David Miliband, the environment secretary, told the BBC on Sunday that throw-away carrier bags would become a thing of the past within a few years.
To say that the past few years have had a few disappointments is an understatement, especially when you think back to the way CableCARD support was implemented and how poorly the Extenders have been supported.
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Then there is investment banking, where a lot has been spent in the past few years building a business from scratch.
"There's still more to do be done in terms of services and infrastructure but the economy has grown and security has improved a lot in the past few years, " says a Ramallah resident, Hussein.
Australia's miners have enjoyed a boom period over the past few years, fuelled by a surge in demand from Asia, especially China.
He has suffered a number of injuries over the past few years, most notably a rotator cuff problem in 1997, and does not think his body is capable of meeting the demands of five-day cricket on a regular basis any longer.
But that is a hard point to sustain, given that the past few years have seen a worldwide recession and modest recovery.
"Over the past few years a lot of the expertise that was there has been drained away, " says Ms Wright.
In the past few years a handful of firms, such as Definity, Lumenos and HealthMarket, have sprung up to serve this market.
But for all that bleakness the drop in sales is only a brief setback in what has been a remarkable past few years for BPDR.
Patriots receiver Wes Welker looks to be headed elsewhere after a tense past few years with New England, while Dolphins tackle Jake Long might be pricing himself out of Miami.
The indie game world has undergone a metamorphosis over the past few years, transforming from an often overlooked niche into as much a staple of the game industry as once-every-year blockbusters like the Call of Duty series.
It looks like those that bought a Seagate hard drive in the past few years could possibly be in store for a few freebies or a bit of cash, at least if a proposed class action settlement goes ahead.
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Consumers have faced a series of record beef prices at retail over the past few years amid tighter supplies and a boost in demand from overseas buyers of U.S. beef.
Volunteers have spent the past few years clearing a two-mile stretch of the waterway from Pewsham to Reybridge.
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For the past few years, a number of artists have taken QR codes to the streets in various ways.
Given that the use of drones has significantly escalated in the past few years, a breach in security is worrisome.
For the past few years, a low level theme that occasionally pops into my news feed is the idea of greater Sino-Pakistani cooperation.
Chinese banks lent out record sums of money in the past few years in a bid to sustain growth amid the global financial crisis.
In the past few years half a dozen recruiting startups have figured out how to entice developers with programming competitions they can enter free of charge.
Any sort of relationship requires some level of trust and that is pretty difficult to get when your nickname for the past few years was a number.
Cashman said the team is thinking about offering the two-time 19-game winner for the Yankees, who has battled injuries the past few years, a minor league contract.
Just look at all the hedge funds and Wall Street firms that have crashed and burned over the past few years as a consequence of such policies.
Unlike biologists, linguists do not have fossils to guide them through the past (apart from a few thousand years of records from the few tongues spoken by literate societies).
Over the past few years, a number of active duty and retired IDF senior officers were forced to cancel visits to Britain after such complaints were filed against them in sympathetic local courts.
Also, in developed markets, their customers have been underspending over the past few years as a result of the financial crisis, and those developed-market car manufacturers now have to catch up in upgrading their machinery.
On defence, although like many other European countries Italy still spends too little, it has in the past few years made a useful contribution in places such as Kosovo and Afghanistan as well as in Iraq.
For the past few years, a significant number of ophthalmologists have used the Avastin cancer medication to treat age-related macular generation, a common afflication among the elderly, even though the drug was never approved for this use.
In the past few years, a handful of IT vendors have begun offering a new breed of engineered systems or optimized systems designed to offer pre-bundled and pre-tested purpose-built machines that free customers from the drudgery of endless integration busywork.
In the past few years, a number of luxury palace hotels have opened in and around the city, including the revamp of the famous La Mamounia, the sumptuous Palais Namaskar and its water gardens, and the walled Selman just minutes from the medina.
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