Panic buying of petrol

[Raider4]

Aye. It's always fun to walk around town on the coldest day of the year, counting how may shops have permanently open doorways with the heat pouring out.

My lifetime of energy saving wasted in two minutes flat, probably.

[toxicpixie]

Leon - I think the problem with this is the misdirection that we constantly see.  Industry is far and away the biggest culprit for almost all aspects of environmental damage but they are never reined in as money is more important.

I remember speaking to a guy in the sewage industry a few years back when they sent out all of those little kits for saving water in the home (putting a brick in your toilet cistern, boiling one cup of water at a time, etc).  He said that those things are helpful in a sense but when you've got industry wasting millions of gallons of water annually, or sewage systems that are draining into the water table because it's cheaper to pay the fine than fix the problem, you're always skirting around the real problem.  Until governments enforce legislation and fines that are actual punishments, nothing will really change.  They'll just keep pointing at the public and tell us to use a different lightbulb or clean our baked beans tin before we put it in the recycling.

This, so much this. Water use/loss at home is utterly insignificant compared to industry waste and indeed supplier negligence losing huge amounts before it even gets to us.

Same goes for virtually everything, and that's now compounded by pushing the issue as a "consumer problem", which shifts the cost away from the repsonsible agencies and onto you (us), AND means we make very little headway against the loss and waste (but at least profits stay artifically high!).

Parts of Glasgow have a  lower life expectancy than North Korea.

It's OK, the bonfire of regulation and break up of the public good at fire sale prices means we'll all be joining them soon! On the plus sie our now declining life expectency means we won't have to fund pensions so much. Win-win! /sarcasm

[mmcv]

Yeah 100% agree, even if every individual followed all the advice it would still be the proverbial urination in the ocean compared to what a few small changes from multinational industries would make. The use of single use plastics being a huge one that keeps shifting the blame to the consumer when they consumer has very little choice in the matter, doubled with the confusion over what can be recycled and where (and how much actually is vs being shipped to somewhere else in the world to pollute their lands).

The amount of microplastics in our bodies and diets is shocking.

Not to mention the pollution produced by the plastic industry, of which there are only really a couple of multinationals running it all.

Just completely unnecessary to shroud everything in throwaway plastic. Even the whole plastic bag tax ends up being as bad since the "bags for life" (assuming life means about five uses max) have more plastic in them so when thrown away are pretty much as bad as the old flimsy ones.

So plastic production is one of the biggest causes of emissions (something like the equivalent of 50 million cars) in the production side and one of the biggest pollutants from a waste perspective.

[Orcs]

Petrol in a diesel car is OK as long as it's less than 50% and you can fill the rest of the tank with diesel.  I've made that mistake a couple of times and it'll run rough for a few days while you work through the petrol but afterwards it's fine again.  It doesn't half clean out your engine as well!

Depends on the car. It was fine years ago but with a modern Turbo Diesels (certainly my old 2007 Mondeo) if you actually turned the engine over with the petrol still in the tank you were looking at £1000's replacing large parts of the system.   

[Leon]

Depends on the car. It was fine years ago but with a modern Turbo Diesels (certainly my old 2007 Mondeo) if you actually turned the engine over with the petrol still in the tank you were looking at £1000's replacing large parts of the system.   

Maybe, I've done it twice in my 2014 Nissan and both times my mechanic told me to go fill it to the brim with diesel and it's been completely fine thankfully.  It didn't sound great for a day or two while the petrol worked through!

[FierceKitty]

Just completely unnecessary to shroud everything in throwaway plastic. Even the whole plastic bag tax ends up being as bad since the "bags for life" (assuming life means about five uses max) have more plastic in them so when thrown away are pretty much as bad as the old flimsy ones.

Cloth shopping bags are pretty common here by now.

[Ithoriel]

My "bags for life" are, all but one, still going strong 60 - 80 shoppings later.

[Steve J]

Well I set out for the weekly shop as normal in our car to ASDA, only to find a big queue, even at 6.30am, to the point that you couldn't even see if you could drive up the wrong side of the road to get into the store. So turned around and came home. SWMBO wisely pointed out that I could have parked across the road in another shopping centre, but this didn't occur to me!

So set off on foot and got there and there was still a queue. Once in the store it was like a ghost town. Chatting to the staff they have had problems getting in themselves, problems with deliveries arriving or their vans leaving and far too much abuse from drivers. Apparently the petrol pumps don't open until 7.00am and they had started queueing before 6.00am.

At least when I left the store things had started to ease, but this was before the school run had kicked in. So panic buying is still occurring round here in Bristol .

[mmcv]

Cloth shopping bags are pretty common here by now.

Yeah we have a few that we use but they're far from common here, as the plastic bags are only a few pence so most people won't blink at paying.

My "bags for life" are, all but one, still going strong 60 - 80 shoppings later.

Are these ones you've picked up from the supermarket? Some last longer than others to be fair but I find most tend to wear down and start tearing at the seams fairly quickly. I don't generally shop in the supermarket that often to be honest so hard to say how long they'd last on regular heavy use.

[toxicpixie]

I never remember enough (any) bags... but the extras are very useful for the debris from the chicken coop cleaning out, generally storing things, and passing the outlaws paper, chocolate & liquroice deliveries in of a weekend

Some are more "for life" than others...

Steve J - I went to local Tescos last night on the way to the club and filled up fine, bit busier than a normal Wed evening but not hugely so. Diesal and E10, no high octane special. The day before I saw a queue down one of the big dual carriages into B'ham that must been... several hundred metres long? So... even five miles apart and 24 hours makes it a complete crap shoot, I think! Especially as half my club mates were having trouble and the rest, like me, just... filled up.

[Steve J]

It does seem to be a bit of a lottery as to where you can or cannot get fuel easily. Said ASDA is just off the ring road so a convenient place for people to try and fill up.

[toxicpixie]

It does seem to be a bit of a lottery as to where you can or cannot get fuel easily. Said ASDA is just off the ring road so a convenient place for people to try and fill up.

NO WHERE HAS PETROL!!!

Translated - where I could be bothered to go to whilst panicking and where everyone else has just also tried to mob has no petrol....

[Raider4]

Low petrol light came on yesterday. Went to filling station @ 09:15 this morning, straight in, bought my usual 32 litres, straight out.

[Ithoriel]

Are these ones you've picked up from the supermarket? Some last longer than others to be fair but I find most tend to wear down and start tearing at the seams fairly quickly. I don't generally shop in the supermarket that often to be honest so hard to say how long they'd last on regular heavy use.

They've not been needed for 18 months or so as I get a weekly delivery from Tesco at the moment but before that the three main bags were in use once or twice a week for around two years. One stiff fabric and two thickish plastic. Cosmetically a little worn but otherwise intact.

[toxicpixie]

Fabric ones usually last well, but the plastic "bags for life" are somewhere between bulletproof and fall apart if you sneeze wrongly depending on which chain does them, I find!