By Jo Nova
Right about now the Greens should be rushing to reverse all the plastic bans
Now we know that CO2 is aerial fertilizer and feeds the world, but this study highlights the crazy unscientific randomness of environmental policies chanted by the same people who say “follow the science”.
It turns out paper shopping bags produce five times as much CO2 over their lifetime as plastic HDPE bags do. Apparently, plastic bags might strangle a turtle, but in the mind of a dedicated Green, paper bags could be causing the sixth mass extinction. Oh the dilemma?
A new study in Environmental Science and Technology looked at 16 applications of plastics in modern life found that in 15 of them, the plastic version produced fewer emissions than the paper, concrete, steel, glass or aluminum sort. And these 16 applications accounted for about 90% of global plastic volume. It seems that with paper bags people often “double bag” their groceries because the bags are prone to breaking, and in the end, in landfill, the paper waste is degraded into methane.
THE DAILY CHART: PLASTIC MADNESS
Steven Hayward, Powerline
So we went and banned plastic straws and plastic bags in much of California and elsewhere because they are made from fossil fuels and a solitary turtle was once found snorting fentanyl through a plastic straw, or something. In any case, Greta/Gaia was displeased, so plastic products had to go.
Well guess what: the substitutes for plastic products mostly produce higher greenhouse gas emissions than plastic. Not by just a little but by a lot.
If the Greens gave a toss about CO2 emissions, you’d think they’d be pretty careful to make sure their own plans were not wrecking the planet. And, ipso facto, oops, if they did the wrong thing, you’d think they’d want to fix that like all life on Earth depended it? Unless, of course, they were attention seeking totalitarians who just wanted to boss people around for the sake of it?
This is not the first time studies like these have surfaced. We know from what the EcoWorriers won’t do, that they don’t give a damn about carbon emissions. It’s all a big show of virtue signalling, a grand theatre where they pretend to care, and their friends pretend to be impressed.
Only people who want to fry coral reefs would choose paper bags over plastic ones, eh?
Even though we don’t recycle PET bottles much, they produce one half the emissions of cans, and one third of the emissions of glass:
PET bottles have the lowest emissions impact because of their low weight and low energy intensity during production. In comparison, aluminum cans release twice the emissions of PET bottles, and glass bottles release three times the emissions. PET has the lowest recycling rate (Table S3) among the three alternative containers and the highest emissions when incinerated at end of life (WtE). However, in this case, the production stage dominates the overall emissions, and here, PET has a much lower impact than glass and aluminum (Figure S3).
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05191
Could a member of Greenpeace even speak the words? PVC pipes are better for climate change (if you care about CO2):
Pet food in tins produces three times the emissions of pet food in little plastic pouch things:
Even plastic milk bottles produce less emissions than cartons do, and every little bit matters as they say:
Obviously Greens will be bragging about the plastic fuel tank in their hybrid cars, right?
…and their acrylic carpet. Save the whales, buy linoleum?
The whole study finds virtually no reason to swap plastic goods for something else:
We conclude that applying material substitution strategies to plastics never really makes sense. This is because plastics’ inherent properties─strong, lightweight, easy to shape, customizable, and comparatively low-GHG emissions─make it the preferred material for minimizing emissions across most products.
h/t Bally
REFERENCE
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Replacing Plastics with Alternatives Is Worse for Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Most Cases
Fanran Meng, Miguel Brandão, and Jonathan M CullenEnvironmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (6), 2716-2727DOI: 10.1021/acs.est.3c05191
So sad!
Melted snowflakes make you shopping bag fail.
It would be a crying shame if your bottles of trendy Chardi fall through & break on the way back to you electric car.
/sarc.
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Another thread with compelling evidence…….and oh wait SIMON nowhere to be found
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It’s a tragedy that our taxes are frittered away on studies of CO2 emissions for such things, when the most important thing is, which material is more fit for purpose, that is which lasts longest and/or has the best outcome from a cost-benefit standpoint.
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It is and has ALWAYS been, exclusively about the “redistribution of wealth”; from the peasants to the “elite”.
And the closely associated “population right-sizing” of said peasant population.
And the “elites”” are getting impatient at the slow pace of this final solution.
As they used to say in the old “Wizard of Id” cartoons: “The peasants are revolting!”
But, at what pace? I suspect it will be a messy, close-run thing.
But I am old and cynical.
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I have never seen any study indicate what happens to the feed stock materials that are not required when plastics are phased out of existence. As natural gas and oil is cleaned and broken into its useable components certain “buy products” that are extremely useful but have no viable market are simply flamed into the atmosphere.
This seems to be a rather inconsistent way of disposing of a product, but hey, at least its not land fill eh? It winds up as the dreaded CO2 and other gases, many of which will be identical to what are produced when plastics degrade over time “in the pit”.
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I think the motivation for paper bags is so they can chop down more forests to make way for more windmills!
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And Slave-made panels, too!
Xi’s fences have to go somewhere, you know.
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Back in the day, people were relieved when plastic bags were first introduced because it meant forests would be saved. Nowadays forests have to be destroyed to accommodate windmills.
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And Bio Fuel
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Everyday I suffer from some inconvenience not having the free shopping bags from supermarkets.
Firstly, you have to bring your own bags to the supermarket, a further inconvenience.
Beyond that, despite the BIG LIE of the Left calling bags “single use” everyone I know had multiple secondary uses for the bags such as kitchen bin liners, bags for picking up dog waste, and for innumerable other uses that the typical soy latte sipping inner city beta male Leftist was too dull to conceive of.
One of the objectives of the Left is to make your life miserable in every way possible, including removal of convenience products like free supermarket bags.
