Plastic Ban

That's the last straw...

More seriously, this really feels like a moral panic 'plastic is killing the planet, let's ban toothpicks...'

It would make more sense to stop supermarkets from profiteering by phasing out thin bags in favour of expensive 'bags for life' that are rarely used long enough to actually have less impact than a 'disposable' bag.

Or better still, let's see more ingenuity in food (or all) packaging.

What about just using simple paper bags that can join the newsprint and other such material we already recycle?

That route is already operating.

Brian

I've never seen a plastic straw or cotton bud or bought a bottle of water. I have picked up many a bin full of black plastic bale wrap. Plastic super market bags got re-cycled as bin bags, now have to buy bin-bags.

I still have the remains of a carton of paper bags bought when i was co-owner of a hobby shop in the early 80's. Almost everything would go into paper bags of one size or another, except large boxes (train sets, large model kits, jigsaw puzzles etc) which were wrapped in brown paper.

Surprisingly I found the paper bags just as strong and durable as the flimsy plastic supermarket ones, as long as they didn't get wet.

My wife recycles almost every bit of paper we get (except the glossy junk mail) through the compost bins. Plastic supermarket bags become bin liners and get thrown out with their contents when full (or too smelly ).

I don't use straws but can't manage without cotton buds in the workshop since they have so many uses. I daresay they could find a more environmentally friendly stalk for the cotton buds, but will they function as well?

Doug

Is it the plastic that's really the problem or the way people discard it?

Well said Jason. "People" must also include the councils who just tip it into landfill.

Russell

I must shoot that canard! The UK has really got to grips with landfill due to the high and continually increasing landfill tax.

Very little goes to landfill now. This graph ends in 2012, the second one extends similar data to 2016. The amount of landfill in 2018 is tiny in comparison to 2000.

The press are missing the most critical factor. Most plastics are made from oil production waste by products. If we stop producing all plastics what happens to the oil production waste?

The oil companies will devise some other process that will enable them to charge us for the disposal of their waste, it will still exist but in another processed form. It exists and cannot be magicked away!

Dave W

Most of us on here remember perfectly good paper straws, though I'm not sure where the wax came from, and cotton buds should be made from natural cotton or wool and a wood stick. Waxed paper cups also used to be good enough for a cup of coffee but I'd be happy to see take-away banned so only china was used.

I'd like to see a trading standards raid on pound shops. It seems half the stuff in them is abysmal quality plastic crap which probably forms a significant proportion of waste when the item breaks on day 2.

The problem I see is the simultaneous reduction in newspaper availability for wrapping, cleaning, firelighting etc. I used to get freebies every week but now often find I have none in the house.

I seem to remember reading somewhere that of all the oil produced from the wells,very,very little ended up being used as oil,or fuel.Most of it ended up as plastic,which of course ended up being dumped [or sent to China,till they got fed up with it ]

When people went shopping years ago,they brought their own bags,so did not have to remove piles of wrappings,which they had no use for and did not need,in the first place.Why does your piece of cheese need to be wrapped up in two or three layers of plastic?,which you cannot open,anyway. Sometimes it,s easier just to eat the lot and let Nature take its course. Cheese,like many other foods should never be plastic wrapped.

Next time you come back from shopping,put the items you want to one side and the junk to the other and see which is the bigger pile. You might be surprised ! Remember also,you,re paying for it !

I am an engineer in the flexible packaging industry and I can tell you that Bio degradable plastic has been around since the late 1970's BUT the food industry refused to pay for it as the additives to make it bio degradable affected their profit margin, as does the types of printing inks used, some required lamination to keep them off the food stuff's

Its the food industry and packaging companies in general that are at fault as the more they can wrap the more they can charge.

and remember that to recycle paper has a massive carbon foot print almost as bad as Plastic recycling power wise

There is no magic answer but what is wrong is passing the "Buck" down to the consumer to deal with it

I must say that I was astonished by the number of plastic straws ...

According to BBC News:

Announcing a consultation on a possible ban ministers said 8.5bn plastic straws were thrown away in the UK every year.

8.5 billion is an awful lot of plastic straws !!

MichaelG.

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P.S. the blue plastic tubes from modern cotton buds are very useful; so I tend to reclaim them.

Just remember,

If you throw something in the sea, it could end up anywhere in the world that has sea as its neigbour. can you imagine if we threw all our plastic rubbish in the sea and China, India, wherever else taxing their population so that they can be seen as 'green'.

And as for the suger tax, im drinking beer now, i must be up 20p by now

Posted by Trevorh on 19/04/2018 12:22:31:

and remember that to recycle paper has a massive carbon foot print almost as bad as Plastic recycling power wise

Years ago, all our old newspapers were given to the Cats & Dogs Home because they could sell it, but then one day they stopped accepting it. Could it have been because of the above statement, I wonder?

Dave
The Emerald Isle

Doug, I’m not sure where they came from but I used to use long, single ended cotton buds for cleaning electrical stuff at work They were about double the length of a normal cotton bud and the shafts were made of wood.

Found them, here you go:

**LINK**

Our local council used to recycle "flyaway" plastics, e.g. Plastic bags, food wrapping etc. Last year the contract changed presumably to provide "better value", but the new contractor won't take this type of plastic so goes it goes in the general waste. One the same subject, the number of food items from the supermarket that are double wrapped is annoying. Cheese being the worst offender. I know one answer is not to use supermarkets, but that is not always practical for those with busy lives.

I think there's a lot of unfair criticism of plastic wrapping. It's the plastic wrapping that allows distribution of highly perishable foods like cooked meats, cheeses and fish products with the prices, volumes and keep-dates we're used to.

Go back to paper packaging of this stuff and food-poisoning cases will skyrocket along with prices, and availability will plummet.

It's true that some products are ludicrously overpackaged and the plastic straw is silly. But probably the main culprits as far as the environment is concerned are the web meshes that some citrus fruit is sold in, the little barbs used for clothing labels, discarded fishing line, and microbeads.

There's no way back to simplistic memories of days gone by without also bringing back the concomitant drawbacks, risks and abuses from those times.

I thought plastic straws were a vast improvement on paper ones especially as small children seem to make them soggy and they then collapse. Ice-cream tubs with the wax coating worked but over zealous scraping resulted in wax flakes in your ice-cream. I am sure incinerators with energy recovery systems must be a useful way to recycle all this plastic coated paper and unwanted plastic, must need some clever systems to control the toxic fumes from burning plastic though.

Mike