OT bags
 

On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 01:48:21 +0000, Bill Wright
wrote:
Given the minuscule
environmental impact of a plastic bag the individual should be allowed
to decide for himself.

The environmental impact of a single plastic bag is indeed minuscule.
However it is the totality of plastic bags that has to be considered.

Scaling up from the number of bags used annually in Northern Ireland
(300m) to the larger population of England there would be about 9,000
million single use carrier bags used in England each year.

A single use carrier bag weighs about 10 grams.

That means that the total weight of such bags used in England annually
would be 90 million kilograms which is nearly 100 thousand tons.

(I hope I have the calculations right.)

--
Peter Duncanson
(in uk.tech.digital-tv)

OT bags
 

Wymsey wrote:
On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 01:48:21 +0000, Bill Wright wrote:

That's a typical greeny 'we know best' argument. It's up to me to decide
what I find necessary in my life, not you. Given the minuscule
environmental impact of a plastic bag the individual should be allowed
to decide for himself.

And all the millions who cannot care a sod.

Shopping bags are so easily made of of scraps of material - just three
rectangles and two more to make handles, even a man could stop
pontificating for 10 mins and make one!

(space)

Faffing around unproductively like that is a waste of resources, and is
bad for the environment. The time and materials cost is transferred to
millions of individuals and thus goes uncounted, but it's still there.
It's like this business of making people sort their rubbish, which
wouldn't even be considered if the labour costs were carried by the
council and thus were countable. Likewise NHS A&E waiting times. If the
time wasted by the patients was to be costed and paid for the delays
would soon evaporate.

Bill

OT bags
 

Peter Duncanson wrote:
On Fri, 20 Dec 2013 01:48:21 +0000, Bill Wright
wrote:
Given the minuscule
environmental impact of a plastic bag the individual should be allowed
to decide for himself.

The environmental impact of a single plastic bag is indeed minuscule.
However it is the totality of plastic bags that has to be considered.

Scaling up from the number of bags used annually in Northern Ireland
(300m) to the larger population of England there would be about 9,000
million single use carrier bags used in England each year.

A single use carrier bag weighs about 10 grams.

That means that the total weight of such bags used in England annually
would be 90 million kilograms which is nearly 100 thousand tons.

(I hope I have the calculations right.)


(space)

Sounds impressive until you divide it by 60 million.

The UK consumes 445 million cans of baked beans every year. That's about
2 million kilos of steel for just one grocery item. Are you going to ban
baked beans, all tinned food, or what?

The UK uses enough rubber johnnies every year to reach to Mars if they
were placed end to end and stretched a bit. When discarded they contain
enough sperm to make all the semolina served up in school dinners in the
whole country.

Bill