AIBU to think singe use plastics should be banned?

[LunasSpectreSpecs]

Actually, I don't think I'm unreasonable at all, and am sure anyone who saw Blue Planet will agree.

We don't need disposable coffee cups, you can get reusable ones for around £1. When you're buying carrots or garlic in the supermarket, why are you taking a wee plastic bag to put it in? Plastic straws are also totally pointless - if you truly have some sort of condition which means you NEED a straw then get paper ones. 5p carriers should be banned - bags for life only.

In fact, other types of plastic should be taxed too. Christmas cracker gifts - mostly plastic and then chucked after an hour.

These were the wraps I bought. www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06X91VT4J/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?psc=1&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8

Thank you.

Of course there needs to be a global effort, but that's not an argument for the UK not doing more. If we all wait around for the next country to get moving, we will never get anywhere. We need to lead by example - and, given that our living standards are far higher than those of many other countries - we should surely do commensurately more in terms fof reducing unnecessary consumption.

people are inherently lazy and often fail to see the bigger picture.

someone else mentioned that 75% comes from asia. and that's just plastic, doesn't include the impact of poaching because of their voracious need to the end product. Or the massive amount of pollutants that end up in the rivers and sea.
we need China especially, to start giving a shit, but as long as the west is desperate to make money from trading with them then there really isn't going to be much pressure for them to change. It's pretty depressing on the whole.

I've been doing household product refills (laundry liquid, washing up liquid and cleaning fluid) for the past 11 years. I was lucky enough to have an Ecover refill station near me until recently. Which means I've been using the same 8 bottles for all this time.

I'm going to switch to BioD as can't get Ecover refills anymore. My local organic shop does refills for household stuff, shampoo, conditioner, hand soap, oil and vinegar. It's cheaper and a lot less wasteful. Google organic shops near you or look at the BioD website, they are a brilliant eco friendly company.

I hate it when shops ask "do you want a bag?" Ffs the charge has been levied in Wales for 6 years. It's about time they stopped asking and make the customer ask for one if they are dull enough to go shopping without a bag.

YANBU. We try to use as little plastic as possible and also reuse and recycle.
We have a filter can instead of buying drinking water in plastic bottles (as the one from the tap is slightly contaminated in the area).
I also banned Christmas wrappers these Christmas. I remember stuffing our recycling bin with shitloads of wrapping paper that only served one purpose for a very short time in its life and even though I'm not a tree-hugging hippy and love my life comforts including my car, I was actually disgusted with myself.

£2:00 if you bring your own refillable mug and £2:50 if you don't.

Starbucks and Costa are doing this already - 25p off every drink if you take your own cup.

www.starbucks.co.uk/responsibility/environment/recycling
www.costa.co.uk/responsibility/our-cups/

Would imagine most other chains do the same. Waitrose are definitely happy to put my free coffee into a reusable cup rather than a takeaway one.

I don't buy many takeaway coffees (maybe 2 a month) and hardly any bottled drinks (when not drinking coffee or alcohol, I only really drink water and am too tight to pay for bottled water so take a reusable sigg bottle) but I'm trying to use my reusable cup for my coffees.

My experience so far is that it doesn't fit under the coffee machine for the free Waitrose takeaway coffee, well you can sort of wedge it under and the coffee drips down the side, but it's quite difficult to not spill it.

The other place I get coffee from is McDonalds, and their set up, where someone makes coffees hidden behind a screen makes it look like it would disrupt their systems to put my coffee in a reusable cup. I can ask them though. However, that would mean I wouldn't get my coffee sticker, so using a resuable cup would actually cost me money, not save it like at Costa or Starbucks.

I can't understand all the anti reuse in grocery discussion . We had Individual shops only 40/30 years ago that dealt with this perfectly well.

I'm sure we can work out a suitable system that would also work in a supermarket.

Glass bottles were collected and cleaned in factory before being refilled gut example. It wasn't down to the consumer to wash themselves and send back.

We took bags to the green Grocers
Meat was wrapped in paper.

YANBU! Would also like to hear from any experts on the consumer changes that would make the most difference.

I like the idea of the washable/refillable detergent/shampoo etc bottles. But the trouble is we have too many brands and choices these days. When you could get refillables, there were probably far fewer choices. Now there would be eleventy billion giant bottles on the supermarket shelf to choose to fill up from.

But I think the real problem could be drinks. If the statistic above is correct (110 billion coca cola bottles), that probably at least doubles when you add all the Pepsi bottles. Many of the bottled water and other drinks will be owned by either Pepsi or Coca Cola (are there any other soft drinks giants like these two)? Schweppes? Or are they owned by one of the other two?

To make the maths easy, say there are 210 billion soft drinks bottles sold per year and there are 7 billion people, that's 30 per person per year.

No-one except a few hygiene obsessed Mumsnetters uses 30 bottles of shampoo/shower gel/washing up liquid/bleach per person per year so the majority of the single use plastic bottles are drinks so that's where efforts should be concentrated.

Use glass instead, deposit schemes, reusuable water bottles and water fountains (can you imagine the threads on here about the use of communal water fountains ).

