Perhaps they can stop ripping off their customers as well?
They have introduced a new clubcard pricing system which means you are penalised heavily for not having one. To have one you have to opt into data collection.
We're not talking small price disparity here. Between 30%-50% more expensive on some product lines for not having a clubcard.
Edit: to be clear that is 30-50% more expensive than the baseline prices for the same items in other stores.
No way, Waitrose is incredibly expensive everywhere I lived compared to Tesco, Sainsbury's, and Asda. Up there with M&S. But I guess it also depends on your typical basket...
Stick to the Essential lines and it's fine. The quality is also better than the generic fake brand crap that Tesco sell and it's the same price or better. Waitrose essential baked beans for example are waaaay better than any others.
I only really live around a Tesco & Sainsbury's, so I was under the impression that generally the 'non-clubcard' prices were more or less in-line with competing supermarkets for most items? Is this wrong? My only other frame of reference really is Sainsbury's which I've known to overprice things anyway.
I've just stopped buying anything that displays a Clubcard price. It's pesky but doable for now. That may change, of course; I don't see them getting much pushback on this so I expect them to keep doubling down.
A non-Tesco supermarket is going to be a priority next time I move.
Very annoying, but if you want to play the game you can use the app on your phone to sign up and give completely false details (name, address etc). Nothing is posted to you so the false address isn't an issue. And you have the satisfaction of polluting their database with garbage.
Or you could just shop somewhere else, but that is a worse option in my case.
I certainly wouldn't install an app to go shopping at a specific store to obtain specific advantages.
No company deserves loyalty through a scheme like this. Only through decent customer service and reasonable pricing.
As for shopping elsewhere, yes. I use Asda now which does not require a loyalty card to get the discount prices and is generally cheaper and better stocked despite being smaller here.
The cynic in me feels like they wouldn’t care. The deal they have with your phone provider allows them to identify you by the phone you signed up with. The deal they have with Amazon facial recognition let’s them identify you with the cameras you walked past every time you go in the store. The deal they have with the state let’s let track where your license plate was seen this month. And of course they have what they want which is the card in your pocket giving them all of your purchases in one easy column.
By not using clubcard, you're leaving money on the table even before the "clubcard prices" were introduced. The whole scheme is basically a cashback mechanism on your purchases.
Like another poster said, if you're worried about privacy/data collection/spam, just sign up with false details. Now days, everything is done through the app so you can get all the benefits without using a real identity.
As for the app, I don't want my phone polluted with even more crap. If I had a corporate loyalty app for every shop I wanted to go in, I'd have a hundred apps, a hundred data collection problems and a flat battery. Instead I have one called Apple Pay which works everywhere..
I'd argue 1% isn't so bad in itself, but it works out to far more than that using the various bonuses and vouchers etc.
Personally I find the Sainsbury's scheme (Nectar) better overall, however. All the "vouchers" that multiply your points are applied automatically through the app, rather than having to goof around with scanning barcodes as in the Tesco app.
I haven't worked out my exact spend at Sainsbury's this year, but it was probably less than £1000. From that I had enough nectar points to buy £100 worth of wines in a recent promotion, and I still have plenty left over... (points, that is. Most of the wine is gone, haha)
For what it's worth, you can install the Clubcard app, add your Clubcard to Apple Pay from within the app, then uninstall it and the card will stay in Apple Pay.
If you do this you also need to be sure to pay with cash, or other anonymous cards, because they’ll also link your payment details if I recall correctly (perhaps not this brand, but most others will).
Yes, retailers can and do link/track purchases against card numbers. But this is true regardless of whether you're a member of a loyalty scheme or not.
Also, if you use Apple Pay / Android Pay, a device account number (DAN) is generated that is different from your physical card number. I'm not sure whether retailers get a name from such a transaction, but I suspect they just get the card number?
I'm normally very careful about my privacy, but I have to say this is one case where I really couldn't care less that they're collecting this data. At least I'm getting rewarded monetarily for it.
