[Closed] The 5p bag charge....

But you can re-use a carrier easily, not so much a tin can...

50p deposit on every energy gel sold.

Granted johndo, flashy - I'm staying out of that one!

Just really hacked off with litter these days. Selfish, lazy ****s.

Pretty much all of the items you have mentioned can be recycled?

Exactly.

Except the cardboard coffee cups.

I don't understand why they don't bring back deposits on drink bottles.

They do it in Germany.

Pretty much all of the items you have mentioned can be recycled?

Just really hacked off with litter these days. Selfish, lazy ****.

Humans are litter. Just think about it. Someone throws an empty drinks can onto the ground.......the ground that has had lots of ugly tarmac thrown onto it by someone else already.

What gives someone the right to say one is worse than the other?

A drinks can, that's not even permanent....tarmac on the other hand; that's like God's scribbled all over our planet with a giant permanent marker pen, but not in a good way.

Think about how beautiful the planet would look without us.

50p deposit on every energy gel sold.

There is an idea. Maybe they should be tagged upon sale to the buyer !

Yes the bag tax works as it has all over Europe. The reality is its an easy one as it saves the shops money as they no longer provode free bags so they are good with it. Also we now have to buy small bin bags as we used carriers before. As for the OPs list yes I'd go with all of that plus;

Box tax on mail order - a few quid a box and paid by size
Cut down flashy packaging on things like ready meals
Things in boxes - why does a toothpaste tube have to come in a box (because its easy to stack on a shelf) ?
....

@nickjb - You couldn't really do the 5p charge though, if I go into a shop and buy a couple of items, I generally just carry them. You couldn't do that with any of the items listed.

In Finland they have recycling machines for plastic bottles, glass bottles and cans, you feed them in and get euros back. Bloody great idea.

In Finland they have recycling machines for plastic bottles, glass bottles and cans, you feed them in and get euros back. Bloody great idea

In this country we have bins, but lots of folk don't use them, how would you get them to use a recycling machine?.

[quote=Nobeerinthefridge ]So.... Do we stop there?
Disposable coffee cups that apparently we have no way of recycling at present?
Takeaway food containers?
Plastic water bottles
Alu cans (specifically energy drinks what da yoot iz drinkin)

The trouble is, nobody's going to reuse their disposable coffee cups, takeaway shops aren't going to be selling takeaway containers for life and nobody will be refilling their drinks cans.

You don't get any money back from putting them in a bin, you with the machines in Finland.

The trouble is, nobody's going to reuse their disposable coffee cups, takeaway shops aren't going to be selling takeaway containers for life and nobody will be refilling their drinks cans.

They have machines in every supermarket here in Germany for you to recycle and get your deposit back (glass beer bottles, too but usually at the bigger ones that have a separate drinks department ). Apparently it's been a raging success as the supermarkets are making a fortune by selling on the plastic and aluminium. Win win for everyone.

Coffee cups.. follow the Norwegian model. You buy a travel mug for life, and then a lid every year and you get free coffee all year at service stations. Really good way of doing it.

I don't understand why they don't bring back deposits on drink bottles.

Yep if there was a 50p deposit on all drink bottles even if selfish muppets still slung them out of car windows they wouldn't stay there for very long, kids or anyone who needed a bit of cash would soon collect them. 5 quid for 10 bottles would be very attractive.

Any drink not sold in a returnable bottle could have a 50p tax slapped on them. I have no doubt that would dramatically reduce demand and any tax collected could pay for litter clearance teams.

Sooner or later something needs to be done so it might as well be sooner rather than later.

Maybe I should have written almost nobody. I'm not sure a 5p charge is going to make a difference to the behaviour of most people spending £3 or £4 on a coffee. I'm guessing that when you carry your mug around you're not buying your coffee from a chain shop? I also carry a drinks bottle around and refill it, but then I don't buy water in plastic bottles.

In Finland they have recycling machines for plastic bottles, glass bottles and cans, you feed them in and get euros back. Bloody great idea.

There's a thing like that on the uni campus where I work. I think it prints a voucher (worth pennies) to spend in the college shop.

Starbucks already sell reuseable coffee cups and give a discount is you use them.

I sometimes get my travel mug filled in Nero, but it then takes me about 2 hours before I can drink it as they make it so hot!

Think about how beautiful the planet would look without us.

Much of the planet would be covered in forest, which gets pretty bloody dull after a while! Humans have many downsides but their habit of deforestation isn't always bad. Certainly Great Britain was just trees, trees and more trees before we turned up.