Incidentally, there was no specific problem ever defined that needed solving. The bags were designed to degrade in the environment but nearly all bags were properly disposed of once they had performed their multiple duties. Very few ever escaped “into the wild”.
People now have to buy plastic bags to replace the free ones they used to get. The paid-for paper bags from supermarkets don’t have secondary uses, they are useless.
As for plastic in the oceans, it doesn’t come from USA, Canada, Europe, Australia, NZ or Japan. People in those countries appropriately dispose of their garbage.
Most ocean plastic comes from countries like China, India, Asia where rubbish of all kinds is just dumped into rivers, routinely.
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Having transparent plastic bags at the checkout made it harder to shop lift (accidentally or deliberate) as you had to transfer itens from the store supplied shopping basket into the tranparent plastic bags.
When you bring your own heavy duty bags it is easy to leave small items in the bottom of these bags without scanning the items.
The extra costs of this accidental or deliberate shop lifting are then passed onto all customers
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Yes, CO2 Lover. I was about to comment on that.
Coles and Woolworths have both reported massive increases in theft since the bag bans.
In the following article bags are not blamed but I am certain that’s one of the main reasons. No one would admit to it of course.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/sep/10/coles-woolworths-theft-measures-security-self-checkout-camera-trackers
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Who takes a bag to the supermarket and fills it before getting to the checkout? The supermarket still has baskets and trollies in which to collect your goods before checkout.
If you go to a attended checkout the operator can see in your bag when they fill it. So hard to accidentally (or deliberately) get away with not pulling something out.
If you go to a self checkout, then if you would definitely use a store basket or trolley. If you don’t, you have to unload the bag before scanning to empty it so you can fill it again. Or you have to scan everything and set the good aside, then pack the bag after it has been emptied … or accidentally nearly emptied. Either way, if you use the bag you brought in to gather goods before the checkout, you have to double handle it at the checkout.
Maybe more people are happy to double handle than I think. Or maybe it’s so accidents are not accidents. But I always use a store trolley or basket. Also because I often accidentally still leave the bags in the car.
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“Who takes a bag to the supermarket and fills it before getting to the checkout?”
I do. One of our local grocery stores here in Northeastern Ohio, USA, has the option of using one of their hand scanners (or your cell phone with the appropriate app) to scan you items as you put them in your your own bags in your shopping-cart/trolley so that when you get to the self-checkout counter, you scan a VR code which downloads the items from the scanner to the check-out station and totals up the cost of the items after which you pay for them in cash or by credit card and get your printed receipt. No double-handling of the items is required.
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You take your 2 store branded re-useable faux canvas bags into the supermarket with one inside the other. While pushing your trolley around shopping you put something light and flat such as a block of chocolate between the two bags. You select just enough product for a single bag to hold and go to the self serve checkouts. You confirm you have your own bags and place the one(containing the second) bag on the tray. Since your hidden product is light, or just to be sure, you position the bag so the end overhangs the edge of the tray thereby absorbing some of the weight and avoiding any weight sensor alarms. You then purchase your stuff and off you go. Simples.
Radicalized shoppers (cost of living, shop doesn’t support Australia Day or (wait for it) Anzac Day) can strike a blow against the man (and even his over head cameras) very easily so long as they aren’t too greedy.
The above is based on my experiences from the shop side of the counter and not as a customer. Even doing away with self serve completely wont stop small scale customer theft which includes eating or drinking the product before the check out is reached.
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Paper bags do not last anywhere near as long as plastic bags. Coles paper bags (25c ea) last twice if you are very lucky. The plastic bags you had to buy were worked out (on mass of plastic) to need to be re-used up to 370 times that of the former free plastic bags to be of equivalent use of material. Taking that longevity into account makes the story for paper bags even worse.
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The use of plastics has greatly reduced food waste.
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And, in my experience, eliminated roaches – at least the insect type.
Also in my experience, most plastic bag litter is in lower class areas where prideless people don’t GAS about their environment.
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Thing is, whatever you buy at the supermarket is plastic wrapped anyhow. So you put your plastic wrapped breakfast cereal into a paper bag but you still end up with a plastic bag you need to get rid of.
When you have finished all the breakfast cereal, you put the plastic bag inside the paper bag again and thow it out with the non-recyclable stuff … the cardboard box probably could be recycled but to the best of my knowledge, in Australia no one does recycle cardboard.
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In Vicdanistan there is now a 10c container deposit scheme to supposedly encourage recycling. But a vast majority of people already recycled such containers by putting them in their recycling bins.
To get the 10c back you have to collect the containers and then take them to a location to redeem them. This takes time and fuel and takes a large amount of space at home to collect enough containers to make the time and fuel cost of redeeming worthwhile.
So what was the point and more particularly, who gets the 10c when you put the containers in the recycling as one used to do?
It seems the only thing that has happened is that we pay an extra 10c (at least) for drinks.
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One of those quasi -government spokespeople was being interviewed on local radio here in regional Victoria. Talking about the container recycle program and what a great success it was etc. One of the smart aspects of the scheme is tracing of the containers which is via the bar codes. So, for Al cans you don’t crush them. The spokesperson then proclaimed that over the weekend there were 100000 containers deposited. You know, big deal. But then he went on to say how all these containers would now not be going into landfill, which is a huge lie. All this very expensive elaborate scheme has done is swap containers from going into your household and council recycle bins into this gimmicky scheme. So, basically just complicated the whole recycle process where we know a substantial amount never gets recycled anyway. It’s just sitting somewhere in a huge industrial yard in Melbourne.
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Tracing what ? ..Those bar codes are printed on the cans during manufacture, ..which is at very few locations ..and generally only contain data on the product contents.