I'm not familiar with U.K. retailers, but these are common at grocers in the U.S. The collected data makes stock purchasing more efficient. Is there any evidence that personal data is monetized in any other way?
> The collected data makes stock purchasing more efficient.
Why does the data need to be personally identifiable for this? Is there a reason a store can't look at total sales volume for a particular product & figure out how many more units to order?
Reasoning for storing any data outside of a GUID is so you can recover your account or key it in manually in lieu of swiping the card. Phone numbers are associated with the card here. You can punch in your number to the payment pad and leave your membership cards at home/throw them away.
Total sales volume doesn't get the same accuracy of individual shopper habits. I'm not in this sector so somebody else can correct me. Knowing what products each customer tends to buy during cold/flu season or a holiday or some opaque reason allows them to predict demand rather than react to overall trends and current stock amounts. If their data model knows that a small group of heavy purchasers of an item haven't purchased the item recently and are expected to visit the store soon, that demand can be anticipated. If a customer moves, then purchasing habits can be automatically planned for at the new store they begin shopping at rather than waiting for their sometimes infrequent purchasing habits to affect sales at the new and old locations.
What I often fail to see mentioned in these kind of articles, is if the removal of plastic introduces some other method of packaging that is even less environmentally friendly (edit: with more carbon emissions).
For example in The Netherlands they banned free plastic bags, so now gift and clothes stores give a free paper bag. Paper bags need to be a lot heavier to offer the same strength.
They calculated that such a paper bags needs to see 15+ reuses to become more environmentally friendly, which is unrealistic seeing how fast they break. Recycling also favors plastic bags. The only upside is that paper bags are better biodegradable in the environment and don't spread microplastics around.
The solution for this particular problem is, of course, that free paper bags should also be banned.
> The only upside is that paper bags are better biodegradable in the environment and don't spread microplastics around.
I think this is quite important. Even if the majority of people were well intentioned and re-used plastic bags, they shed micro plastics during use, eventually they fail and even if you recycle them, there's no guarantee they won't be sold off with other recyclable waste and then dumped or burned.
I mostly agree, but burning / pyrolysing plastic is not a bad outcome for 'recycling' oil into energy if properly done at scale (including emissions filtering) for electricity / district heating.
That's understandable because the tire is a fast moving object coming in contact with a rough surface, but your average plastic bag? The wear that a plastic bag experiences is absolutely tiny by comparison. Your mousepad/table/keyboard probably experiences more wear than all your plastic bag use combined.
And samonella causes 25,000 hospitalizations per year in the US, should we ban chicken as well? Multiplying any tiny number by 7 billion will get you a big number. What matters is how big it is relative to everything else. If plastic shedding from plastic bags accounts for 0.01% of the global microplastic pollution, then there's no real point going after it.
The crazy thing is yeah, we should probably halt meat production. You’re right, multiplying 7 billion by anything is a big number. You’re getting it. It’s sort of inevitable right?
People living to the limits, in the here and now, gambling they’ll be childless and dead by the time any of this shit matters.
>we should probably halt meat production
We honestly need a great reset so we can turn around our counties and stop all this harmful behavior. A government with full control is the only real way forward.
I'm not quite sure what "more environmentally friendly" means in this context (CO2?), but the plastic bag ban is explicitly made to reduce plastic waste and micro-plastics, not for other environmental factors.
Carbon emissions from manufacturing plastic bags isn't really an issue either. The content of the bag will usually have a much higher carbon footprint (and if it doesn't, probably you wouldn't need a bag for it). If that is the price to pay to reduce plastic pollution it's a fair trade off.
While it is an issue, I'm afraid it'll be one that will encourage capitalism to pounce on it. There is plenty of water, it's just that it becomes more expensive if there is a shortage, compared to e.g. just pumping it up from the aquifer.
There are other way for styrofoam cup to pollute ocean. Plastic disposal or recycling method used to (maybe still are) simply exported to or become a landfill. It will eventually degraded to micro-plastic, which follow water-flow and end up in ocean.