You don't get any money back from putting them in a bin, you with the machines in Finland.

I've seen people fling money away because they couldn't be bothered dealing with some change from a shop. Money back from a recycling machine would be great for those of us who already do bother to recycle but not sure it would make one bit of a difference to the scum out there who litter.

Lapdance vouchers?

They should stop selling bottles of piss too, lorry drivers only drink half of them before lobbing them onto the verve (autocorrect left in there)

Certainly Great Britain was just trees, trees and more trees before we turned up.

Sounds good, more trees would be great.

Humans have many downsides but their habit of deforestation isn't always bad. Certainly Great Britain was just trees, trees and more trees before we turned up.

And what's wrong with trees ? They're bloody useful if you're a squirrel.

In Finland they have recycling machines for plastic bottles, glass bottles and cans, [b]you feed them in and get euros back.[/b] Bloody great idea

In this country we have bins, but lots of folk don't use them, how would you get them to use a recycling machine?.

I've seen people fling money away because they couldn't be bothered dealing with some change from a shop. Money back from a recycling machine would be great for those of us who already do bother to recycle but not sure it would make one bit of a difference to the scum out there who litter.

I don't see that education really works, particularly for school kids who are the worst offenders IME.

Just really hacked off with litter these days. Selfish, lazy ****.

Aye. Older generations just ****ed one off into a copy of Razzle and discarded it into the otherwise pristine hedgerow.

Razzle was very much recyclable tho.....

Aye. Older generations just **** one off into a copy of Razzle and discarded it into the otherwise pristine hedgerow.

Kids these days have it too easy. No longer are they thrilled to find a sun faded page of byway bongo. The thought of footpath filth is anathema to them. One click on their phone or tablet and it's straight to it.

Actually, in all seriousness, I think there's something in this. Finding a copy of Mayfair (Yeah, I was always that classy!) back in the day showed you little more than pretty girls scantily, yet classily, dressed and then undressed. Hitting up the interwebz gets you straight to some nasty, nasty stuff. I know which I'd prefer my son to find.

Our blue recycling bin is emptied every week and a chip records the weight. Vouchers are then redeemed based on weight recycled. Seems a good idea. Except what do most people recycle? Milk bottles. Two kilos of water has more value that an empty bottle 😉

I always carry a coffee cup. A decent reduction when buying would be very welcome. 10p would make no difference. 50p would start a revolution. I like that Norwegian idea a lot.

Coffee cups should have a big charge, 50p or even a £1. People would quickly bring their own, in fact Starbucks etc would give them away. Job done.

When I was working in the States 25 years ago on a summers day in central park a guy would walk round with drinks in a bag of ice. 20 mins later another guy would come to collect the empty can. Capitalist solution, the deposit on the can meant they where collected. Simple.

based on weight recycled.

I like that Norwegian idea a lot.

It's a national obsession because they have no space for landfill sites.

The weekly bin collection is the size of a supermarket carrier bag as everything must be re-used or re-cycled. Even down to crockery, you can't throw away your odd plate when you get a new set, it has to go to the government run shops (like charity shops), had a baby, tough shit you've got to use washable nappies, etc.

It does help that:
a) the shops and products are geared up for this, you can leave packaging in supermarkets (which then forces the shops to cut down on packaging as they have to then pay for it's disposal and people don't want to spend their time doing it).
b) it's cold, which means anything paper is burnt in the fire at home.

Imagine the uproar in this country if people were told their annual waste had to fit in a wheelie bin? There's uproar if it's limited to that much in 2 weeks!

Can we put a massive tax on individually wrapped items too? e.g. a single apple on a polystyrene tray, covered in clingfilm.

Reduction in packaging should be the first step!

birky - Member

There's a thing like that on the uni campus where I work. I think it prints a voucher (worth pennies) to spend in the college shop.

We have that too- or you can donate the 10p to charity too, which apparently loads of people do. Nice touch but the machines are pretty big and seem a bit unreliable.

Some genius festival organiser started charging a 20p deposit on beer glasses a few years back. Course, everyone still threw their cups on the floor but an underclass soon emerged that'd happily spend £200 for their festival ticket then spend all day collecting cups.

Late stage capitalism in action but it did mean less mess (and less toxic reading festival cup fires)

Some genius festival organiser started charging a 20p deposit on beer glasses a few years back. Course, everyone still threw their cups on the floor but an underclass soon emerged that'd happily spend £200 for their festival ticket then spend all day collecting cups.