Ober 70% of Aluminium and steel cans are already recycled , even before these schemes were started, because separating steel and Aluminium from general waste can be done simply and automatically.
Glass and plastic are another game altogether !
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Just more woke virtue signalling with no real benefit but a lot of additional costs
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… “but a lot of additional costs” …
Do you wonder, as I do, where that money – those costs – go?
Someone makes money out of it.
Yes – the chaps doing the work of moving the cans etc.
And their schedulers, managers, payroll, etc.; and Yoomin Racehorses Department, with DIE trimmings, obviously.
And their well-deserved pansions.
And – who else?
Be nice to know.
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But it is Government job creation!! Another way to transfer money from citizens to the government through income and business businesses taxes.
Leftists are emotional non critical thinking creatures who react to a problem, real or perceived, but neglect to consider the unintended consequences of their solutions.
One usual consequence is their good intentioned efforts will be taken over by zealots and/or grifters who don’t care about the cause – just the power and money.
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Australia only has one maker of ethylene and polyethylene, which is the company, Qenos. Perversely Chinese owned. And they are shutting every factory in Australia. Likely because they are on the list of 250 companies who have to pay 35% tax on CO2.
So recycling plastics in Australia is now impossible. Thanks to the government.
Steel, aluminum, lead,.. all metal makers are being pushed out of business. All transport companies. QANTAS, Virgin,.. Glass manufacturers. Concrete manufacturers. Plastics. And of course all the miners who pay our bills. Plus many more. Even the MMBW for sewage processing.
35%! You cannot make concrete without generating CO2. That’s chemistry. So import your concrete. From China.
Now you will need paper bottles. Say for toxic sodium hydroxide aka dishwashing liquid. Think of your house without plastic bottles.
The insanity continues. And Quenos is just the first manufacturer to pack up and leave. All the car manufacturers have left. No one makes electronic components.
And Britain has stopped making new steel completely. It will only melt old steel. All new steel has to come from China or Russia. Which of course is the plan. And Nippon Steel is trying to buy US steel while Nippon’s backing is from China. I expect the first thing they will do is shut the place down.
But Albanese say we can make Solar Panels profitably and create jobs. Except that he also says we do not have to compete on labour costs with China because we can build fully automatic plants. Think about that for a second. It is only beaten by his claim that we can use solar to charge our electric cars at night.
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“Except that he also says we do not have to compete on labour costs with China because we can build fully automatic plants.”
I presume these fully automatic plants require some sort of energy to operate them, it would have to be renewable energy produced by the sun and wind. Good luck with that.
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Those fully automatic plants will employ lots of political advisors and social media influencers to produce endless photo shoots and posts for Instagram, Tik Tok, Facebook and X.
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And …
Diversity
Inclusion and
Equity staff
Even for robots.
Beggars belief.
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Saw the other day:
Plastic recycling is a DIRTY LIE and complete garbage
Climate nuts aren’t saving the planet; they’re actually making things worse. Many are so stuck in their echo chambers that they don’t even realize the damage they’re unleashing. It’s all about “feeling good” for them; they don’t really care what the facts and real-life results are.
Once again we’ve been lied to on a MASSIVE scale by the establishment. Recycling has always been a huge Scam.
“the efforts to sell the false promise of plastic recycling were to avoid restrictive regulations and potential product bans.”
I’ve been reporting this for a decade on my show, but it makes people feel good to think they’re doing something to help the environment so I don’t expect separating our garbage to stop anytime soon, much like the Covid vaxx & face masks, these are nothing more than virtue signaling.
https://revolver.news/2024/04/video-plastic-recycling-dirty-lie-complete-garbage/
Say YES to oil and plastics, and NO to the kakistocrats and Golgafrinchams.
Do EV zealots even know that ashphalt is made with the dreaded oil?
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The Green in leaves, chlorophyll, is a long chain hydrocarbon. The main ingredient in oil, gas, coal. Green things should be banned. Grass, trees, bushes, phytoplankton. Ban the lot.
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Here in northeastern Ohio, USA, the local governments (counties in this case), have set their own rules about plastic bags; the county I live in allows plastic bags while a nearby county has banned them (I rarely shop in that county). Although we don’t get any money for recycling plastic bags, the grocery store I shop at has a huge bin in which you can deposit your surplus used plastic bags and the bins seem to get a lot of use because most morning I go there some one is emptying out that bin (which is almost always full) for recycling. Of course what they actually do with the plastic bags taken from the bin is anybody’s guess, but I like to think they are properly recycled.
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Here is the UK [I’m in suburban South London] we have a similar scheme – big supermarkets take ‘soft plastics’ [so, crisp packets, cat-food pouches, the ‘string bags oranges or lemons sometimes come in, sweetie wrappers, that sort of thing].
Exactly the same – a big bin, which seems to be changed over several times a day at the supermarket I use.
I, too, like to think they’re properly recycled.
Or, at least burnt for energy ….
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Some at least are marked ‘Recycle At Store’.
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I think the reason for the container deposit scheme is because we used to send all our “recycling” to China to be taken care of (or not, but it was out of sight so who cares). But now that China and other Asian countries don’t want our recycling anymore the councils actually have to process it themselves, and many people are terrible at sorting recycling, all sorts of non recyclables and contaminated rubbish gets chucked in recycling bins, which is very difficult to try and sort out. Hence the plan to pay the public to sort recycling for the councils.
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But they only have to make plastic bags at least 4 microns thick and their classed as “reusable”. Isn’t that so?
There’s a large well known wholesale butchers outlet (no names no pack drill) in Brisbane that still supplies free carry plastic bags.