But the most critical thing right now is CO2 reduction. I think that anything that causes a net increase in CO2 production can be labeled as environmentally friendly. It’s all hands on deck. If we can’t get our CO2 under control, this just becomes rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic
Plastic alternatives are also heavier and bulkier. More trucks are needed to ship the same product. Plastic is in fact the best environmental choice in many cases. Even single use plastic. The current zeitgeist regarding plastic is nothing more than a repeat of the 1920s alcohol prohibition. A moral panic not based on facts.
The solution to plastic in the ocean isn’t to ban plastic in the West but to build out trash management systems in Asia and Africa. The only thing the war on plastic does is raise emissions and accelerate climate change.
Is banning them really the solution? People need to be able to carry their stuff. If plastic bags are the best option, thats just the physical reality of the situation. Arbitrarily banning things left and right isn't going to fix that.
I live in a municipality which banned the bag years ago. I wasn't thrilled but honestly the difference is a negligible annoyance. You use paper, reusables or do without. It's fine.
You can't ban all bags, but you can ban free bags. Like, charge $0.25 for each bag and use the proceeds to clean up microplastic waste in your jurisdiction. It's basically a tax on plastic bags.
The current market price of plastic bags doesn't reflect the externalities of using them willy-nilly and throwing them out.
While in Germany it has helped to increase the amount of foldable bags we carry around, latest surveys just show a large majority doesn't care about having to pay such kind of taxes.
What matters is whether the revenue from plastic bag sales actually goes into the cleanup effort, offsetting the externalities. If it doesn't, then the whole policy is a sham. If it does but the revenue is not enough, the price tag should increase until it accurately reflects the true cost.
Increasing the cost to well above pocket change might have the welcome side effect of making people care more, but IMO that's a secondary concern.
This argument could be used against the ban of asbestos. One of the factors that makes plastic bags the "best" option is externalized costs. Killing sea life and whatever the effects of microplastics collecting in our bloodstream are not included the price.
We should probably just charge/tax for "throw away" bags (paper or plastic) and move people towards bags that are actually reusable over a long period of time.
We use sturdy hemp bags for our groceries. They cost $1.50 or something like that and last for years. And it's hemp, so it should degrade like other natural fibers.
The UK recently required a 5p charge for plastic bags. As far as I'm aware this has seen an excellent reduction in usage (even that tiny incentive is enough to make customers grab a bag from home instead of being lazy) and hasn't induced a switch to paper bags.
I'm not so sure it's been any good. What's actually happened is supermarkets have replaced the thin plastic bags with far thicker plastic bags. While sales of plastic bags has went down, considering the ones that are sold are vastly thicker, I'm not really sure if there's been a net decrease in plastic use by weight.
This seems like a positive outcome to me - thicker plastic bags are more durable, can be reused for longer etc., so while there may still be the same amount of plastic "being used", more of it is presumably plastic that has been used before, and so less ending up in landfill?
The big issue has been with the labelling for these thicker bags. The marketing term has been "Bag for Life" - but the goal of that term was that this bag could be replaced for free at the supermarket so that they could be recycled properly.
In reality, very few people understood the setup and people have instead been treating them like the usual disposable plastic bags that just happen to cost a bit extra.
People would generally re-use the so-called "single use" thin, free plastic bags as bin liners and are now instead getting much thicker plastic bags and buying additional (also thicker) bin liners which are certainly single-use.
Is it a net win? I'm not convinced. It's definitely great PR, for everyone involved.
Disclaimer: I used to work for an environmental political party which very much supports this plastic bag tax.
Anecdotally - I've mostly stopped using plastic bin liners in the smaller bins where I could previously have reused carrier bags from shops. Rubbish goes in the bin directly & that gets tipped into wheelie bin periodically. Slightly limits what I put in these smaller bins (essentially, dry stuff only - anything wet goes in larger bin that always required a purchased bin liner anyway), but otherwise impact is minimal.
Dry waste doesn't get a bin liner for me either, but being on this thread implies you are unusually engaged with the issue.
