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No more plastic bags...


Lanzalad

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I have just come from Macro.

When you buy your fruit...veges...chicken...pork..etc…...plastic bags are still available to put your purchase in before you head to the checkout...free.

The sale of plastic bags for use at markets...food vendors .. garbage bin liners..... plastic cups...straws....etc...are still for sale.

At the checkout.... Macro never supplied bags for your goods free or even boxes for that matter ...you had to bring your own or you could purchase plastic bags with the Macro logo on them.... these are still available for sale.

cheers

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On 1/6/2020 at 3:50 AM, Toy Boy said:

Probably.

My Christmas present to several cousins back in the UK was a large bag of plastic straws (over 1000 in a pack) bought in Makro here that I took back with me.

They love them, as all the woke supermarket chains in the UK now only sell paper straws, which simply don't work.

I've warned them, though, that if they want more they should ask me now as it's quite possible by the end of the year they'll no longer be sold here either.

Have you seen this before.. ?

Plastic straws should be banned world wide ..

 

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Even up here in Buriram no more free plastic bags in any supermarket, be it 7/11, Tesco lotus or mini BigC.

We just bring a cloth bag or big shopping bag and put everything in there like we are used to doing back home. 

Imo it's a great and well overdue development. 

Of course you'll still get a plastic cup, straw and bag when buying your iced coffee but let's not try to boil the ocean shall we. 

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39 minutes ago, mrcharliemofo said:

The 7-11 near my house are still giving out plastic bags but with no branding on them plus they take them out of a drawer now whereas before they were on the counter ?

We're reverting to the old days when Playboy magazines and condoms were kept out of public view so as to not insult our delicate sensibilities.

 

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53 minutes ago, code_slayer_bkk said:

I stopped into a coffee shop yesterday ... they gave me a paper straw ... I asked for a plastic one they told me "no have" ...

I said - f**k it and left with the full cup of coffee on the counter ....

Who the hell drinks their coffee through a straw?

Whenever I purchased any beverage for immediate consumption, even ten years ago, it was

my ow tung, my ow lort.

 

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2 minutes ago, forcebwithu said:

We're reverting to the old days when Playboy magazines and condoms were kept out of public view so as to not insult our delicate sensibilities.

 

Yeah, those were the days, sneaking into the Gents at the Pub to buy condoms and being scared to complain if it took your money and gave nothing back.

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Another few years of the goody-twoshoes brigade getting their way and you'll have to beg the bloody shopkeeper to get you a bottle of beer from under the counter, lol.

But no, seriously...

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7850467/Former-drugs-Tsar-PROFESSOR-DAVID-NUTT-calls-orders-national-epidemic.html

What's your POISON? It's Britain's deadliest drug, costs the NHS billions and shortens our lives, yet alcohol is legal. Former drugs Tsar PROFESSOR DAVID NUTT calls last orders on a national epidemic

Now a new decade has begun, everyone is making resolutions to go to the gym, stop smoking and eat less chocolate. But above all else I would advise all of you to look at your relationship with alcohol — and to cut back.

As I argue in my new book, alcohol has the most profound effect on our physical and mental wellbeing and we should be encouraging everyone to drink less.

After all, Boris Johnson gave up drinking it during the election and my advice to him would be to have all MPs breathalysed before they cast votes in the Commons.

Alcohol, I’m sorry to report, is the chief substance that oils the wheels of our government. In the Palace of Westminster alone, there are nearly 30 places to drink, all subsidised.

Numerous MPs have admitted to at least getting merry while on Commons business, while some have been roaring drunk. One member described being too intoxicated to walk through the voting chambers.

And all this matters, because even relatively modest amounts of alcohol impair a person’s judgment.

One main reason is that the part of the brain that keeps you in control — the frontal cortex — is the first part switched off by booze. Not desirable when MPs are discussing matters of national importance.

That’s not all alcohol can do, of course. As a doctor, I’ve devoted most of my professional career to studying its effects on the brain and the body, and I’ve co-written three scientific reports that all came to one devastating conclusion.