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My butcher gives you a reasonably heavy duty blue plastic bag that is virtually indestructible (don’t want to drop the Sunday roast) but one can only use it for garbage unless it is washed. Seems such a waste even though it is appreciated and necessary.
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When they first proposed to ban free supermarket bags in Victoriastan want I wrote this to my supposed parliamentary “representative”, a pretend conservative Liberal.
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You wasted your time and ink. Representative is a misnomer. Elected parasite is more apt especially when referring to many Liberals and more especially when referring to Victorian Liberals.
I agree with your summation of the usefulness of the humble plastic bag. We now have more expensive plastic bags that clutter the boot. Strangely if I buy a banana, two tomatoes, three mushrooms, four lemons they end up in four plastic bags. If I buy meat at Coles it comes in plastic trays and some fruit comes in plastic containers. The toothbrush comes in a hard plastic container eight times bigger. The truth is the modern shopper brings home half a recycle bin full of plastic containers and packaging every time he goes shopping. To paraphrase George Carlin ” the earth needs plastic and we were put here to provide it.” https://youtu.be/7W33HRc1A6c
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George Carlin was a very wise man- and funny as well.
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It’s not a waste of time to write to your Rep. If 5% of the electorate took 5 minutes and wrote to their MP it would absolutely freak them out. The staffers have to deal with the incoming mail.
They like to train us to feel like “there’s no point”.
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Remember who one of the main promoters of the bag ban was, Waleed Aly.
Aly should be just as infamous as Flim Flammery.
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I wonder whether Wally Brain Dead would use a rubber/latex/plastic condom or a paper condom?
Serious question – /sarc
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Perhaps Aly would enjoy a visit to his ancestral homeland to see for himself their method of disposal – just visit the closest waterway.
I can’t be doing with these lefty, urban w—— anymore.
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Dear Green people, please stop analysing my life to such minute degrees to prove a point that often proves fallacious and unnecessary. You doubtless won’t be satisfied until we’re all back living in dark caves.
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The supermarket bag saga is just comical. Ancient people will remember a time when they were all paper. But, as the story points out for heavy items you double bagged or for moist items you had to be really careful lest the bag got soggy and broke. Then the single use plastic bags came in and the motive was the fact we were saving trees. At least we were saving Australian trees. The single use plastic bags were great. Light, strong , water repellent and you got them for free. Plus, I suspect a lot were manufactured in Australia. They weren’t really single use only because a lot of people used them twice for shopping or for little jobs like weed collection around the home. Hence, they became multi- use and very efficient. Then we progressed to the thicker plastic recyclable bags, but you paid for them and they were manufactured in Germany or some Asian country. People re-used them constantly but they were unhygienic because of this. Now, we’re back again to paper bags which you buy for 25 cents, but have a look at the base. Made in China- so not even produced in Australia. It’s just farcical.
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Jo’s article and the comments above all go to show how NOTHING the Left does is ever thought through*.
Whether it be the forced imposition of “renewable energy”, untested covid vaccines and a ban on known effective treatments, transgendering children, restrictions of various farming practices, or impositions on daily life in general.
NOTHING they do is for the greater good of society. They are destroyers, not creators or makers.
As Donald Trump said: https://youtu.be/Cw0P_QbcZpw
*Actually, it is thought through, but only by the Elites of the Left trying to destroy Western Civilisation. The average Leftist foot soldier, the “useful idiot of the Left” just mindlessly parrots what they are instructed to say (and some are even paid to do so).
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A vast majority of Leftists and Politicians are scientifically and historically illiterate, innumerate, and logically incompetent.
To be a Leftist or a Pollie, there are a great many things in Reality that must be ignored and supplanted by emotion and magical thinking. However, the consequences of avoiding reality cannot be ignored.
We have reached the civilizational pivot point wherein the Uni qualified are ignorant, the elected are liars/thieves/ignorant/participants in fleecing the citizenry.
Only a meritocracy works. We have a kakistocracy. The lunatics and thieves are in charge of the asylum.
It is almost amusing how little the elite understand about the real world. Reality doesn’t need elites. Reality needs competence, integrity, and cohesive community. None of the elite have an actual clue how things are made or how systems work. Without their privilege, they wouldn’t last a week in the real world.
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Only the gullible woke Western sheep have banned plastic bags ect. The rest of non woke world, plastic everywhere.
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The one aspect not mentions is durability. One of the features of plastics is their low rate of degradation. That means disposal needs more attention than materials that degrade more readily.
I believe most of the effort related to reducing plastic is to lower environmental contamination. My wife always cuts the plastic rings from the plastic containers and holders. Images like the one linked are confronting for most people:
https://assets3.thrillist.com/v1/image/2617606/1584×912/scale;webp=auto;jpeg_quality=60;progressive.jpg
My personal view is that CO2 intensity with plastics is not an issue. It is their durability in the environment. Plastic that biodegrade should be the priority for temporary use packaging.
For about 10 years now we have used mostly the same reusable bags for shopping. I particularly like the insulated ones with zip top and always use one of these for chilled items. Reusable bags have afforded us extra utility.
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That varies, some plastics degrade faster than others, and some, like the singlet bags which were banned, are especially vulnerable to sunlight.
The research I referred to in comment #18 below found that plastic bags in landfill degraded faster than paper bags.
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It is degradation in oceans that count. That is where it appears to hang around and impacts sea life. If it all made it to landfill it would not be as much of an issue as whet just ends up in the oceans.
Some open drains I have seen in Indonesia that end up in the ocean are truly ugly sites.
I am still amazed how many Australians still litter. They see any place but their home as a garbage bin. Some even do not discriminate with their own home. They are fire traps awaiting initiation.
