The future of plastic

We just need to be aware and do what we can. So buy loose fruit and vegetables (we have a market), take cotton bags to put your shopping in, freeze excess and left-overs using recycled plastic bags like those frozen foods come in.
I have metal bowls and bins and use china or enamel containers, not plastic. Wooden or fabric toys or give books. Rubber balls and raw bones for the dog. No more plastic bottles of water.

Went n on the train to Sydney this morning. It was poring with rain. At every station there was a plastic bag dispenser for wet umbrellas.

We’re lucky enough to have a green grocer still. It’s mainly a serve yourself loose stuff. The supermarket has loose as well as pre-packed - but have poly bags. We re-use ours.

What I object to is that the tasteless cheap bananas are loose while the lovely, tasty expensive organic ones are pre-packed. I understand they need to differentiate between them, but there must be another way.

But... I had a Seasalt order delivered yesterday. In a double layered brown paper bag with the garments loose inside. NO PLASTIC! Mind you, it was delivered by Royal Mail so it wasn’t left on the doorstep in the rain.

We have a community shop in our town which prides itself on no plastic or very little. You can buy a single potato. There's a refillery too.
It can be slow to be served but it's friendly and sociable.
A return to old fashioned values perhaps?

I think it was Morrison's which were giving paper bags for the loose fruit and veg when we went the other day.

I had a light bulb moment this morning, I suspect it is a moment that most people had years ago and I am just slow on the uptake.

The reason so much of our shopping is so packaged in every type of packaging materials is because we no longer have shop assistants.

Think about fruit and veg. In the supermarket fruit and veg aisle there will 6 kinds of apples, 4 types of onions 3 types of potatoes. If everything was loose when you get to the till, how is the cashier to remember which one is which -simples -. Have one item free flow and all the rest packaged with names and prices on the packaging.

Until recently there were still green grocers where you went in, someone put your fruit and veg directly in your basket or in a recyclable/compostable/reusable paper bag.

This applied in almost every kind of shop. If we want to get rid of packaging bring back shop assistants.

Oh, except, remember the long queues waiting to be served, not being able to see just how fresh the bottom fruit in the bag was.

Back to square one, pass me that package of 6 Braeburn apples.

Its tricky isn't it when faced with the barage of merchandise Pamela

A silver lining in this coronavirus scare may be less crap from china and less pollution for them.
We used to give out paper bags with a pencil and a packet of flower seeds along with chocolate and birthday cake. Always home made.
smug so and so

We could do a lot by simply refusing to buy plastic crap.
I’ve recently been to children’s party. The house and garden was festooned with plastic bunting,(it’s summer where I am at the moment) all the children were given plastic goody bags filled with more plastic rubbish.
The garden was awash with plastic slides, pools, ride on toys. We used to have to share toys, not have one each.
The message doesn’t seem to making much impression on the young.
There were 3 birthday cakes, one to eat and 2 to smash. One was full of sweets, one full of plastic things.
If we didn’t buy the rubbish in the first place there wouldn’t be so much to dispose of.
Plastic should be viewed as a valuable product to be used wisely.

I’m afraid we have to choose the least worse solution, to dispose of our waste, recycle or compost where it is economic, but not at any cost. Soft plastics in particular should not go to landfill. My own bins are over 80% recyclable with less than 20% waste, mostly soft plastic and some general rubbish
Biodegradable does not seem to be the holy grail of plastics.

I don't think it was your post which confused me, Grammaretto.

We trust what the LAs tell us about their recycling records whether or not that is true!

I was rather shocked by the lack of recycling in some areas overseas but understand that the logistics could be difficult.

Yes they are Callistemon I was confusing the issue.
I am pleased to hear that at least in some parts of the country recycling is happening.
We are very behind at every level.
I host young people from around the world and they are quite used to recycling and refilling. However I was surprised when a German boy saw more electric cars here than back home.

I thought anaerobic digesters were for processing food waste, not for non-recyclable rubbish which would normally go to landfill and for which we are trying to find a solution?

But the country is running out of landfill sites, hence all the expensive incinerators, and the land can then not be fully returned to agriculture because of the pollutants in the soil. Some grazing can take place, but whether the animals can then go into the food chain I am not sure.