There are definitely negative externalities (whether that's paper bags, or bin liners, or food spoilage, etc!) that are entirely ignored when people in general talk about the benefits of the plastic bag tax. We don't know whether there has been any net benefit because that has not been properly studied.
As an example, the UK government has tied the plastic bag tax to charity donations (but supermarkets were promoting charitable donations before any bag tax...?) and accepts self-reporting of sales by supermarkets (not amount of plastic consumed? and "bags for life" are not reportable!!), which makes it complete non-sense https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carrier-bag-charg...
How is this? I thought the economics of plastic recycling is pretty poor with bags being one of the worst offenders. Why are recyclers reluctant to accept them?
For a lot of the same reasons they are a hazard to wilderness. They are hard to control because the blow about. They wrap and tangle about things. They carry contaminants which are difficult to wash away.
When California enacted their bag bans, I shifted a lot (more) of my purchasing to Amazon. If you really want retailers to make it even more inconvenient to shop at a brick and mortar, beware the consequences.
Environmentally friendly is not measured on one indicator. Perhaps in terms of energy-intensity, paper is higher than plastic. But energy use of store bags is relatively negligible anyway, not to be ignored but also not a grave threat. But in terms of the spread of plastics and biodegradability, a one-time paper bag is certainly better than a one-time plastic back, and not quite as negligible in its impact.
Further, the vast majority of plastic bags have not been replaced by paper bags, but by people's own bags. For example in supermarkets there's an 80% decrease in use of plastic bags since pricing them in the Netherlands (Dutch but google translate works fine): https://nos.nl/artikel/2325519-tachtig-procent-minder-plasti...
Besides, if plastic is being replaced by paper, it simply shows incentives work. If paper is also undesirable, the next step is not to reintroduce free plastic bags, but to introduce pricing for paper bags just the same.
Honestly I don't see how this argument pops up in every single discussion on plastic bag reduction every time...
>Environmentally friendly is not measured on one indicator. Perhaps in terms of energy-intensity, paper is higher than plastic. But energy use of store bags is relatively negligible anyway, not to be ignored but also not a grave threat. But in terms of the spread of plastics and biodegradability, a one-time paper bag is certainly better than a one-time plastic back, and not quite as negligible in its impact.
The problem here is that increased energy use applies to every bag used, whereas the concern about biodegradability only applies for bags that are mismanaged. A plastic bag that's buried in a landfill or burned in an incinerator is a non-issue, and most (almost all?) bags end up properly disposed.
>Besides, if plastic is being replaced by paper, it simply shows incentives work
Is it? The parent commenter said that plastic bags were banned, not that they were taxed.
> Honestly I don't see how this argument pops up in every single discussion on plastic bag reduction every time...
Well, it wasn't an argument about plastic bag reduction. It was an example in an argument about omissions in reporting about plastic reduction efforts. The example is clearly valid, even if you consider other metrics to be more important in the example. It probably didn't help that I initially put "environmentally friendly" in there mindlessly.
I also clearly stated my opinion about the solution to this, which doesn't involve lifting the ban.
I would take a guess paper bags have more plastic particles in than most plastic bags...
Many paper bags are made of recycled materials which likely already have a lot of plastics. The recycling process grinds them up into microplastics. Then ink and glue is added (more microplastics).
It's good to mistrust corporations doing green things for PR, but if your objections ultimately trace back to talking points from climate change denying or minimizing media, then you've probably been conned by the very corporations you're trying to be vigilant about.
The solution which I've seen implemented at a couple of stores in the US is to not offer a bag at all. You can either BUY a cloth bag or bring your own. The cloth bags seem to be sturdy enough to last for decades unless you're being ridiculous and filling them with 50lbs of canned goods.
Another way of looking at it is, marketing influences consumers so much stronger than reality does, so the obvious answer - buy less - gets muddied by people cycling through non solutions because it is more profitable.
I like that they aren't just cutting plastic blindly. They are doing things to make that plastic easier to recycle when its needed. Currently in the US, it seems as long as your package is hypothetically recyclable you can stamp it with the logo regardless of the burden it places on the user or recycling company.