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Shouldn’t there be a giant swirl of discarded face masks floating somewhere in the Pacific?
Probably necessitating a vaccine mandate for fish.
And the aquatic mammals.
Don’t want to be species exclusionary.
No lives can matter until fish lives matter.
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They can’t even be recycled!
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And the ring of elastic is just perfect for the garrotting of endangered sea creatures.
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The Left loved the useless virtue signaling masks.
But even those wokesters at Greenpeace (UK) knew they were hazardous to wildlife.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/single-use-face-masks-hurting-wildlife-what-you-can-do/
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We have such short memories.
Plastic bags were introduced to curb the use of paper bags and other excessive paper use.
Who remembers the ultimately successful protests against Gunns Paper mill in Tasmania?
One of the biggest selling points in the promotion of computers to businesses back then was the much-vaunted “paperless office”.
(Now everybody has printers in their home and everything goes to paper, often in duplicate or triplicate.)
I remember a few years later, when computers were being widely adopted and printers had become the necessary accessory, walking past the big glass shop window of some office late at night to see a tractor-feed printer churning away out of control and the room waist deep in paper. So much for the already-forgotten paperless office.
There used to be information online from some plastics manufacturing group, about the results of research into the ecological impacts of paper bags and plastic bags compared. The plastic bag was found to be between 10 and 100 times less polluting at every stage from manufacturing through distribution, usage, and disposal.
Naturally the truth was brushed aside and ignored in all the woke fanfare about the evils of the innocent consumer killing wildlife with their shopping bags, and all the mad scrambling to climb aboard the virtue-signalling bandwagon.
I’m glad and grateful to Jo, that this is finally coming back.
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You will get the paperless office when you get the paper less toilet. Except that the Japanese got there first.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1160707/Introducing-high-tech-paperless-toilet-leaves-clean-dry-tearing-trees.html
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We were all there before toilet paper became common in the civilised world.
Many years ago staying in a remote village on a remote island I had to use the toilet.
Realising there was no toilet paper I asked, “what do you use to wipe your butt?”
The woman looked at me with dumbfounded amazement as if thinking, “are you serious”.
“Your hand of course!”, she gestured.
Also the French have the bidet and in Southeast Asia they have the bum gun.
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How many people would print this blog to read it?
We gave up buying newspaper last year. And we are relics of a bygone era. None of our adult children buy newspapers ever. None of them or their partners buy magazines. My wife still picks up the Coles magazine and Aldi still send their weekly catalogue through the junk mail.
I have not printed emails in over 20 years. And my last employer stopped printing emails around 15 years ago. It is much easier to store stuff electronically especially when it comes to retrieving it.
Printed money is now getting scarce. We gave up cheque books about 15 years ago.
We do have a printer but it only gets the occasional recipe or document for signing printed on it. Every time it needs to be used, I have to do a head clean so it prints legibly.
We have some plain paper books for grandkids to draw on but they are all quite adept at using tablets to draw.
Last week I took a DVD player and hard drive video recorder to the op shop. This hardware has been made obsolete by wifi to TV. All the DVDs will get taken somewhere next week. A box of DVDs can be replaced by one thumb drive or a subscription to a streaming service.
We have hundreds of books that will end up in tips somewhere. All now obsolete. My wife buys two or three “books” a week that cost very little and she reads on her Kindle. Now thousands of books on it but no paper.
Paper for graphics and writing is not obsolete but its use per capita is in decline. Paper for packaging is increasing mainly because everything that gets made these days is produced in China and has to be protected for shipment offshore. Usually cardboard forms a protective shell with plastic foam as the internal shock absorber.
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You’re very modern.
Whenever I buy something for the renovation, paint, plaster, timber, whatever, the computer spits out a receipt and that gets stapled to the A4 receipt from the big laser printer. They all have to be collected and entered into the spreadsheet and handed over to the accountant at tax time.
My 93 year old mother has to print a copy of everything she’s sent.
I agree it’s on the decline now, but for about 30 years after the paperless office was the buzzword of progress, paper usage went through the roof.
When I am in Officeworks or JBHiFi there seems to be a huge assortment of inkjet printers. Even the newsagent and the post office sells printer paper.
Somebody must be printing.
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I always reuse plastic bags as rubbish bags. If I can’t get them free from the supermarket I buy them. I also used to use them for storage until the fell apart.
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I also buy them online, 100 at a time.
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For groceries, I use a corrugated cardboard box with handles that can hold about 3 pecks of apples. The current box has lasted about 5 years and should last another 5.
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/e4/12/1b/e4121b2669d492960468e72cf651833e–apple-facts-apples.jpg
Bags, plastic or otherwise, are a pain.
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A box needs 2 hands…..a bag only needs one… or sometimes none if its a shoulder bag or back pack…(think cyclists)
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The thinking community has to learn to “think” (sic) like a Leftist so we can predict their next move.
They have a constant urge to destroy and make our lives miserable.
What therefore will be their next move?
Ban paper bags as well?
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Single use plastic bags get used for shopping then used for rubbish, thereby going to landfill.
Except that we can’t have such items going to landfill. Landfill must be reserved for solar panels and windmill parts that are past their use by dates.
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And Teslas.
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Pollution in rivers and oceans is a behavioural problem of the Third World, not a plastics problem.
E.g.:
Brazil https://youtu.be/wVnMBGXVVUI
India https://youtu.be/uNqtmr-5JzA
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+ Indonesia, Vietnam, etc..
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In Australia, authorities refuse to allow garbage incineration to make electricity as they do in proper countries.
It’s a huge waste of biomass burying it plus after incineration the steel from cans can be recovered. (Aluminium might oxidise.)
