think the idea of loss aversion suggests that people would be more likely to avoid taking a bag at the time than they would be to return them for a deposit (not that this is an option with bottles).
- abakker 9y agoI really want a deposit/membership at my local grocery store for reusable bags. I don't want to remember them. I want to use some standard, reusable ones at the store, and then be able to return them in bulk for my deposit back. I end up taking paper bags in SF because I constantly forget to bring reusable ones, despite having dozens at home.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- barrkel 9y agoThe habit to get into is have a non-bulky resuable bag that folds up nice and flat and keep it in a jacket pocket or some other location that's available when you're out and about; and to put the bag back in that place when you finish unpacking at home. Relying on remembering before you leave the house or whatever is much less effective, I think.
- dwaltrip 9y agoI had the same problem. I keep mine in my car now, which had helped.
- 9y ago
- johnhenry 9y agoIt seems you have a financial interest in this. When you say you have £20 worth of bags, is this at the 5p per bag rate, or at your proposed £1 per bag?
- yason 9y agoI do agree. I was just looking at the selection of regular-size bags today at my local Finnish grocery store: - 0.20€ for a biodegradable bag - 0.20€ for a plastic bag It's good that they offer bio bags that are no longer more expensive than plastic bags but it should definitely be the other way around. If they priced bio bags at 0.20€ and plastic bags at 1.20€ you would not hesitate to guess whether people would move to carry their own reusable nylon/cotton bags or buy the biodegradable bags instead (or, rather, two of them instead of one plastic as they break more easily). I rarely buy a new plastic bag myself but when I do I don't even blink at the 0.20€ price. The price should make me stop for a moment and reconsider.
- Taylor_OD 9y agoChicago started charging 7 cent a bag and that certainly made me think twice about my bag use.
- desireco42 9y agoSuddenly this 7 cents are the biggest expense and everyone remembers to bring their bag, which is awesome because effects are great.
- monksy 9y agoI really don't want to give the city more money. They've already upped income tax, property tax (property values have been going up as well), and they played with the sales tax.
- oh_sigh 9y agoPlastic bags have some externalities relating to how people discard them. Why can't the city tax to help recoup costs?
- monksy 9y agoI see you haven't experienced the latest increases in taxes in Chicago. Soda was one of them, but that was repealed.
- juliushuijnk 9y agoSo you're ok with it, if the money just goes to the shop, but they are obligated to ask that minimum price?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- monksy 9y agoGiven the context of what's been happening in Chicago, and a bit of the mismanagement of how they prioritize things: It's been frustrating to be hit with a lot more taxes.
- mino 9y agoThat was a wrong decision: rather than imposing a small fee, they should have banned the sale of non-biodegradable bags altogether. Italy is doing so since 2011, and it seems to be working just fine.
- ChrisRR 9y agoTesco used biodegradable bags but they weren't lasting long compared to the original bags. They couldn't be used for much because they started falling apart within weeks.
- PakG1 9y agoAt least they're biodegradable though? Plastic isn't really.
- qbrass 9y agoPlastic breaks down in oxygen and UV light. The problem is people keep burying them.
- always_good 9y agoWell, they break down into small pieces that everything ingests.
- sdfasdasfsf 9y agoWhat is plastic? PE, PTFE, There are microorganisms that eat certain polymers (PE), but I don't think anything will ever eat PTFE (teflon) I'd bet that switching away from teflon frying pans you'll help the environment more than getting rid of a life time of PE bags. F chemistry is super nasty
- dpark 9y agoI bet you won’t. The amount of PTFE consumed by the typical person is minuscule compared to the amount of PE they use. People buy Teflon pans maybe once every decade. They buy more PE with a single bottle of soda. For that matter, most people probably have more PTFE in their plumbing than stored in their kitchen cabinets.
- jimmaswell 9y agoI don't like that this is a regressive tax - pay a premium for the good bags, settle for paper, or pay for reusable bags. If anything, maybe just give a tax credit for not using plastic, which is printed on the receipt.
- untog 9y agoHow would people use this tax credit that is printed on the receipt for every supermarket trip they take? It doesn't sound even remotely practical.
- privacypoller 9y agoWhat about if stores credit customers n cents per bag they don't use (i.e. for each reusable bag they do use) and then claim an annual tax credit, kind of like a mirror version of how pass-through consumption taxes like GST/VAT work?
- Sargos 9y agoHow about putting the tax up front while the customer is on the register? It reduces the burden of documentation for both the customer and government while also ensuring near 100% compliance. Might be a good idea to look into.
- homulilly 9y agoA better solution would be to pan the production and use of disposable plastic bags altogether like most countries did with plastic microbeads.
- jimmaswell 9y agoThere's no good reason to ban plastic bags. We have to take convenience and quality of life for humans into account at some point when considering these environmental issues.
- hangonhn 9y agoI'm one of those idiots who always forgets to bring reusable bags but since they passed similar laws in my city, I've cut down on bag use, sometimes just carrying all my items. Laws like that help because groceries no longer assume you want bags. Now you have to make a decision. So even when I do forget and have to buy a bag, I ask for the bare minimum and the clerk just stack my bag as full as possible. In the past, I think they would have left a lot more room. I guess these laws have an impact just simply making us make a decision on the number of bags we want to be charged for.