But the trouble is that the companies that profit from these bottles are too big and too powerful and make too much money.

There is no interest in scaling back their operations, despite them selling a product that almost no-one actually needs. We could all completely boycott their products with little hardship.

Carry a reusable water bottle and/or a reusable coffee cup. Buy glass bottles and recycle them, where available.

There's another thread about new year's resolutions on here and I failed miserably at the usual lose weight, stay off Mumsnet, exercise more and eat less crap ones this year, but next year, 2018, for me is going to be 'Buy Zero Plastic Drinks Bottles'.

Also, I scuba dive, so will pick up as many as I can in the sea. I will be diving with turtles in Tenerife after Christmas and I don't want to see any of them tangled up in plastic.

Completely agree, OP.

We need to lead by example, and then get other countries on board.

I think multinational companies in countries like China, Philippines and Indonesia are responsible for 60% of plastics in Ocean, so it's key to get their buy in too.

The multinats have a huge part to play.

The only problem I can see (that I don't think anyone's mentioned yet?) is that lots of the plastic bags and bottles we use are biodegradable. This means that the bags can only be used for so long until they literally fall to pieces. Plastic bottles start contaminating the water after a while (talking about the Coca Cola etc bottles, not the water bottles you buy down the kitchen aisle in Asda).

So is it better to have biodegradable plastics with a shorter shelf life or non biodegradable plastics which you can reuse?

A million plastic bottles a minute worldwide apparently, which is over 500 billion a year, over 90% of which are not recycled.

www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/a-million-a-minute-worlds-plastic-bottle-binge-as-dangerous-as-climate-change

Use of bottled water in Asia is a big source. Perhaps it would help to ensure as many people as possible have safe tap water in their homes, that is cheaper than bottled water?

From an ocean pollution POV, all my single use plastics are either recycled or incinerated to produce power. I honestly can’t think of any occasion in the last year on which any single use plastic I’ve used could possible have ended up in the oceans making David Attenborough sad. I did accidentally buy a facial scrub with plastic micro beads a few years ago though, which is now long gone but that’s it.

Where I do fail the David Attenborough test is that I do sometimes wear artificial fibres, and I do wash them in the washing machine. Oops.

And of course the carbon footprint of all this stuff is a whole ‘nother problem.

It's a bit 'generational' too. DH and I always have a cotton hankie in our pocket but my late teen DDs think that cotton hankies (even though they go straight in the wash if used) are the grossest thing imaginable and that individually wrapped packets of tissues are essential and 'so much more hygienic'...

They also love single use kitchen roll, while I insist on using daisy cloths, a clean one each day (not as bad as my mum, who used to rip up our old pants and vests to make dishcloths - the original recycling queen).

YANBU. I am doing what I can, including not putting fruit and veg in a little plastic bag when at the supermarket (and not choosing prepacked when there is loose available).

I do get takeout on occasion, but never take a fork, and have asked (nicely - and had a good response back) that the various cafes don't automatically hand out plastic forks, but wait until people ask for them.

What StepAway said. There's been great reductions in packaging over the last 20 years, because there's better packaging round the final item so you don't need so many boxes, crates, larger pallets, etc protecting them. But the consumer only sees the final item and increased packaging there.

UK plastic will almost all either be recycled, possibly burnt to make energy (like coal or oil, just getting a use first), or landfilled - China is getting there with environmental policies apparently (centralised government being rather effective when it wants to be!), but India is now more of a problem, not to mention China offshoring heavy industry to Africa...

I try to simply use less stuff, and some of the useful items are plastic. I have a dedicated hippy friend who refuses to comprehend that sometimes plastic is a good solution, as her expensive cloth bags get soggy or filthy again and she needs new ones (cf a 10p Bag for Life that lasts as long...), the expensive mesh bags to put her fruit and veg in ditto, the wood or bamboo toothbrushes that can't be produced in bulk so will need much more packaging per item to ship to the UK. It's not easy to decide on the best solution.

Stepaway In the last gemeente we lived in, in Flanders, you paid for specific rubbish bags, at €40 for a roll of 20 large bags, so the more you threw out, the more you spent. The bags for recycling PMD (some plastics, metals and cartons) were cheaper. In the current gemeente, we have wheelie bins (and use black plastic sacks to contain the waste), but the general waste, and the veg/fruit/small garden waste is weighed and you are billed every so often for what you've thrown out. The paper/cardboard and PMD recycling is free, but you still pay for the PMD bags, the biodegradable ones for the green bin, and the pink ones for the single use plastic that they are beginning to recycle here as well, such as yoghurt pots, butter containers, and the stuff enveloping some magazines etc.

Whilst you don't pay a premium for plastic bottles you do for glass, but can get money back on the empties at the supermarket in the form of a voucher, or you can use the glass recycling points which are liberally dotted about.

None of the supermarkets sell single use bags now, it's bags for life, or cardboard boxes at the entrance for some places. There have been moves towards biodegradable packaging as well.

I don't know about the rest of Belgium, but Flanders seems to be way ahead at addressing these issues.