Reading and Leeds (and I'd assume most big festivals) do this.

Yup, it was Reading I first saw it at. Which made sense because the cramped festival ground always ended up looking like a landfill site

It's a quid a cup at Twickenham matches. You can get it back if you queue up.

You see kids roaming around with stacks of discarded cups.

Disposable coffee cups that apparently we have no way of recycling at present?

This is something someone really needs to get on Waitrose back about as their free tea and coffee is going through a lot of these.

I was arguing with waitrose CS earlier in the year about their insistence to use black plastic for things like tomatoes, chicory etc. They kept sending back the same crap I already knew about black pigments blocking the plastic type detection and how companies had spent a lot of money trying to develop a pigment that wouldnt block it. When I suggested that the simple answer was just to stop using black plastics they were just ignored it and sent back the same "we are trying to cut our waste, new black pigments etc etc"

I need to send them a follow up email telling them we have now switched to Aldi out of protest. That might kick them into action 😉

There is definitely less litter here in Germany than in the UK... 10 or maybe even 20 Cents for a bag (you easily get into the habit of taking your own bag) and up to 25c deposit on plastic bottles.

A flip side to the bottle deposit is that you see normal looking, well dressed "professional" bottle collectors rummaging through bins, which is a little sad. The positive is that if you can't be arsed carrying your empties home from the park/river you can pile them up knowing they will be gone by the morning.

Some genius festival organiser started charging a 20p deposit on beer glasses a few years back. Course, everyone still threw their cups on the floor but an underclass soon emerged that'd happily spend £200 for their festival ticket then spend all day collecting cups.

UK is now better than recycling than most of Asia so that is something to be happy about.

Still there is more that can be done I think financial incentives is the way to go, give people 5p discount for using their own travel cup rather than taking paper cup, weigh and pay people for their plastic and metal recycling etc.

I spent 3 years putting in a bit of effort separating and setting aside my bigger bits of stainless steel and aluminium. I ended up with about 30 kilos of Aluminium. I knew it wasn't worth much but I thought it was also me doing my little bit rather than wasting it on landfill, but when I took it to local scrap merchant they wouldn't even take it, they said they only take copper and stainless, so the Aluminium ended up in landfill!

I think charges for packaging is excellent, I wish fast food places would do it too.

There is a supermarket in Germany that has no packaging, you take your own Tupperware in and take what you need like a giant pick and mix store.

Measures like the 5p bag charge are a drop in the ocean of what needs to happen. Major changes in behaviour are required if our grandchildren are to thrive. Unfortunately, miserable baby boomers are running things now and the 5p charge looks like the best we'll get for a while.
Having a bag for life (often made by super low wage workers in the third world then shipped over here, leaving a decent carbon footprint behind it) ensures only that you'll be going to hell with a dumb, self satisfied smile on your face.
Until we get a grip of how we package, consume and waste products, no meaningful progress will be made. All this involves both major behaviour changes on the part of the consumer (unlikely) and potential damage to corporate profits (never gonna happen).

[i]I wish fast food places would do it too.[/i]

McDonalds should give a discount for people who bring their packaging back for recycling. Free shitty hamburger for each bag returned or something. Anything which would help stop the scumbags chucking them in the street.

Surprised that the 2p bag charge has done well, actually. The staff in my local Tescos always seem very surprised when I say I have a bag.

All packaging is waste. It should be law for it to be recyclable.

[url= http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/oceans-plastic-fish-2050_us_569e9963e4b00f3e986327a0 ]heard this story on the radio today.[/url]

Sad Monday fact 🙁

All packaging is waste. It should be law for it to be recyclable.

And recycled, and of the absolute minimum amount required. Don't understand why this isn't already the law.

take your own mug to Starbucks

McDonalds should give a discount for people who bring their packaging back for recycling. Free shitty hamburger for each bag returned or something. Anything which would help stop the scumbags chucking them in the street.

I think it was on here that we discussed a machine that reads your car reg at the drive through with ANPR and quickly prints it to all the packaging and the bag going into your order. Of course it is used so the staff make sure you get the right items but also when your waste is found dumped in a layby 👿

Or your a code linked to your debit card if walking in and paying by card.

Litter and non-recyclable packaging drives me mad. My partner and I do make an active decision of what goes in our trolley based on the packaging and will put things back on the shelf if we feel it's excessive and overly un recyclable.

Unfortunately everything you can do as an individual at home feels like a drop in the ocean. We are designing our new house to have as much natural materials as possible and be as environmentally friendly but then you see what is going one elsewhere in the country and world and you just feel like you are wasting your time. Quite depressing.