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Progressive temperature incineration solves that problem and as a by product distils the metals as they all melt at different temperatures.
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The best way to eliminate plastic waste is to make it valuable. Thermoplastics have an energy density of 26 – 46 MJ/kg for camparison petrol is 44 and coal about 30.
Burning waste plastics and rubber to generate electricity is very effective, organisations/governments will actually pay you to take away the fuel you need to make electricity. Japan, China and Sweden do this very efficiently and the CO2 released is less than coal but would be relesed anyway by natural decay, effectively making it carbon neutral.
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The paper VS plastic bar chart reveals the paper bag emits some 17Kg CO2 equivalent while just sitting there containing unidentified groceries. Really? So, how much does it emit while lying flat and empty with its fellows? Please offer an explanation to satisfy Pauline. Else the whole report appears to be ridiculous. Just like the anti-science of hockey stick derivatives.
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Australia was a small but serious country when I was born post WWII. We had a respected army, navy and air force. Our men and women worked to make and grow products sought after around the world and favored at home.
Now. Our military are renowned for their red, high heeled, shoes. We make little of anything much but we can make espresso coffee, badly in the main. Our ‘leaders’ export our jobs rather than products that we make. They import food and goods and ‘workers’ trained in sponging.
If you doubt this just look at the teal and other shades of drongos we elect to our parliaments. How many real leaders, men or women, are among them?
We have had some rubbish prime ministers over the years but the current model is the all time lemon. Worse even than… You make your own choice.
Blimey!
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where we lived in Europe there was a high temperature incinerator and generator which burnt the regions non recyclable waste. It was set into a hill in a woodland, the only sign was the chimney. Nothing was visible from the chimney apart from a steam plume in the depths of winter. This was back in the early 00’s
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The following excerpt is the sort of innumerate BS the Left go on with to stop industrial waste-to-energy incinerators in Australia. They claim 3,909,500 million tonnes of waste is produced in Australia that is or will be burned.
That’s 156,380 tonnes per year for every man, woman and child in Australia.
It is obviously untrue, a lie and pure BS.
These are the imbeciles that make Australia’s energy policy.
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If anyone burnt 3.9E12t of hydrocarbons, they will produce more than 4E6t of CO2. It is obviously a typo.
3.9E12t of waste would be on a par with Chinese consumption of coal.
It would be brilliant for Australia to get paid to take plastic waste then burn it to produce electricity but probably more cost than burning through the abundant lignite resource in Victoria.
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156,380 x 25,000,000 =
00
Plastic bags? Disposable paper? Recycling is a fraud.
But how is Nett Zero, the concept driving the government, going to work? No additional CO2. Since when? The government talks about 43% below 2005? Do we have to go back to 1750 for 100% reduction. Why was that a magic time in the world?
And it’s impossible to go back to 1750.
In 1900 there were 1 billion humans on earth. Now there are 8 billion. Each outputs 3 tons of CO2 a year. To get to nett zero, as in 1900 you need to get rid of 7 billion people. Fine. Seems rational. Starve them to death seems to be the UN/WEF plan.
And people have needs. Food, transport, clothes, water, energy. How are you going to supply those without producing more CO2. Even sewage for 8 billion people generates CO2 and methane.
People cannot be nett zero in their lifetime. Animals cannot be nett zero. All lifeforms generate CO2 from burning sugars from photosynthesis.
And currently you do not make metals without making CO2. Concrete too. It’s a chemical reaction! And generates CO2.
No one makes cars or windmills or solar panels without generating CO2. And are these car, windmills and solar panels going to live forever? How are we going to make new windmills and solar panels in 2050?
Man made CO2 drive Global Warming is a fraud. Nett zero is an even bigger fraud if that was possible.
And the biggest fraud of all is that CO2 is controlled by human activity, human CO2. It obviously isn’t. Without realising it, NASA said so.
Between 1988 and 2014 NASA detected more new trees than the entire area of South America, two Brazilian rainforests. Trees went up 14%! And CO2 went up the same 14%. Not down.
So world has demonstrated unequivocally that 14% more CO2 means 14% more trees.
Worse, sequestering trillions of tons of atmospheric CO2 in trees had no detectable effect on CO2 levels! Why? Because the oceans control CO2. Simple physical chemistry. Bury CO2 and the ocean releases more. This is first year chemistry physical, equilibrium of a dissolved gas, CO2. Not Albanese fantasy.
Not only is Nett Zero absurd. So are carbon credits, carbon certificates, sequestration, carbon farming and all the ignorant and scheming Australian laws of the last 24 years, Labor and Liberal and National Party and the Greens. Fantasy science. Climatology.
There are no scientists home because even NASA says its all a lie. I am just pointing it out.
The NASA observation of massive Greening of the planet with increasing CO2 also tells you everything about how CO2 works. 14% more CO2 means 14% more trees. Goodbye Carbon Farming(2011) Act.
So many illegal Australian laws based on non science, ignorance and government greed. And illegally padding our electricity bills with cash which goes to ‘investors’. So we Australians pay for the windmills, but we don’t even get to own them? It’s Labor party vengeance for the 1990s privatization of energy. And a grab by the gnomes of Canberra for all power, something not granted under the Constitution.
And so they ban plastic straws and plastic shopping bags. What utter nonsense. We have long left the idea of ecology and reasonable balance. We are now in the era of devastating Australian laws which rob the people to pay for evil and manipulative end of world fantasies.
Carbon indulgences and Hell Fire are an old story we left behind in the reformation 400 years ago. Or so we thought. The UN is the new Papacy and the President is the new Pope of hell fire, boiling seas. Just pay up.