Not sure if another country has this but I've often wished we had better recycling information on packaging that was driven by recyclers practical experience. It would be nice if companies could put a distinct logo on their package if it was immediately recyclable (aluminum cans) vs requiring some disassembly (cracker boxes with plastic sleeves) vs virtually unrecyclable (soft plastic wrapping around moist foods).
>Currently in the US, it seems as long as your package is hypothetically recyclable you can stamp it with the logo
I know it's logo consists of the "recycling symbol", but the logo you're talking about is supposed to tell you what type of plastic it is[1], not whether it's hypothetically recycleable.
Interesting. Although, now that it has become the ubiquitous logo to identify recyclables (moron in a hurry principle), they should probably recycle it accordingly.
In the US, the foggy plastic milk jugs and cleanish number 1 and 2 bottles are the only plastics that are worthwhile to recycle, so there isn't really all that much use in more sophisticated markings.
People say this implying that there is something about the material which makes it inherently "worthwhile" and that's just not true anymore. Recycling has advanced quite a bit and these days what makes things not "worthwhile" to recycle can have as much to do with how they are designed and disposed as with the utility of the underlying material.
A cottage cheese tub is made from recyclable plastic but it's not "worthwhile" for a recycler to collect them if they aren't rinsed. Cardboard is useful but moreso if flattened. Though not at all if a plastic liner is still glued inside.
I encounter people all the time not knowing if a thing is recyclable and if so how to prepare it. The worst part is that people often even put extra effort into recycling but because they don't understand how the recycler consumes the items they actually harm the recycler with improper disassembly.
You could have one icon for things like pop cans and milk jugs which are recyclable without modification. Similarly, there could be icons for compound packaging. You might have a symbol that means a box must have a plastic liner removed and the box be flattened. The important thing is consistnecy.
People might even begin to shift their shopping habits towards products that came in easy to recycle packages. But consumers can't even really index on that currently because they have to get pretty educated on their local recycler's practices to know this.
Recycled polypropylene isn't particularly marketable is what I meant. It's worthless, even when it is clean. From the POV of the recycler, it's an unwanted byproduct of collecting #1 and #2 bottles.
And it's pretty much the same story for every other plastic I did not explicitly mention in my other comment.
Mandates banning bad packaging would do more than trying to train consumers.
> From the POV of the recycler, it's an unwanted byproduct of collecting #1 and #2 bottles.
From the wikipedia article linked above.
"When many plastics recycling programs were first being implemented in communities across the United States, only plastics with RICs "1" and "2" (polyethylene terephthalate and high-density polyethylene, respectively) were accepted to be recycled. The list of acceptable plastic items has grown since then"
> Mandates banning bad packaging would do more than trying to train consumers.
A ban would be great. I think it's not politically feasible on a large scale in the U.S.
If you click through to the recycler that the wiki article cites, they aren't wildly explicit about it, but they only want plastic bottles (the ones made with 1 and 2 plastic).
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] threadThey have introduced a new clubcard pricing system which means you are penalised heavily for not having one. To have one you have to opt into data collection.
We're not talking small price disparity here. Between 30%-50% more expensive on some product lines for not having a clubcard.
Edit: to be clear that is 30-50% more expensive than the baseline prices for the same items in other stores.
A non-Tesco supermarket is going to be a priority next time I move.
Or you could just shop somewhere else, but that is a worse option in my case.
No company deserves loyalty through a scheme like this. Only through decent customer service and reasonable pricing.
As for shopping elsewhere, yes. I use Asda now which does not require a loyalty card to get the discount prices and is generally cheaper and better stocked despite being smaller here.
/s.....hopefully
Like another poster said, if you're worried about privacy/data collection/spam, just sign up with false details. Now days, everything is done through the app so you can get all the benefits without using a real identity.
As for the app, I don't want my phone polluted with even more crap. If I had a corporate loyalty app for every shop I wanted to go in, I'd have a hundred apps, a hundred data collection problems and a flat battery. Instead I have one called Apple Pay which works everywhere..