Some genius festival organiser started charging a 20p deposit on beer glasses a few years back. Course, everyone still threw their cups on the floor but an underclass soon emerged that'd happily spend £200 for their festival ticket then spend all day collecting cups.

We affectionately refer to them as Wombles.

I'm all for them working to help fund their stay. Some are a bit mercenary though, they'll have your cups without asking if you're not careful. Generally a minority though.

Or you could just re-use proper bags 🙄

We've got lots of fabric ones we've had for many years, but our favourites are plastic bags from a German supermarket which we bought over 5 years ago.

The biggest change with the 5p thing here in Wales I think was the fact that they stopped automatically handing them out. So if you have three or four items, you ended up carrying them in your hands.

And for all those whining about 5p - remember it goes to charity. £22m raised in Wales as of last year. Hard to complain about that, don't you think?

It hasn't all worked.

Ocado still do home delivery in plastic bags. They charge you 5p and then credit it when you return bags.

I have complained but got no where fast !

It must make the security dudes' job harder- I'm always forgetting bags and doing the Juggle of Shame or packing stuff into my pockets or down my jacket like a shoplifter...

We hated the 5p charge when it first came! So much so we went and bought a load in bulk from a wholesaler in protest HA!

Lots of people have reusable water bottles, coffee cups and more anf the world still turns. It's also a damm sight better that using the wrong thing for the job.

All packaging is waste. It should be law for it to be recyclable.

This. In Manchester we've just had the size of our general waste (grey) bins downsized.

However, given that we already recycle everything we can and that the rest of the packaging can't be recycled (yoghurt pots, plastic trays from meat etc.) we're now stuck with a bin that will easily be filled over the 2 week collection period. I fear a lot of dumped waste in alley ways etc.

£10 deposit on every cigarette butt....

Measures like the 5p bag charge are a drop in the ocean of what needs to happen. Major changes in behaviour are required if our grandchildren are to thrive. Unfortunately, miserable baby boomers are running things now and the 5p charge looks like the best we'll get for a while.
Having a bag for life (often made by super low wage workers in the third world then shipped over here, leaving a decent carbon footprint behind it) ensures only that you'll be going to hell with a dumb, self satisfied smile on your face.
Until we get a grip of how we package, consume and waste products, no meaningful progress will be made. All this involves both major behaviour changes on the part of the consumer (unlikely) and potential damage to corporate profits (never gonna happen).

This x 1,000,000

We've developed a global economy where it makes financial sense to manufacture our consumer goods halfway across the world from where they are consumed, and then ship them. Then we feel all smug with our artisan knitted shopping bags bemoaning all that nasty pollution being created in Asia. And of course with the bag tax, we all feel like we're "doing something" to help. It's railings for the war effort all over again*

*If anyone is unaware, most of the Victorian railings removed to "help the war effort" sat around for a while and then were quietly dumped at sea. Even when it was clear that the railings weren't being used in anything like the quantities being collected, collection continued because the communities losing their railings had a morale boost from helping the war effort - I guess a summary of the feeling might be "we're all in it together"

I'm sure that when I first became interested in what used to be called "green" issues, the mantra was "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", and not "still buy the same amount of stuff and then throw away a lot of it"...

5p a carrier bag?

50 small bin liners, costs about £1.

A snip at under half the price of a carrier!

Neither are recyclable.

And for all those whining about 5p - remember it goes to charity. £22m raised in Wales as of last year. Hard to complain about that, don't you think?

Only goes to charity if its a normal style bag. Supermarkets are sneaky round my way. They hide the 5p normal ones away out of sight and only put out bag for life ones which are between 6p to 9p. They get to pocket the cash for these ones themselves.

The shops don't have to give the 5p to charity. The government 'suggest' that is donated to good causes, but they can do what they like with it.
I think most of the big supermarkets give it to charity in some way.

Coming from Eastern European background where there is no shop that gives you free bags, I was amazed at some shops. It felt cool for a bit, knowing I don't have to worry about a bag. A bit later, I started to hate it. No, I don't need 3 bags for 3 items (like milk, eggs and meat). Yes, I am sure I will be okay with one!

I was really happy about the 5p charge. I love the food bins being provided too as I now can dispose food separately. Same with dry recyclables.

Supermarkets are sneaky round my way.

Still £22m though.

take your own mug to Starbucks

There are already enough mugs in Starbucks. Usually hipster dickheads drinking overpriced coffee.