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What is wrong with Australian scientists? Why aren’t they calling out this nonsense. It’s not like religion. The stolen billions going into shutting all our industries down are inexplicable. Meanwhile Albanese and Bandt are just full of themselves wrecking the joint while preaching about Make Australia Great Again. None of it makes any sense.
And banning plastic straws and plastic bags are just window dressing. The big game is banning manufacturing, travel, agriculture, mining and turning Australia into a poor nation for open cut mining. We are even told to keep it all in the ground. For whom?
Why isn’t the Chief Scientist saying something? Or the Universities? And the CSIRO is just looking for more funds, as are they all.
We are losing all our industries. And the illegal laws being passed rip off all Australians.
Yes, it’s pretty obvious the plastic bags and straws are nonsense. But it’s all nonsense.
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At least the CO2 Coalition video is good stuff.
Even if it accepts we humans are increasing CO2, which is nonsense. Pushing the barrow that CO2 is overall a good thing and avoiding confrontation has some value. It’s just sad that they refused to call out the basic lie, that ’emissions’ do nothing but enable politicans to run around like demented accountants calling CO2 a toxic pollutant. We cannot change CO2 if we wanted to do so. No matter how many windmills we erect.
It feels like we are protesting against Easter Island statues, saying they are a useless waste wrecking the island. It will be awful to be proved right.
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Good name for a t-shirt. For the obverse: CO₂ IS AERIAL FERTILIZER! And for extra emphasis, for the rear view: CO₂ IS AERIAL FERTILIZER PUNK!
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Australia’s refusal to incinerate most domestic waste in waste-to-energy plants means there will not be enough landfill sites for solar panels and windmill blades.
We don’t have to worry about the thousands of tonnes of concrete and steel foundation for windmills, they get to leave that in the ground where it can disrupt groundwater flow and burrowing animals plus affect tree roots if the area is ever reforested .
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Seeing as we all agree that emissions of CO2 are irrelevant, then this whole argument is also irrelevant though interesting. The physical damage done by billions of plastic shopping bags is obvious. I agree that the attempted substitution of certain plastic items such as straws and bread bag tags is silly and in fact useless, but the shopping bag issue needed to be addressed. This began in the early 1990s when some brave individuals took on the supermarkets, one at a time. Eventually SA became the first state to ban them.
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Maybe it’s obvious to you, but to people like me who are a bit slow on the uptake the obvious isn’t so obvious.
Can you give us some clues?
What’s obvious to me is the destruction of rivers caused by the toxic chemical outflows from paper factories. That’s what turned the public outcry against Gunns paper mill.
CO2 is not pollution but there is a helluva lot of pollution nevertheless.
Then there’s the destruction of old-growth forests.
Sturdy paper bags need slow growth tree fibres for strength. Recycled paper just isn’t strong enough apparently.
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I was referring to the enormous damage done to animals, which has been documented.
Indeed Jo wrote “Apparently, plastic bags might strangle a turtle”, clearly a passing reference to what can be the case to make a point, but the truth is that millions of seabirds, thousands of sea mammals and countless fish die every year of plastic waste. Cows eat them when they float into paddocks, turtles think the bags are jellyfish and whales can end up with dozens of plastic bags inside them.
This information, from 1994 was sent to me by my sister who was one of the people involved in the campaign to reduce waste.
It is disappointing that people want to return to using plastic bags at the supermarket which will continue to kill animals and yet the same people point out the very valid argument that wind turbines kill thousands of birds every year as a reason for not having them.
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My experience with modern thin biodegradable plastic bags is that they tend to fall apart before you even get home! And deteriorate very rapidly in sunlight and water. They are very different to the hardy bags of 1994, thirty year ago. I think your information is very dated. There are other solutions than just banning everything. At one stage Greenpeace banned Chlorine, an element of the periodic table. So no salt, PVC,..
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Marine animals aren’t dying from plastic bags blowing into the sea or being washed into the sea from Australia. The only time I’ve seen plastic bags blowing about was at the local tip there used to be a couple caught on the barbed wire fence that had blown from the landfill site. They were dying in the sunlight, very thin and tattered, being turned into microplastic atmospheric pollution no doubt.
Two bags. Being vaporised. Many years ago. Before biodegradable plastic bags.
We don’t have a stormwater problem here. No gutters or creeks clogged up with plastics being washed out to sea.
The only way Australian plastic can end up encountering a marine animal is through the recycling fraud.
Instead of actually recycling it we used to send actual shiploads of the garbage across the oceans, paying Asian countries to take it. Some shiploads somehow mysteriously ended up floating in the ocean. Who knows how many? The other problem has been the stormwater pollution problem throughout South Asia.
I have seen garbage everywhere in Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia, China, all eventually being blown or washed down the drains and rivers, out to sea.
Thaipusam, the 3 day religious festival at Batu Caves generated enormous amounts of garbage. In places you had to wade through it by the 3rd day, and down at the creek it was knee deep.
To be fair, most places, notably Cambodia have more recently been making good efforts to reduce littering so that will help.
On some islands, subject to the wind and tide, a bay could fill with floating garbage.
Here in Australia we’re not the cause of plastics choking animals. You’ll have to go ban plastic bags elsewhere if you want to fix that.
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Along these same lines, a “sustainability team” organized in my office examined replacing Styrofoam cups with paper ones. Our sustainability guru researched the matter and found that the paper cups contributed more CO2 than the Styrofoam ones. We gave up on the idea.
A few years later the vendor that supplied all of the coffee/tea fixings switched to paper cups, also bringing in those paper sleeves you need to keep from burning your fingers.
It seems that perception beats out reality.
