Why a coffee cup tax won't have the same effect as the plastic bag tax

I see in the i newspaper that the Lib Dems, with policies I increasingly find sad, are proposing a 5p tax on coffee cups (I assume they mean treated cardboard when they say 'plastic') to try to have the same effect as the plastic bag tax, which has reduced usage of single use carrier bags by about 85%. Unfortunately, I don't think it will work unless it's thought through a bit more.

The point is that the plastic bag tax works because people pay it explicitly and separately. If you use a bag you pay a visible fee. But a coffee cup charge will inevitably be absorbed into the price of a coffee because it's not really a separate item. You can't just have the coffee and not the cup. People won't notice it the same way.

Admittedly, there is a kind of way to have coffee without a cup, and that's to take your own cup in. Starbucks, for example, have a 25p discount on takeaway coffee if you do this. So they are effectively imposing a 25p disposable coffee cup tax - five times as much as that proposed by the Lib Dems. And certainly some people do take their own, but it's an inconvenient thing to do, compared with a carrier bag you can stuff in your pocket. Based on observation on visits to the chain, it's a tiny proportion of people who do - probably significantly less than 8.5% rather than 85%.

For this kind of action to deliver you have to do two things - make the tax visible and easy to avoid by doing the right thing, then to monitor alternatives to ensure you're not just shifting the problem elsewhere. The carrier bag tax has done the first of these, which is great. I haven't seen any reporting on the shifting of the problem, however, which is a little worrying. I know that when Ireland introduced a similar tax there was a surge in production of other types of plastic bag to cover situations where people had been repurposing carrier bags, so the actual reduction in plastic film going into the environment was significantly less than the apparent reduction by merely looking at carrier bag use. I've not seen any figures for this in the UK yet.

Environmental measures should not just be for appearance's sake. They need to deliver a benefit and to have a measurable impact. And I find it hard to believe that the 5p coffee cup tax would be anything more than greenwash.

This has been a green heretic production.

Comments

Why I hate opera

If I'm honest, the title of this post is an exaggeration to make a point. I don't really hate opera. There are a couple of operas - notably Monteverdi's Incoranazione di Poppea and Purcell's Dido & Aeneas - that I quite like. But what I do find truly sickening is the reverence with which opera is treated, as if it were some particularly great art form. Nowhere was this more obvious than in ITV's 2010 gut-wrenchingly awful series Pop Star to Opera Star , where the likes of Alan Tichmarsh treated the real opera singers as if they were fragile pieces on Antiques Roadshow, and the music as if it were a gift of the gods. In my opinion - and I know not everyone agrees - opera is: Mediocre music Melodramatic plots Amateurishly hammy acting A forced and unpleasant singing style Ridiculously over-supported by public funds I won't even bother to go into any detail on the plots and the acting - this is just self-evident. But the other aspects need some exp...

Murder by Candlelight - Ed. Cecily Gayford ***

Nothing seems to suit Christmas reading better than either ghost stories or Christmas-set novels. For some this means a fluffy romance in the snow, but for those of us with darker preferences, it's hard to beat a good Christmas murder. An annual event for me over the last few years has been getting the excellent series of classic murderous Christmas short stories pulled together by Cecily Gayford, starting with the 2016 Murder under the Christmas Tree . This featured seasonal output from the likes of Margery Allingham, Arthur Conan Doyle, Ellis Peters and Dorothy L. Sayers, laced with a few more modern authors such as Ian Rankin and Val McDermid, in some shiny Christmassy twisty tales. I actually thought while purchasing this year's addition 'Surely she is going to run out of classic stories soon' - and sadly, to a degree, Gayford has. The first half of Murder by Candlelight is up to the usual standard with some good seasonal tales from the likes of Catherine Aird, Car...

Is 5x3 the same as 3x5?

The Internet has gone mildly bonkers over a child in America who was marked down in a test because when asked to work out 5x3 by repeated addition he/she used 5+5+5 instead of 3+3+3+3+3. Those who support the teacher say that 5x3 means 'five lots of 3' where the complainants say that 'times' is commutative (reversible) so the distinction is meaningless as 5x3 and 3x5 are indistinguishable. It's certainly true that not all mathematical operations are commutative. I think we are all comfortable that 5-3 is not the same as 3-5. However. This not true of multiplication (of numbers). And so if there is to be any distinction, it has to be in the use of English to interpret the 'x' sign. Unfortunately, even here there is no logical way of coming up with a definitive answer. I suspect most primary school teachers would expands 'times' as 'lots of' as mentioned above. So we get 5 x 3 as '5 lots of 3'. Unfortunately that only wor...

Search This Blog