Alcohol is by some margin the most damaging drug of all. Why? Because of the harm it does to society as well as to the individual — with taxpayers inevitably picking up the huge bill. Similar studies have been carried out since, in Europe, and Australia, each with the same outcome.

In the UK, we’re particularly keen on drinking — so keen that our alcohol consumption has nearly doubled since the Sixties. According to the Global Drug Survey, Britons get drunk an average of once a week, and one in ten of us are drunk on five or more days a week.

A staggering 10.8 million of us drink at levels that pose a risk to our health. Indeed, alcohol is now the leading cause of death for men aged between 16 and 54, cutting life short for around 30,000 people a year.

Alcohol is also the reason policing public drunkenness costs us more than £6 billion a year. It’s why the costs to the NHS are over £3 billion.

Did you know that in the past half-century, deaths from liver disease in the UK increased fivefold? Or that up to half of all people in beds in orthopaedic wards are there because of alcohol-related injuries?

Alcohol is a poison — and over the past 20 years, scientists have been learning a lot more about the havoc it wreaks on the body. Think you’re safe having a couple of glasses each evening? Read on.

A couple of years ago, we discovered that just a single drink a day increases the risk of breast cancer. Even light to moderate drinking raises your risk of developing an irregular heartbeat (cardiac arryhthmia), which can make you feel faint, short of breath and potentially lead to a stroke.

Most people still think the chief danger from drinking too much is cirrhosis of the liver. It isn’t: the biggest killers associated with alcohol, we learn, are strokes and heart attacks. After that come various liver diseases and at least eight different types of cancer.

Drinking also causes brain damage: at least one in five cases of dementia, it’s thought, is probably due to alcohol.

What’s frankly terrifying, though, is that a large 30-year study found evidence of faster cognitive decline in people who drank only up to seven units weekly, than in teetotallers. That’s the equivalent of having two large glasses of wine plus a small shot of spirits in a week.

Don’t think you’re a safe driver if you’re under the legal limit of 80mg blood alcohol level (which allows a man to drink roughly four units, or two pints, and a woman three units or a large glass of wine.) A 2010 government report concluded that if your blood alcohol concentration is between 50mg and 80mg, you are up to six times more likely to die in a collision than if you’d drunk nothing at all.

It gets worse: having alcohol in your blood has an even greater impact on whether you die as a result of a crash.

You may think having just one pint of beer for the road is perfectly all right, but even that is doubtful.

New neuroscience research from Sussex University found that one pint can compromise your road safety. Your co-ordination may not be affected, but you’ll have an exaggerated feeling of being in control of the car — and overconfidence can be dangerous.

There’s another mistake a lot of people make: they think it’s OK to drink a bit more on holiday. It’s not. If a woman drinks five units a day (less than three standard glasses of wine) for just two or three weeks, she has five times more risk than a teetotaller of developing a fatty liver — the first stage of serious liver disease. For men, it’s eight units a day.

You may think you’ll be fine if you follow the UK chief medical officer’s advice to drink no more than 14 units a week. And if you stick to these levels (roughly two pints of beer or two glasses of wine a day, spread out over three days a week, with days off in between), your risk of dying due to an alcohol-related condition is only around one per cent. But any more than that, and the risks rise disproportionately.

One study concluded that having a couple of drinks on more than four days a week raises the risk of premature death by 20 per cent.

And a recent report from the European Commission concluded that drinking any more than two units a year increases your risk of cancer, although the increased risk is very small. That’s just one pint of low-strength lager!

Hang on — what about all those studies that apparently showed benefits from drinking a daily glass or two of red wine? Sorry to disappoint, but a 2018 review of all the evidence — published in the leading medical journal, The Lancet — concluded that any partially protective effect on the heart is more than cancelled by negative effects, such as raised risk of cancer.

Let me put it this way: If alcohol had been discovered in the past year or two, it would be illegal. The safe limit, if you applied current food-standards criteria, would be one glass of wine a year.

