Neil's Irrelevant Press Release Thread

It won't surprise anyone that as the editor of a national magazine, I get sent a lot of press releases.

Sometimes these are so irrelevant, idiotic or just plain bad, I feel the need to share them. After that's what they want me to do.

I'll only share the really off-beam ones.

Today I got this. Someone has had the revolutionary and sensational idea of selling honey in glass jars! Surely they should get a Nobel Prize for this planet-saving concept:

Sarah’s Wonderful Honey Helps You Reduce Plastic Waste

​Did you know that approximately 20 million plastic squeezy honey bottles are sent to landfill every year? Simply switching to glass can reduce this astonishing figure.

By choosing one of the Sarah’s Wonderful Honeys, you can help reduce this number as the range is available in glass jars that can be easily recycled*, or for the more adventurous, re-used.

The jars can be used for an array of opportunities. Just give yours a good clean and reuse it for storing spices, dried herbs, homemade salad dressing or use to make overnight oats. The list goes on!

Afterthought: The really adventurous will come up with lots of workshop applications for old honey jars, so perhaps it isn't irrelevant?

They do make you wonder sometimes don't they?

My classic is on supermarket shelves already - Recycled Toilet Paper, not for me thank you.

I would have thought the plastic bottles were also made of a plastic that can be recycled, just depends on whether the end user puts the container in the general waste bin or the recycling bin.

Don't really like Honey myself so it is an irrelevant thread

Hey, what a neat idea. I bet you could use glass bottles for milk too, but how would you seal the top without a plastic screw lid.?
Should admit that I have only just discovered the convenience of squeezy Golden Syrup for my porridge, so much less messy than tins, but resisted the higher price for years.

The bleedin' obvious, many old skills and even the ability to work things out for oneself is going - see many questions on here.

Notwithstanding that the plastic honey containers are more expensive than glass jars, Glass 1 lb. jars with a screw top lid are my preference for filling with honey, after you can screw the lid to the underside of a shelf and keep screws and the like safely in them rust free and dust free. A gross of 1 lb. honey jars cost £55.00 with lids. Squeezy bottles are £37.00 for 50. Go figure. Then you need labels to conform to the regulations, that is 3 different labels by the way!

Clive, busy bee.

Not the end user from what I'm hearing, but the outfit that claims to be doing the recycling... (but might just be shipping it overseas)

Back in the days of the horsedrawn dairy cart when you ran out to meet the guy with your refillable mini-churn soemone had the ridiculous idea of making milk deliveries in such bottles and bringing them round by electric float every morning. Daft! you wouldn't get horse muck for the roses any more..

pgk

Hi, that sounds like a silly idea to me, whoever thought of using glass jars for storage? especially for spices etc.

Regards Nick.

With care, those could be adapted for jam, or even honey...

The prices have been fluctuating of late but historically speaking, the "refill" sachets of Kenco coffee are quite a bit more expensive than the equivalent bottled version. Same contents but one in a plastic bag, the other in glass. Given the minimal cost of plastic, you'd be forgiven for concluding that the glass costs less than nothing. More likely a cynical ploy to exploit the gullible, which to date has not included my coffee drinking wife.

Murray

When I joined the Scouts in 1947 we didn't have a meeting place other than "SKIPS" house. So to start thing off, raising funds for a HQ we collected 1 Lb & 2 Lb jam jars washed them out and sold them to a small jam factory. The local tip was about 4 miles away and unbeknown to all, us lad made a raft and floated around the gravel pits/ tip on a Saturday afternoon when the site was closed collecting jars from around the reeds. When "Skip" found out that was stopped, to dangerous even in those days. However, we eventually raised £125 which was more than enough to buy our own HQ. The fathers built the HQ using corrugated iron sheets. The building is still there but now unused as we didn't have a toilet or other washing faculties, just one 40 watt bulb and a slow combustion stove. Nearly forgot, 1 LB half penny and 2Lb one penny.Happy days

Our local council has just banned glass in the recycling bin as they no longer have a commercial contract from any recycling company wanting glass. Seems like the market for glass recycling in Australia has hit either a slump or over-supply.

I've used plastic pill containers for storing BA bolts and nuts, and metric ones in the smaller sizes, but they all sat stacked in a drawer making it a chore to find the one i wanted. Then i hit on the idea of using the formed plastic spice bottle trays popular in modern kitchen drawers. Now they are all in plain sight and i can get almost twice as many in the same cabinet space by using shallower drawers. I thought of using the spice jars themselves but that meant buying heaps of spices that would take years to use up, whereas the pill bottles come free once a month.

These ideas will never catch on but there could be pop bottles with deposits refunded when you take them back - and milk in returnable bottles also.

As they say, the possibilities are endless.

No - it would never work.

We have that now and machines that accept the containers but it has spawned another issue - bin scabs !

Some people have woken in the morning and gone to retieve thier recycle bin that was put out at the kerb to be collected but a bin scab has upended it during the night to dig out the containers that can be taken for a refund which is 10 cents a container . So all along that street were bins left dumped on the road and the garbo isn't going to clean it up !

That's a common trick. Same goes for plastic sachets of handwash and fabric softener. I used to buy paper sachets of sweetener refils for SHMBO's dispenser until I discovered that it's 25% cheaper to buy the new plastic dispenser.

Russell

Just to buck the general trend, I used to use glass jars for storage in the shop but got rid of them in favour of plastic a few years ago. One too many shards of glass on the floor, which I hadn't noticed (the shard not the floor), from smashed jars.

I figure if a plastic jar can be recycled it can be done just as well after N years in my shop (with perhaps more recycling options at that time).

(Not that there's much product coming in glass jars in this neck of the woods any more either - although that could change in the current - knee-jerk - reaction to environmental plastic problems).

Nice one today, research finding the blindingly obvious:

We have a story that we thought might be of interest.

Quick Pitch: Running costs, reliability and price are what motorists look for when buying a car, according to a study.

NSS!

Neil

You mean fitting mag wheels, fat tires, a sub-woofer in place of the rear seat and an airfoil fin on the boot lid does not increase the value of your car?