Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.
Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.
Rebecca Pow, the minister for environmental quality and resilience, said the policy had “helped to stop billions of single-use carrier bags littering our neighbourhoods or heading to landfill”.
“Both the deposit return scheme and new rules to make plastic producers contribute to clean-up costs, which formed the key planks of the government’s waste strategy, have been delayed until 2025.
“There’s obvious context here, which is that they reannounced the success of the single-use plastic bag ban on the same day that they unveiled a hugely destructive plans for 100 new oil and gas licences.”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Environmental campaigners have called on the government to learn from its own successes after official figures showed the use of single-use supermarket plastic bags had fallen 98% since retailers in England began charging for them in 2015.
Annual distribution of plastic carrier bags by seven leading grocery chains plummeted from 7.6bn in 2014 to 133m last year, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) said on Monday.
Rebecca Pow, the minister for environmental quality and resilience, said the policy had “helped to stop billions of single-use carrier bags littering our neighbourhoods or heading to landfill”.
“Both the deposit return scheme and new rules to make plastic producers contribute to clean-up costs, which formed the key planks of the government’s waste strategy, have been delayed until 2025.
“There’s obvious context here, which is that they reannounced the success of the single-use plastic bag ban on the same day that they unveiled a hugely destructive plans for 100 new oil and gas licences.”
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