What would you ban tomorrow to address climate change / pollution?

[joggerbottom]

I would ban:

Glitter
Plastic sequins
Make up and cosmetics in plastic packaging
Toys that come with children's magazines and food boxes
Petrol vehicles
Clearing land for dairy / meat farming

I could go on but it would be a very long list!

External Christmas decorations on dwellings.

It infuriates me each year to see the phenomenal waste of power as people pile tat on to the outside of their homes.

Fine, have a Christmas tree indoors, go wild with a string of fairy lights, but the sheer waste of electricity, and it goes on for weeks. The people who do this are inevitably the ones who start in November, so those lights are flashing for the best part of five weeks!

All those people who put central heating on when the temperature drops below 20 degrees. Wear appropriate clothing!

Pretty much everything that's already been mentioned above.

Medication in blister packs.

Disposable nappies
Christmas crackers and all the tat that shops get in to sell to people with no imagination for presents
Some fresh foodstuffs have to be wrapped in plastic to keep them fresh for longer and thus reduce significant food waste. Anything else ban single use plastic
Balloons
Bottled water
The plastic rings on milk bottles and the silver whatsit inside. Constitutes 90% of the litter washed up on my local beach.
Excessive and unrecyclable cosmetics packaging. Think of all those hard plastic dependants and stupid double walled hard plastic jars for face creams etc.

Individual kitchens. It would be much.less wasteful if there were large community kitchens that fed a local area.

Sewage that gets dumped into streams without being processed first.

New properties without excellent public transport links so that people don't need cars.

Shorthaul air travel. Noone should be taking a plane from London to Scotland.

Unnecessary and unrecyclable packaging. Biscuits don't need to be in a plastic bag AND a cardboard box. Same with teabags.

All the unnecessary packaging. I live in Asia where it is spectacularly bad eg individually wrapped biscuits/snacks, and everyone thinks I'm weird for asking for an actual cup, not a disposable cup in coffee shops.

"Noone should be taking a plane from London to Scotland."

But it is far cheaper and faster to take the plane. What we need is for the government to spend more on rail and bus services.

Single use plastic bottles.

Excessive packaging from companies e.g. supermarkets and Amazon.

Shitty plastic fiddly toys.

Fruit and veg being wrapped in plastic.

Oh and air conditioning. My husband blasts it from May to October and it drives me crazy. I don't mind having it on for a few hours a day or as we go to sleep but he would have it on 24/7.

Disposable nappies, disposable sanpro, disposable wipes (cleaning and cosmetic etc).

This would need to happen in tandem with the reusable alternatives being developed further to make them more user friendly and more affordable.

Cars, vans and lorries from all large towns and cities.

Phase out petrol and diesel cars; replacements provided by governments for those with a household income

This thread reads in part like people’s personal bugbears / swipes at other people’s habits but things that will not necessarily be particularly impactful. All that said, I have no words of wisdom

Cheap "disposable" fashion.

Wipes in any form and also disposable nappies, with subsidies for cloth.

Balloons

Ban plastic bags altogether. Don't make people pay for them, because then it justifies buying them. If they were not available people would get used to bringing recyclable ones.

I went to Japan recently and the recycling facilities are really good there. We need more pressure here on people to recycle. Fines for people who don't, better facilities which are uniform. For example I work on a different Borough to where I live, although it's 8 miles down the road. At home I can recycle glass, at work I can't.

Veganism becoming the norm.

@millimollimandi
At the Amazon check out you can actually choose to have all the packages delivered at the same time. There’s a tick box on the delivery or postage page.

Disposable nappies.

Cruise ships!

Some of these are going to have a far greater detrimental impact on the most vulnerable in society and their carers than they will on the average person.

We need to make the sustainable options more affordable.

I don’t think there is anyone who wants the plastic wrapped goods over sustainable options. But we have so many people who are living in poverty and using food banks. These people can’t afford to travel to a fill your own jars shop. It all seems very middle class at the moment.

I follow a you tuber/ instagrammer who has some fantastic ideas but she goes on holiday 4x a year and admits she spends a few hours a day in her car taking her children to school in her 4x4. It’s great that she’s making what she can at home and shopping sustainably but is she really making more of a difference than someone who doesn’t own a car, shops in Tesco but doesn’t go in holiday?

I doubt it Slazenger flying is up there as bad for environment

Put Donald Trump in the bin.

Glitter
Plastic food packaging wherever possible.
Single use plastic
Carbon credits - enabling us to buy our way into oblivion.
Multinationals ability to devastate land/forest/oceans - political action needed here.
I think the last two require a banning of capitalism.

spoon the problem with recycling is a lot of it never actually gets recycled. It gets shipped to China or the Philippines who burn it or who end up sending it back.

We need to reduce our waste. That's the key imo.

Glitter
Disposable wipes (cleaning, makeup, baby, all of them!)
Disposable nappies (bio-degradable ones available on prescription only to adults. But as cloth became mainstream again nappy services would pop up and then banning all together and funding nappy washing services to those who are disabled.)
Packaging for all fruit&veg, single-use bottles for milk, go back to cardboard ice cream boxes.. Ideally recycled or I wonder if there's a bamboo alternative to cardboard..?
Non-sustainably made clothes
Beef(worst meat out of all of them environmentally speaking, cows milk
possibly too...)
Junk mail
Disposable drinks bottles(instead investing in free water dispensers, maybe paid ones for other drinks and shops can sell re-useable bottles if you forget).
Balloons

I feel like these are all the obvious ones, there's more that needs to go!

Eating meat. Animal agriculture is responsible for more greenhouse gasses than all transportation combined.

Heard an expert discussion on it all and they said transport and emissions from companies was the biggest contributor and recycling isn't a drop in the ocean compared to it. He said air space is so busy now and tackling travel would be the game changer. Saying that I'd ban wipes, disposable nappies, go back to glass bottles and introduce something like in Germany where you bring back your bottles for a few can't. My biggest bug bear is places like aldi saying they've loose fruit when theres only a little loose. I'd make renewable energy and electric cars affordable for the average person too