Would you take a new drug if you were told it would increase your risk of cancer, dementia and heart disease, or that it shortened your life? You wouldn’t touch it.

Yet over the past 50 years, alcohol has become entrenched in our lives. We drink for social bonding. We drink together to clinch business deals and come to agreements. We drink to celebrate the birth of a child, to commiserate with each other when someone dies. We drink because we’ve had a stressful day at the office, because we’re feeling anxious or just because it’s Friday.

When a nephew turned 18, I went to buy him a birthday card. I counted 23 cards for 18th birthdays before I found one that didn’t focus on alcohol. What kind of message is that for a young person?

Alcohol used to be a special purchase: you had to go to an off-licence or the pub — during limited hours — to buy it. Now it’s so easy to buy that many of us just chuck it into our supermarket trollies.

We’re now the sick man of Europe. Take the drink-driving limit, for example, of 80mg blood alcohol. It hasn’t changed since 1967, thus leaving the UK with one of the highest drink-driving limits in the world. In most of Europe, the level is 50mg. Norway and Sweden, among others, have lowered it to just 20mg, which effectively allows for a dab of alcohol in a pudding.

Some countries have gone much further, adopting successful policies to curb other damage caused by alcohol. The consequences in France are impressive.

Back when I was a medical student, it was rare to see someone in a UK hospital with alcoholic liver cirrhosis. But not in France, which is why we called it the French disease. Now, however, French cirrhosis rates are lower than the UK’s. This is because the French did a detailed analysis of drinking in the 1980s and realised it was a serious health issue.

So they tackled some key areas. A law was passed to ban most alcohol advertising on TV and in cinemas, and all alcohol ads aimed at young people. All alcohol sponsorship for cinemas, sporting events and festivals was also stopped.

Every label now has to carry the words: ‘Alcohol abuse is dangerous for health.’ Restrictions have been placed on happy hours. No alcohol can be given away free. The drink-driving limit has dropped to 50mg.

On top of that, the French government priced out cheap alcohol by pressuring the industry to make quality wine — so that now the French are consuming half of what they used to drink, there’s been a dramatic reduction in road fatalities, and deaths from liver cirrhosis have dropped by half.

In stark contrast, UK death rates over the same period nearly tripled as our alcohol consumption nearly doubled. Meanwhile, the price of alcohol had tumbled to a third of what it cost in 1970.

Yet the French policies even turned out to be a win-win for the wine industry, because there’s more profit in making quality wine. And that’s despite the fact that people drink less of it.

As someone once said to me, ‘I’ve never seen anyone get drunk on a 1961 Château Latour.’

So WHY haven’t we adopted any of these sensible policies? Because the Government makes so much money from taxes on alcohol. That is short-term thinking. The fact is that when you add in the costs of alcohol to society, there’s a net loss to the Exchequer.

These are: £3.5 billion annually on health; £6.5billion for policing drunkenness; £20 billion for lost productivity through hangovers. That comes to £30 billion.

Add in other factors such as alcohol-related costs to social care, the criminal justice system and the fire services, and the cost zooms to £55.1 billion. Taxation of alcohol raises about £20 billion a year. So that leaves a net deficit of up to £35 billion.

Successive governments have been perfectly aware of this. But they’ve been loath to change anything because the income from taxation is immediate — with the alcohol industry paying up quarterly. The Treasury view is that if anyone started meddling, tax income would plummet while the health benefits wouldn’t be evident for ten to 20 years.

Again, they’re wrong. Some of the health savings would be immediate — such as having to spend a great deal less in alcohol-related policing costs. And think about A&E on a Friday night: if it were only half full, you wouldn’t need so many nurses and doctors.

Plus if you could reduce someone’s consumption of cheap cider from, say, two litres a day down to one, he could then be treated more cheaply in a normal ward, rather than in intensive care. This is because the risks of dying get disproportionally higher the more you drink.

