I loath banning anything,Ireland brought in a tax and that cut usage by 90%. Tax first, then phasing out the bags if that dosent work.
Of course, educating British people not to throw bags away might help...lol
I appreciate your reply, thank you. I oftentimes find it interesting to compare the approaches to solutions for various social ills from different countries with different economic/political / social philosophies. On the issue of littering, we in the USA had a significant problem with that up until the early 1970's when penalties for illegal dumping and highway littering were dramatically increased.....I believe that the penalty for littering on the highway can be several hundred dollars or more, as I recall. Where I live in Washington State, it's also mandatory that motorists keep a litter bag in their car, and a person can be fined for not having one (although I haven't heard of this being a common fine that's been occupying the time of Police). Although hardcore environmentalists will of course argue that we still have a 'terrible' problem with highway littering here in the USA, I think that most people would say that things have gotten considerably better in that regard in the past 40 odd years. We also have various "adopt a highway" programs where businesses and civic groups can organize cleanup activities, and I think that some states even have prisoners doing that sort of work as well.
While there of course are always exceptions, it seems that oftentimes the solutions for various social problems in Europe and the UK will first lean toward a complete ban of an offending object in question which we Yanks might consider a "sledgehammer" fix to a problem where we might instead try to work toward changing a negative behavior toward a positive one either through fines or incentives, with an outright ban of a consumer commodity being 'usually' much further down the line, if deemed necessary.
Thanks for reply.
We are actually now adopting many of the US policies you mentioned: heavy fines for flytipping,sponsored litter bins.
We have considered fines for people who overload or misload the various types of refuge bins at home (ie put household rubbish in a ‘green’ garden refuge bin, or fail to put paper in the blue recycling bin-—most houses now have three bins: brown for regular rubbish, ‘green’ for garden rubbish and blue for recyclable material-—), but that caused a storm and the councils concerned may back off of that idea, as British people found the idea of fines over their own household/garden rubbish too draconian. Esp. as many penny pinching councils are cutting back on bin uplifts, some only doing it once every two weeks!.A health hazard in itself...
I like the car litter bag idea though, lazy idiots throwing cigarette papers and even worse out of cars on roads and motorways does happen here...