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Underneath all the trivia. Plastic cup, straws, bags is a pernicious, an evil anti democratic idea. That Governments alone should control all commerce, not the market. The market would balance cost with benefit, usability and reusability, convenience and inconvenience, cost of disposal and consumer views. Even for plastic bags.
But what do we see? Governments claim they have a duty to protect the planet. And ban things and tax and rob the public to save them. This is happening with everything including plastic bags. The emergence of the new science of ecology in the 1970s has allowed enormous overreach. And now politicians have decided that based on the opinion of other politicians (a UN Intergovernmental Panel) CO2 is a noxious industrial byproduct and should be severely restricted if not totally banned. We Australians are paying billions a year in theft, not taxes for the views of these politicians. All of whom promised there would be no carbon tax, a promise they have kept by just stealing the money.
We saw the same arrogance with the Chinese created Wuhan Flu. The new world government, the UN and World Health Organization responsible for preventing pandemics actually distributed it. “Not infectious human to human” was the edict from the new President of WHO. And no one dares say anything. Australia tried.
General health, even planetary health concerns have allowed politicians to claim their utterly moral decisions are backed by Science, The Science, Their Science.
Too bad I for one cannot find a word of truth in Their Science. And plastic bags are just another game played by politicians exercising their control over commerce, in the true communist way. Behind it all is China once again, pushing their Leninist dogma. Just like avowed communists Albanese and Bandt. It is nothing to do with ecology. Now Albanese is going to make Australia a manufacturing superpower. Who believes a word he says?
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And if the Liberals took stock of the Referendum and promised to dismantle all these evil laws, they would romp home in all elections. There are too many Malcolm Turnbulls/Morrisons, Paul Keating/Chalmers, Kevin Rudd utterly egotistical people who have no time for the deplorables. And with Albanese/Bandt, words fail. How did Australia elect two openly committed communists?
The government has no business deciding whether people use paper bags or plastic bags, petrol cars or electric cars. Customers should decide.
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The idea that Anthony Albanese is saving the planet is beyond ridiculous. But he says it all with a straight face. As the late great Sir Les Patterson would say, a legend in his own lunchtime.
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They have to find or invent things to blame the general population for, to divert attention from what’s actually going on.
Then they have to keep the population doing something they think is solving the problem, imaginary or not.
That way people think they’re being noble and actually making a difference, and those citizens who are not complying with the new urgencies will be the new villains and cop all the venom All the attention is thereby directed elsewhere while the thieves running the show are silently getting away with the loot.
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Ah, that explains it.
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On the other hand wool carpets don’t emit toxic fumes, don’t burn and are a byproduct of meat production. Sheep also fit into a crop rotation system as well as convert indigestible plant matter into protein.
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My bet, you’re a sheep farmer David?
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One thing not covered in this article is the comparison of hydrocarbon based plastics with organic based vegetable polymer plastics which (I understand) are non toxic, biodegradable, edible in at least some cases, (or at least harmless if ingested) and made totally from vegetable matter. It surprises me that this option hasn’t been pushed much more before now. Vegetable polymer plastics have been around for decades and could be seamlessly substituted for oil based plastics.
Nevertheless, the poor duck squeezers will go into hyperdrive trying to deal with their cognitive dissonance as they ponder the facts about plastic Vs other materials.
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Good find, the more CO2 the better, at least a paper bag won’t strangle a turtle.
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So that’s thrice the green flakes have got it wrong, first they wanted paper bags banned because , ‘oh the trees’ , so 30 years worth of pvc used, then ‘oh the wildlife and ocean pollution’, then pvc banned and back to paper, but wait, paper bags = more CO2 than pvc, oh dear, what to do.!
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It is SO EASY to get “Triggered” by all this green nonsense. We in Highland region of Scotland have just taken delivery of another PLASTIC Wheelie Bin to sieve out our (non) rubbish rubbish …. Yeeeeerz ago ( They speak like that on the Black ISle ) we had very little rubbish to tip. Why would we? Paper wrapped goods from local shops.
Anyroad, We were wondering whether the Coonsil had shares in the Plastic Bin Co. or were they rushing to get new bins before we stopped extracting oil / making more plastic stuff. Just imagine wheeliebins made of Iron, or galvanized steel( lighter) or 1″ planks like tattie boxes …
So now some poor folk have to re-build a larger Wheeliebin Corral to corral the growing herd of potential errant Binnies. – if only the Bunnies behaved the same way!
Shock HORROR _ Wool! Another nail in a coffin. Plastic micro-fibres and dust from all that plastic fabrics in general, …. but as I was discussing with local guys / operatives & management at the local WoolBoard Depot, the Hows n Whys of falling wool consumption … but the COST ( of labour & transport(fuel) & rents/rates) of processing of SHORN WOOL PLUS not mentioned – the WATER (?) to wash and treat the wool (?) …. We have Carbon footprints, water footprints, but what about Human footprints and whatever else you like. JINGS where is this reply heading ? The Lammies are popping out, … better go.
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I still have a milkman deliver to my house 3 days a week and the glass pint bottle of milk and fruit juice are rinsed and picked up the next time he comes as has been the way for decades. They also deliver a range of groceries but since Mueller bought them items that were in plastic containers have been replaced by glass bottles that are not re-used and are of no use to me either. Sparkling water went glass and also much more expensive so I buy that elsewhere. Cream comes in bottles which are much less user friendly and can’t just be put in the freezer for later. I ran out of olive spread and lo and behold they no longer sell the plastic tub of margarine they used to.
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The general rule of thumb, taking account of the life-time costs, is that there is least CO2 emissions from the cheapest option and most from the most expensive.
At a glace the items in this article supports that rule of thumb.
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