- gt_ 9y agoThe habit of assuming customers want bags seems like one way to characterize much, of not most, of the problem. I get the impression it’s seen as a common courtesy for some, or a gesture. Maybe nothing more than a habit, maybe less than that.
- dpark 9y agoEvery time I go home to Tennessee to visit family, I’m shocked at how wasteful they are with plastic bags. If you buy a small cart load of groceries/whatever at Wal-Mart, they have a big rotating carousel of bags for the cashier to drop items into and they’ll consistently use every bag slot rather than putting everything into a couple of bags. They’ve sent me home with 6 bags before, each holding only 1 or 2 items. I’ve had convenience stores try to give me a bag for a candy bar. It’s one item and I’m going to eat it now. What am I going to do with this bag? There’s always a look of confusion when I ask for items not to be bagged. It’s just such a foreign thing. I’m glad that my city has instituted a bag fee and banned plastic bags. A lot of places don’t actually seem to charge per bag as they’re supposed to, but even so the number of people bringing bags is much higher now and the number of bags used is way lower. And none of them are throwaway plastic.
- shaki-dora 9y agoI often just take one of the empty cartons some products are shelved in.
- chopin 9y ago
- jpao79 9y agoThis is the best invention ever for the ones that you do pay 5 pence/cents for: Rubbermaid Bag Recycler Wastebasket https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000RNFEFQ/ https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000RNFEFQ/
- kentosi 9y agoMeanwhile when I moved here in New York I was shocked at the common practice of "double bagging" where they literally put a plastic bag into another plastic bag. The argument being that 1 bag isn't strong enough.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- autokad 9y agoif you ever had your milk go splat on the pavement after it went right through your plastic bag, then yeah, its not enough.
- oneplane 9y agoThere are amazing fabrics today that can solve this; one called cotton and another called nylon.
- wnissen 9y agoPlastic bags hold about 20-30 pounds, how much milk are we talking?
- coldtea 9y agoPlastic bags can easily tear with just a small box being sideways and its corners cutting into the bag...
- BinaryIdiot 9y agoDepends on the type of plastic bag. If we're talking Walmart grade plastic bags then those are not going to hold 20 pounds. You'd be lucky to hold 10 pounds with those terrible bags. Safeway bags, thought? Those are crazy thick and strong and could easily handle 30 pounds.
- jwilk 9y agoFor metrics units users, that's 9-14 kg.
- coldtea 9y ago>The UK dropped to 500 million bags annually used from 7 billion after introduction of a 5 pence per bag charge. Still totally insignificant. A small plastic product packaging, of the kind everything comes in, has more plastic than 200 bags. https://goo.gl/images/cBp3zn https://goo.gl/images/cBp3zn Like TSA "security theater", this is "environmental theater".
- paulintrognon 9y agoBut those can be recycled, can't they?
- celticninja 9y agoThe clamshell type ones cannot.
- sdfasdasfsf 9y agoIn theory, maybe. But it's super complicated - Plastics really don't mix well. Even trace amount of a different polymer (those numbers in the bottom) will destroy the strength of a batch of plastic (there is research in this though) - Recycling is expensive and in an economic battle against new stock (carbon tax?). Cleaving the bonds to make diesel or feedstock is another option to "recycle" polymers (I dunno why it's not done. energy intensive wrt to oil? Dirty?) Plastics are amazing... but we really should stop using them altogether except for fringe no alternative cases. P.S. turns out plastics are bio-degradable by some tough organisms. So there's hope.
- dpark 9y agoPlastics being biodegradable might not be much of a net gain. It would help clean up some, but it also means all that carbon makes it’s way into the air. Mixed bag there.
- astrodust 9y agoMost plastics labelled "biodegradeable" aren't actually what they say. What they do is break down under ultraviolet light into very tiny particles you can't see but which are still plastic. These diffuse into the environment, but they never truly break down into more natural compounds. It's the equivalent of sweeping all those bags under the rug. They're still out there, just permeating into everything instead of being visible.
- wastedhours 9y agoAnecdata, but since it was introduced, I've gone from getting a new bag every day (lunch/fresh groceries), to using the same one for pretty much the last 6 months. It was a very noticeable shift to making me think about their use. Buying one because I've forgotten is a rare, and slight annoyance (the price doesn't put me off, it just changes the mental model).
- monk_e_boy 9y agoLots of my friends have said the same thing. I've always wondered why people didn't re-use bags before the charge... Saving the environment didn't matter, but 5p does? People didn't know plastic was bad before? They didn't care? It's great that the 5p charge works, but do we need to have a 5p charge on every bit of plastic to drive the point home?
- philwelch 9y agoThis is literally the standard market solution for externalities, and follows the same basic logic as carbon taxes, cap-and-trade for SO2/NOx emissions, and so forth.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- grinsekatze 9y ago> Saving the environment didn't matter, but 5p does? People didn't know plastic was bad before? They didn't care? i think it simply does not register, until something flips the switch. "money" is a powerful trigger. people pay special attention to what it is connected to.