Personally I find the Sainsbury's scheme (Nectar) better overall, however. All the "vouchers" that multiply your points are applied automatically through the app, rather than having to goof around with scanning barcodes as in the Tesco app.
I haven't worked out my exact spend at Sainsbury's this year, but it was probably less than £1000. From that I had enough nectar points to buy £100 worth of wines in a recent promotion, and I still have plenty left over... (points, that is. Most of the wine is gone, haha)
Also, if you use Apple Pay / Android Pay, a device account number (DAN) is generated that is different from your physical card number. I'm not sure whether retailers get a name from such a transaction, but I suspect they just get the card number?
Why does the data need to be personally identifiable for this? Is there a reason a store can't look at total sales volume for a particular product & figure out how many more units to order?
Total sales volume doesn't get the same accuracy of individual shopper habits. I'm not in this sector so somebody else can correct me. Knowing what products each customer tends to buy during cold/flu season or a holiday or some opaque reason allows them to predict demand rather than react to overall trends and current stock amounts. If their data model knows that a small group of heavy purchasers of an item haven't purchased the item recently and are expected to visit the store soon, that demand can be anticipated. If a customer moves, then purchasing habits can be automatically planned for at the new store they begin shopping at rather than waiting for their sometimes infrequent purchasing habits to affect sales at the new and old locations.
We can't know how data will be manipulated as future technology is developed.
For example in The Netherlands they banned free plastic bags, so now gift and clothes stores give a free paper bag. Paper bags need to be a lot heavier to offer the same strength.
They calculated that such a paper bags needs to see 15+ reuses to become more environmentally friendly, which is unrealistic seeing how fast they break. Recycling also favors plastic bags. The only upside is that paper bags are better biodegradable in the environment and don't spread microplastics around.
The solution for this particular problem is, of course, that free paper bags should also be banned.
I think this is quite important. Even if the majority of people were well intentioned and re-used plastic bags, they shed micro plastics during use, eventually they fail and even if you recycle them, there's no guarantee they won't be sold off with other recyclable waste and then dumped or burned.
they do? I thought most of the microplastic pollution is from plastic that made it into the ocean and are broken down by the sun?
People living to the limits, in the here and now, gambling they’ll be childless and dead by the time any of this shit matters.
0.01 > 0
We need to stop thinking production and use of plastic is inevitable.
Except in the times & places that it is (i.e. times/places with water shortages)
The average styrofoam cup used at a cafe or event isn't going to end up in the ocean, unless the cafe/event is next to the ocean.
The solution to plastic in the ocean isn’t to ban plastic in the West but to build out trash management systems in Asia and Africa. The only thing the war on plastic does is raise emissions and accelerate climate change.
GP was talking about banning paper bags I believe
The current market price of plastic bags doesn't reflect the externalities of using them willy-nilly and throwing them out.
Increasing the cost to well above pocket change might have the welcome side effect of making people care more, but IMO that's a secondary concern.
We use sturdy hemp bags for our groceries. They cost $1.50 or something like that and last for years. And it's hemp, so it should degrade like other natural fibers.
Unfortunately relying on the general public to be sensible and considerate is doomed to failed, so we get the stick rather than the carrot.
In reality, very few people understood the setup and people have instead been treating them like the usual disposable plastic bags that just happen to cost a bit extra.
People would generally re-use the so-called "single use" thin, free plastic bags as bin liners and are now instead getting much thicker plastic bags and buying additional (also thicker) bin liners which are certainly single-use.
Is it a net win? I'm not convinced. It's definitely great PR, for everyone involved.
Disclaimer: I used to work for an environmental political party which very much supports this plastic bag tax.
There are definitely negative externalities (whether that's paper bags, or bin liners, or food spoilage, etc!) that are entirely ignored when people in general talk about the benefits of the plastic bag tax. We don't know whether there has been any net benefit because that has not been properly studied.
As an example, the UK government has tied the plastic bag tax to charity donations (but supermarkets were promoting charitable donations before any bag tax...?) and accepts self-reporting of sales by supermarkets (not amount of plastic consumed? and "bags for life" are not reportable!!), which makes it complete non-sense https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/carrier-bag-charg...
