William of Ockham risks legal action over exclusivity rights to bring us this story about carrier bags: In Australia, most states/territories, with the exception of New South Wales, have banned supermarkets from giving away single use plastic bags with shopping. In … Continue reading
This from the BBC is a surprisingly balanced and informative article on plastic use: Located in the south Atlantic, on the fringes of the Antarctic, it is nearly 1,000 miles (1,500km) from the nearest major human settlement. Yet even here … Continue reading
Ocean plastic a ‘planetary crisis’ booms the UN. Life in the seas risks irreparable damage from a rising tide of plastic waste, the UN oceans chief has warned. Lisa Svensson said governments, firms and individual people must act far more … Continue reading
I now return to my second favourite niche blog topic after polyamory: carrier bags! A friend points me towards this article as proof that banning carrier bags is not just a wealthy, middle-class hobby-horse. Let’s see, shall we? Kenyans producing, … Continue reading
One of the reasons why I think the whole climate change alarmism is, well, alarmism is because the obvious solution is almost always dismissed out of hand. If climate change is occurring and it is due to humans releasing too … Continue reading
This is the post I know you’ve all been waiting for! Further to my previous two posts on carrier bags, I now have something more to add. Back in August I said that my local supermarket had stopped providing free … Continue reading
I can’t believe I’m going to write a second post on carrier bags, let alone in the same week as the first, but that’s blogging for you. Tim Worstall did me a solid and linked to my piece over at … Continue reading
As with seemingly a good portion of my newly-acquired knowledge, I first heard about Chesterton’s Fence over at Tim Worstall’s blog. Chesterton’s Fence is the principle that reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of … Continue reading
Now there’s a surprise: Sales of “bags for life” rose to 1.5bn last year as the amount of plastic used by supermarkets increased to 900,000 tonnes, Greenpeace research has found. … Many supermarkets have stopped selling 5p single-use bags altogether … Continue reading
Via a reader on Twitter, an academic paper on one of this blog’s favourite subjects, the effectiveness of banning single-use plastic bags. Here’s the abstract: Leakage occurs when partial regulation of consumer products results in increased consumption of these products … Continue reading