Indeed, I’d argue that we need to go much further than France, starting by taxing drinks on the amount of alcohol they contain.

At the moment, the duty system doesn’t make sense. Why should the tax on cider containing 10 per cent alcohol be one-third that of a wine of the same strength? All that does is encourage the consumption of strong ciders.

We should also cut the availability of super-cheap booze, and stop supermarkets using discounted offers on alcohol as loss leaders. On what planet does it make sense for a poison to be sold at less than the price of water?

Children need to be educated at primary school about the dangers of alcohol. We should also repeal the licensing law so pubs once again shut up shop at 11pm, close the Government’s wine cellar and stop the subsidy of alcohol in Parliament. (Unlikely that MPs will call time on that particular perk!)

And we should follow Scotland’s lead in introducing a minimum price per unit of 50p. At the time the law was passed last year, more than half of all alcohol was being sold below this price level — mostly to teenagers and alcoholics

There are already promising signs that the amount drunk in Scotland is decreasing.

Come on, Boris, you know it makes sense. One of your predecessors, David Cameron, supported minimum unit pricing and set up a committee in 2010 to bring it about.

Unfortunately, his government also decided the group should be made up of 50 per cent health experts and 50 per cent representatives of the drinks industry.

At first, there was an attempt to work together. But all the health experts resigned in 2011, after industry representatives blocked all suggestions of compulsory policies, such as minimum unit pricing.

Clearly, it was impossible to be objective when half the committee was linked to the industry causing the problem.

That committee is defunct. In fact, there isn’t a single body in Britain that’s empowered to argue the case for sensible alcohol policies. And that, I fear, is a tragedy for us all.

Adapted by Corinna Honan from Drink? The New Science Of Alcohol And Your Health by Professor David Nutt, published by Yellow Kite on January 9 at £16.99. © 2020 David Nutt. To order a copy for £13.59 (20 per cent discount) go to mailbookshop.co.uk or call 01603 648155. Offer valid until January 11, 2020, p&p is free.

 

Edited by Toy Boy
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@Toy Boy,

Hey mate, the fact that you guys can't control your drink is an internal UK problem. You could all drink yourself to death, it wont impact the climat change or state of the oceans !

Different issues.  And dont start to blame it on Brussels and EU ...... We Europeans stand our drink ! 🤣🤣🤣🤣😄😄😄

 

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51 minutes ago, Toy Boy said:

Another few years of the goody-twoshoes brigade getting their way and you'll have to beg the bloody shopkeeper to get you a bottle of beer from under the counter, lol.

But no, seriously..

I pretty much hate all politicians, for me issues boil down to whether they are a good or bad idea.

Single use plastic is wasteful and easily avoidable. How difficult is to bring out a a "bag for life", I've got stacks of them, eventually you do remember😀

The UK really should (but never will), have a sensible look at it's policy on drugs, with alcohol  assessed as part of the bigger picture. It will never happen as any pragmatic discussion always get lost when the voice of the Daily Mail kicks in.

 

Edited by Lemondropkid
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9 hours ago, code_slayer_bkk said:

I stopped into a coffee shop yesterday ... they gave me a paper straw ... I asked for a plastic one they told me "no have" ...

I said - f**k it and left with the full cup of coffee on the counter ....

Why do you need ANY sort of straw?

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On 1/9/2020 at 12:33 PM, Esco said:

Even up here in Buriram no more free plastic bags in any supermarket, be it 7/11, Tesco lotus or mini BigC.

We just bring a cloth bag or big shopping bag and put everything in there like we are used to doing back home. 

Is it plastic bags themselves, or the sale of plastic bags, which is banned?

In other words, if you took your own plastic bag, would that be an issue?

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1 hour ago, Bazle said:

Is it plastic bags themselves, or the sale of plastic bags, which is banned?

In other words, if you took your own plastic bag, would that be an issue?

Re-usable plastic bags are available next to the till at Villa, for 5b.

If I get a chance and feel rich tomorrow I'll buy something and a bag to put it in... and photograph it. 

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