How is this? I thought the economics of plastic recycling is pretty poor with bags being one of the worst offenders. Why are recyclers reluctant to accept them?
Further, the vast majority of plastic bags have not been replaced by paper bags, but by people's own bags. For example in supermarkets there's an 80% decrease in use of plastic bags since pricing them in the Netherlands (Dutch but google translate works fine): https://nos.nl/artikel/2325519-tachtig-procent-minder-plasti...
Besides, if plastic is being replaced by paper, it simply shows incentives work. If paper is also undesirable, the next step is not to reintroduce free plastic bags, but to introduce pricing for paper bags just the same.
Honestly I don't see how this argument pops up in every single discussion on plastic bag reduction every time...
The problem here is that increased energy use applies to every bag used, whereas the concern about biodegradability only applies for bags that are mismanaged. A plastic bag that's buried in a landfill or burned in an incinerator is a non-issue, and most (almost all?) bags end up properly disposed.
>Besides, if plastic is being replaced by paper, it simply shows incentives work
Is it? The parent commenter said that plastic bags were banned, not that they were taxed.
I said free plastic bags are banned. So they are 'taxed' by the store instead.
Well, it wasn't an argument about plastic bag reduction. It was an example in an argument about omissions in reporting about plastic reduction efforts. The example is clearly valid, even if you consider other metrics to be more important in the example. It probably didn't help that I initially put "environmentally friendly" in there mindlessly.
I also clearly stated my opinion about the solution to this, which doesn't involve lifting the ban.
Many paper bags are made of recycled materials which likely already have a lot of plastics. The recycling process grinds them up into microplastics. Then ink and glue is added (more microplastics).
Not sure if another country has this but I've often wished we had better recycling information on packaging that was driven by recyclers practical experience. It would be nice if companies could put a distinct logo on their package if it was immediately recyclable (aluminum cans) vs requiring some disassembly (cracker boxes with plastic sleeves) vs virtually unrecyclable (soft plastic wrapping around moist foods).
I know it's logo consists of the "recycling symbol", but the logo you're talking about is supposed to tell you what type of plastic it is[1], not whether it's hypothetically recycleable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resin_identification_code
People say this implying that there is something about the material which makes it inherently "worthwhile" and that's just not true anymore. Recycling has advanced quite a bit and these days what makes things not "worthwhile" to recycle can have as much to do with how they are designed and disposed as with the utility of the underlying material.
A cottage cheese tub is made from recyclable plastic but it's not "worthwhile" for a recycler to collect them if they aren't rinsed. Cardboard is useful but moreso if flattened. Though not at all if a plastic liner is still glued inside.
I encounter people all the time not knowing if a thing is recyclable and if so how to prepare it. The worst part is that people often even put extra effort into recycling but because they don't understand how the recycler consumes the items they actually harm the recycler with improper disassembly.
You could have one icon for things like pop cans and milk jugs which are recyclable without modification. Similarly, there could be icons for compound packaging. You might have a symbol that means a box must have a plastic liner removed and the box be flattened. The important thing is consistnecy.
People might even begin to shift their shopping habits towards products that came in easy to recycle packages. But consumers can't even really index on that currently because they have to get pretty educated on their local recycler's practices to know this.
And it's pretty much the same story for every other plastic I did not explicitly mention in my other comment.
Mandates banning bad packaging would do more than trying to train consumers.
From the wikipedia article linked above.
"When many plastics recycling programs were first being implemented in communities across the United States, only plastics with RICs "1" and "2" (polyethylene terephthalate and high-density polyethylene, respectively) were accepted to be recycled. The list of acceptable plastic items has grown since then"
> Mandates banning bad packaging would do more than trying to train consumers.
A ban would be great. I think it's not politically feasible on a large scale in the U.S.
https://www.rumpke.com/docs/default-source/default-document-...
There's not pictures of random plastics, and they aren't asking for yogurt tubs by name.