15/20 years or so ago there were protests here against an incinerator being built upwind of Norwich. The tiny noxious particles (the sort which can go through lung walls), many known to be cancer causing, couldn’t be filtered out and apparently usually dropped at a distance over half a mile away - depending on the strength of the wind.

The main problem with it was the fact it couldn’t be turned down but had to burn at full power 363 days a year (2 days off pa for cleaning). This drastically discouraged recycling / reusing. Of course this was fifteen plus years ago so things may have changed. There may be more restrictions on what can be burnt. Mechanical Biological Treatment and Anaerobic Digesters were much better as they are sealed, but also much more expensive to build. In the end, an incinerator was built in Suffolk.

Also, modern landfill sites are pretty good nowadays. They are sealed below and the methane produced is collected for power. Energy from Waste!

I am often defeated by the logic of some protest groups. They walk the walk (and cause endless disruption), talk the the talk, but do not seem to think the think. ER is one such, but 10 years ago we had a local group who did the same sort of thing over a local issue.

Sorry, that sounds like gobbledegook and not what I typed.

By incinerating non-recycleable waste
In Gloucestershire

There is a new facility in Gloucestshire, M0nica which has been mired in controversy. The aim is to reduce landfill by incineration unrecyclable waste and thus power 25,000 homes and recovering metals, but ER and other groups did everything possible to try to prevent this opening.

We need answers not protests.

I like that idea MOnica I was at one of the garden festivals back in the 1980s where a garden was built next to, or on top of, a landfill site! The methane gas coming from the waste was being used to power the gardens. I wonder what became of those ideas.

I see Glastonbury will be using an anaerobic digester for power this year. Of course that's using slurry not plastic but researchers are working on generating electricity from plastic waste.

I know of no plans to get rid of plastic, just single use plastics that ends up clogging up our sea and countryside.

The landfill waste from my LA area goes to a waste incinerator. All such incinerators have to meet very high particulate and noxious gas standards and I remember reading sometime ago that the emissions from such furnaces can be cleaner than the air they are emitted into.

I was watching a beach being cleared of plastic on Coast on tv. I kept wondering what was then going to happen to this. Would it eventually end up in the sea again?
I read that by 2050 there will be more plastic in the sea than fish.

I can`t see us seeing the end of plastic it`s everywhere.
And the government wants us to stop using it.
How about making the manufacturers do the wright thing buy not making plastic.
Also we now have plastic money introduced by the same people who are telling us not to use it ? seriously.

Sorry Davidhs. And I did check it too!

Incineration is pretty toxic too David's. The really small particulates, the nasty stuff, go straight through the filters and into the atmosphere to be dropped downwind.

Here is some Tupperware info - the results here are for the yellow plastic measuring spoons/scoops:
When tested with an XRF instrument, the “Daffodil Yellow” vintage (c, 1972) Tupperware measuring cups had the following readings:

Lead (Pb): 2,103 +/- 41 ppm
Arsenic (As): 250 +/- 28 ppm
Chromium (Cr): 735 +/- 68 ppm
Zinc (Zn): 463 +/- 18 ppm
Nickel (Ni): 20 +/- 8 ppm
Iron (Fe): 51 +/- 19 ppm
Vanadium (V): 239 +/- 155 ppm
Titanium (Ti): 10,100 +/- 400 ppm
For Context: The amount of Lead that is considered toxic in a newly manufactured item intended for use by children in America (where Tupperware originates) is anything 90 ppm Lead or higher in the paint or coating, or 100 ppm Lead (or higher) in the substrate.

I still can’t find the original info and obviously people will go on using it, but like the new “bamboo” cups/mugs and plates they are apparently leaking chemicals into our foods (and our children’s foods). The bamboo is generally leaking formaldehyde rather than arsenic, cadmium and lead etc. but it’s a similar issue.

My children loved my Tupperware scoops etc and used to chew on them. I don’t want my grandchildren doing the same.

felice I couldn't agree with you more. I've posted before about the danger of hot meals being given in non-sealable paper containers - the gravy running all over the place, the curry slopping onto the car seats.

Just after Christmas, my 80 year old friend who had gone to collect a take-away, saw this happening and reached out to stop the carton tipping over.
She swerved, hit a small tree on the grass verge and wrote off her car.
Fortunately she was unhurt, just shocked but now she has no vehicle thanks to this lunacy and baa-baa thinking.