- subsubsub 9y agoOne possible reason that no one's mentioned... It isn't about the money you pay, but the money you keep. If I buy a few things for £4.99 then without a bag I can pay with a £10 note and get a £5 note back, but with the 5p charge I receive loads of coins in change. Plus the cognitive pain of monetary amounts like £5.04
- jeffffff 9y agothe non-reusable plastic bag ban in austin, tx was a pretty big failure. the problem is that a lot of the big stores (heb in particular) sell heavier "reusable" bags for 25 cents that no one actually reuses. these bags have a significantly larger environmental impact than the disposable bags if they are not actually reused as intended. http://kxan.com/2015/06/10/report-austin-bag-ban-had-unintended-consequences/ http://kxan.com/2015/06/10/report-austin-bag-ban-had-uninten...
- badwolf 9y agoanecdata... Every time I go to HEB almost everyone in checkout line is reusing their HEB "emergency" bags.
- kodablah 9y agoIn the Metroplex the plastic bag law was repealed after bag manufacturers sued the city for unlawful taxes on containers. It didn't have majority citizen support anyways, was seen as a way to complicate purchasing on smaller retailers, and many were just paying the fee anyways. While many support the idea of reduced plastic bag consumption, they didn't like the government tax approach. I personally don't have a strong opinion.
- monk_e_boy 9y agohow do you feel about the government imposing these rules on commerce. In the UK we're quite used to this and don't mind. Americans often feel that government should keep out of capitalism.
- jeffffff 9y agoi think it's fine in principle but in this case the implementation was poor. mostly i don't understand why non-reusable paper bags were banned. they're recyclable, biodegradable, and made from a renewable resource. the regulation requires paper bags to have handles and be at least a certain thickness so that they're "reusable". we'd be better off if the people that buy the 25 cent plastic bags and throw them away were getting disposable paper bags. probably need to charge them a fee on top for being wasteful. in my opinion the second biggest problem with regulation is that often regulators don't properly account for human nature and some percentage of people being shitty. the biggest problem with regulation is corruption and money in politics. i think regulation is necessary in lots of cases. not sure that my views are representative of most americans though.
- vmarsy 9y agoSame in France, the stores starting charging for plastic bags (even before the gov introduced a tax) in the early 2000s, and it dropped to 800 millions back in 2010, from 15 billion in 2003.[1][2] Since 2016 they're completely banned. Glad to see that more countries took similar easy steps. The E.U. is forcing every member country charge for those bags by the end of 2018, and to make sure on average people use less than 90 bags per person per year by end of 2019. For comparison, Danish and Finnish use only 4, France 80, and Portuguese 400+ [3] [1] http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2013/01/03/l-interdiction-des-sacs-en-plastique-se-mondialise_1812467_3244.html http://www.lemonde.fr/planete/article/2013/01/03/l-interdict... [2] https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2003/12/04/202430-la-chasse-aux-sacs-plastiques-est-lancee.html https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2003/12/04/202430-la-chasse... [3] http://www.liberation.fr/france/2016/06/25/sacs-plastique-ce-qui-devient-interdit-ce-qui-va-etre-disponible_1462004 http://www.liberation.fr/france/2016/06/25/sacs-plastique-ce...
- Baeocystin 9y agoThe number of bags used drop is significant, but I wonder how much the volume of plastic used has changed? This is an honest question. I am genuinely curious. Here in California, for example, the 10 cent bags you now pay for are much more robust than the cheap freebies of before, but also clearly use more material in their construction. I would estimate at least 5x-10x the mass per bag of the previous free ones. (I much prefer the newer system, FWIW. The stronger bags are much more useful around the home, too.)
- redthrow 9y agoThe economist Bryan Caplan wrote about the topic here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/01/californias_gre.html http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2017/01/californias_gre....
- Baeocystin 9y agoInteresting read, thanks for the link.
- megous 9y agoI bet reduction is not due to price, but due to cashiers not automatically handing out bags to people (which was a frequent occurance when they were free).
- skookumchuck 9y agoPutting a tax on the use of such items is better than banning, because it does allow for justifiable uses, if the user is willing to pay for it.
- Steko 9y agoCorrection: the 500 million is for six month period. More recent data can be seen here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carrier-bag-charge-summary-of-data-in-england/single-use-plastic-carrier-bags-charge-data-in-england-for-2016-to-2017 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carrier-bag-charg... WRAP previously reported information on carrier bag use based on a voluntary agreement with 7 major retailers (Asda, The Co-operative Group, Marks & Spencer, Morrisons, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose). Their data for 2014 showed that these retailers issued 7.6 billion single-use plastic carrier bags in England during that calendar year. Defra’s data for the year from 7 April 2016 to 6 April 2017 shows a very substantial fall of 83% in the number of single-use plastic carrier bags issued by the seven largest retailers to just 1.3 billion single-use plastic carrier bags.
- Iv 9y agoIt is through this kind of actions that we can hope to one day erase the Great Pacific Garbage Patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch