Plastic Ban

Then I will get more emails from Ray complaining that both his magazines have gone astray or got soggy, or about the extra delay while ME waits for MEW to be printed

Neil

I have postal subscriptions to three magazines, and all of them come wrapped in plastic. Why not use A4 brown paper envelopes?

In the good old days Neil (aged 7) delivered MEW to gentleman subscribers by hand. How well I remember him in his smart uniform struggling up the hill to Dufferton Abbey in a blizzard with the magazine balanced on the handlebars of his immaculate Penny Farthing.

The magazine was properly packaged in a walnut tea-chest full of excelsior, the whole carefully wrapped by virgins in a tarpaulin, postage 1d.

Shockingly bad service - I had to set the dogs on him because the lazy young oik brought the magazine to the front-door instead of the servant's entrance.

I much prefer reading paper to online versions, but Digital might be an alternative to an erratic postal service. Unless you hate computers or suffer from koumpounophobia.

I read my digital subscription on a tablet which prevents phobic problems

John

The plastic wraps can be carefully opened by cutting one end to yield a useful small plastic bag now the supply from shopping is dwindling. BTW I hope they are food safe.

The trees! The trees! Where will the drop bears live if the corporate raiders cut all the trees down to make wrappers for MEW?

I always wondered who that boy was. Must say his uniform used to look a bit bedraggled by the time he got to World's End cattle station in central Orstralia. Of course, keeping clean on the 105-mile dirt driveway up to the house can't have been easy for someone so young and carefree. I doubt that he travelled with his own batman in those unenlightened days.

Plant operators have pushed back on councils regarding the range of plastics they will allow due to the fall in value of paper and plastic on world markets. Previous high values subsidised receiving and dealing with the low value or cost items. The fall in values has ended this practice so these are now classed as contaminants or waste and we get charged for them hence why a council in this situation prefers to have it in the general waste so it is collected and paid for as that rather than being separated out and charged for as general.

I often get the feeling that the face of these solutions to moral panic often changes,

but the problem still remains, you can't magic things away and everything has to go somewhere. Simply banning it isn't going to clean up everything that's been dumped.

Michael W

Seem to remember hearing that the Chinese are not buying plastic waste from here at the moment, they have large stock piles of it.

At one Hospital that I worked at I was in charge of making up and sterilizing dressing packs etc, I made the cotton buds, wooden stick, cotton wool tip. All the packs were in brown paper bags with a colour stripe to indicate that it had been through the Autoclave. We continued with that system after commercial pre- packed stuff arrived on the scene, This sort of inhouse work stopped when Aids/HIV first appeared in the early 80s.

Ian S C

In the past, they had complaints from subscribers about the raised eyebrows of posties delivering magazines in plain brown envelopes

Neil

So how does not using plastic bags make delivery any different on actual arriving? For years people only ever had brown paper bags with such in them.??
Soggy well if the ink is still that wet best find a better printer. OR start loading the digital version as PDF.

Putting two mags in one envelope means one has to wait for the other, at least a week...

Mags in plastic bags are one of the few times I don't complain. My post box is a mile round trip away, and in bad weather I don't always get to it. Result is soggy mail. I don't mind for bills and ads., but the mags must get thru'.

Gordon, you'll just have to do as I did last year, build a better mail box.

Didn't hear where, but one city in Australia has given up on separate plastic recycling due to China not taking plastic rubbish any more.

Ian S C

Ian- I did build a better mailbox, a little man in a big yellow digger remade it a few days later. Just waiting for all the building work to get finished before I decide on further work. Don't want to upset him as I need my road.

That was Ipswich where I live now Ian but they have withdrawn that situation rate payers slammed the idea.

Considering plastic bags are made in China also.

Mail box won't be plastic will it Ian?? LOL

Your maths is off by approximately 1 order of magnitude. More like 0.3 per person per day.

If they want to attack plastic problem, the first place to look at is food packaging industry. For example by setting a standard stating that no more than 0.01% of brutto weight of food can be a plastic.

Return to glass bottles for drinks and force shops by law to accept returns for money deposit. Oblige shops to accept returns without proof of purchase from a given shop. Set a price of bottle high enough to make sure that 95% of consumers pay attention to its value and set final price paid by drink manufacturer for recycled bottle high enough that shops are making profit too. If cheaper to manufacture new than collect recycled, tax new bottles until making new is more expensive. Make unified standard for soft drink bottle, wine bottle etc so they are easy to refill by any manufacturer. The same for jam jars and other common packaging. Permit aluminium for light weight "convenient" drink packaging. It corrodes fast enough and already there is a good incentive to recycle anyway.

Make an exception for biodegradable plastics, eg those easy digestible by microorganisms with environmental halflife less than 6 months or so.

Bans on toothpicks or cotton buds are lipstick on pig but in an era of reign of stupid everything is possible. I wonder when they will legislate in paper condoms.

Martin

Edited By Martin Dowing on 22/04/2018 06:58:06

Edited By Martin Dowing on 22/04/2018 07:03:10

Engineering is an art of compromise. Surely we *can* manufacture packaging materials of sufficienty low environmental impact and degradable fast enough not to bother us. Technology *is* there.

Solution for electrosh*t on the other hand could take a form of compulsory manufacturer warranty for 5 or 10 years to legislate out cheap disposable crap. I have TV 30 years old (Sony Black Trinitron). Quality of reception still beats many modern plasmas and LCDs. It have *never* seen service albeit on 1 occassion I have replaced a fuse myself.

I have also several warm light energy saving compact fluorescent bulbs made 20 years ago. They were 10 queeds each at the time but maybe 2 of 20 are blown by now. Current versions won't last more than a year or two.

Martin