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skissane 13 hours ago

> There is still one country that uses leaded gasoline for personal cars.

That was true five years ago, but no longer-Algeria, the last country to allow it, banned leaded petrol in 2021 - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-58388810

tialaramex 10 hours ago | parent [-]

It's actually not clear to me in what sense "banned" is used here. The UK never formally "banned" leaded petrol. They banned sales of new cars which need it, and then later told places which sell petrol that they can only have a small portion of their fuel as leaded, and then (as anticipated) market forces did the rest.

AFAICT it would still be legal for the place on the bypass near me to sell leaded fuel but they don't because (a) the market is too small, not worth it and (b) as a result wholesalers don't offer the product, so if they wanted to sell it they can't get it anyway.

Symbiote 3 hours ago | parent [-]

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/1998/70/oj/eng

This EU directive banned the sale of leaded petrol in the UK on 1 January 2000.

tialaramex 32 minutes ago | parent [-]

Hmm. The thing is, EU directives aren't themselves law, or rather, in a sense they are but they're laws for the EU member states, telling them that they need to legislate to achieve this thing but without specifying how. The EU can write legislation which is binding on actual citizens, but it mostly writes directives, like this, which just tell the member states to do the legislating.

So, was this directive actually implemented by the UK before it left? Or did they go "Eh, we achieved the intended goal anyway, no action" ?

This way the EU doesn't have to worry about weird edge cases where the EU wants to control Foozling of Doodads but it turns out that in Poland ordinary people often Foozle their own Doodad at home and so their approach needs to consider individual citizens who want to Foozle a Doodad, but in Ireland that's crazy and you pay one of a few dozen Registered Doodad Foozlers to do it at scale, requiring a very different regulation to achieve the same goal.