Banish Plastic

[flower_hercules]

Only just started reading this thread and got really exited!

Check out these tow blogs below, they are a bit out of date, but truly inspirational.

http://lifelessplastic.blogspot.com/

http://365daysoftrash.blogspot.com/

(I hope, as a newbie, that I am not repeating something listed here before).

[merlin]

I have to say, I have not read all the posts in this thread. However, I just wanted to say that where I live the government have made it compulsory for any shop to charge for any plastic bags given out at the checkout, which they love.
Now I must admit, it did get on my pip at first, mainly because I am a man, and I usually forget to take the shopping bags with me to the shop.

It has worked though, I can clearly see people walking about with 'old fashioned shopping bags, as well as the new fold away jobs. I know it has worked because the shop still has shed loads of plasic bags with santa on them.

I wonder if it could be extended to packaging that is clearly over the top. For example, we went to a friends house last week, they had a shop brought pizza in the freezer (poor loves). It was in a plastic shrink wrap and in a box!!!

I mean, it can’t be right can it? I said about it at the time, and the response was that the cheaper ones were in just a shrink wrap (I wonder why lol). I remember a course I was sent on from work many years back.

PMV, perceived market value (it must be good, it’s expensive).

[Thomzo]

Flower, don't worry about repeating old threads. It sometimes takes a newbie to resurrect an interesting topic and get us chatting again.

Zoe

[narmour]

I decided last night as a special treat I was going to cook venison (don't judge me Bambi lovers). I've been banging on about it for weeks and haven't got round to it so decided to pop to the church of consumerism down the road. I went in and found two nice leg steaks, vacuum packed, then as an extra precaution against who knows what, places inside one of those little meat trays! how rediculous. I re-use these in my greenhouse as water trays for some of my smaller plants so they will find a home but I mean seriously. What's that all about?

[diggernotdreamer]

I went into Waitrose once and bought a small organic loaf. They had none on the shelf so the woman went out back, got a loaf packed in a plastic bag, took off the plastic bag and then put it into another plastic bag. I got a bit aerated and said leave on the original, I am not allowed to she said. Well I wrote a snotty letter to Waitrose quoting some eec packaging directive I found out about, and they wrote back with some old rubbish as to why they did this, anyway, several months later they are selling the bread in the original wrapper. A butcher in Enniskillen is going to start selling his meat in paper bags to reduce the amount of plastics they give out, just keep moaning I say

[GeorgeSalt]

I do some work for a plastic film recycler, and it's a fascinating industry. The principle problem is that the general public sees "plastic", including some materials that are very difficult or almost impossible to deal with. Simple low density polyethylene films are generally easy to process, and more valuable for reuse the less colour the have. Mixed polyethylene (low and high density) is less easy to seal with as the two materials have different melting properties and running them through the machine together is very difficult. PVC is for specialist processing.

The worst problems with plastic materials are the following two categories:

• Plastic laminates - crisp packets with laminated layers of metal foil and plastic, laminated juice boxex, etc. Tetrapak has developed it's own process for recycling their cartons, but generally recycling these materials is uneconomic.
• Contaminated material - contamination can cause problems with the processing machinery and can introduce uncontrolled contamination of the final reprocessed product that reduced its usefulness. Food packaging is one of the worst culprits. Washing is possible, but with plastics films it's too easy for the material to be wrapped into the film.

The ideal solution is to reduce unneccessary use of plastics, and also to make sure that where plastics are used the packaging design process takes into account how the pacakging material could be recycled and how the end user can identify which type of material it's made from so that it can be directed to the correct recycling route.

Householders need to be able to identify the broad types of plastic, local authorities need to collect for recylcling only those materials that can be recycled. And then householders need to start questioning the producers of goods whose packaging cannot be recycled. Too often the question is thrown at local authorities, "Why don't you collect yoghurt pots for recycling?" - and that's clearly the wrong direction in which to be asking the question.


On a related note.. locally our glass and bottle banks have been switched to all-colours-in-one. No longer are the higher value clear glass bottles and jars collected seperately from the lower value greens and least value browns. My suspicion is that the glass is now going for use as an aggregate in construction and not being melt processed back into glass. This is a much cheaper route to a much lower value product - but it still attracts the same value of recycling credits under the Regulations and Directives on recycling packaging.

This is a related note because the same thing is happening in plastics recycling - melt for reu-use is under constant pressure from the lower cost option of sort-and-export. A plastics broker that collects plastics, bales them and exports to a country outside the EU receives the same payment for recycling credits as someone who goes the energy intensive route of melting for reuse. Once the exported plastics leave the EU they leave the controls on energy use, environmental protecion and worker safety protection that domestic recyclers operate under.

[Crickleymal]

If they made the recycleable labels on plastic products easy to read it might help. Sometimes you need a magnifying glass and sometimes it would be easier to take a rubbing rather than try to deciper the low contrast impression.

Speaking of useless packaging, I bought a couple of cloth belts (for trousers) on ebay. Each came in its own plastic sleeve which the seller had then individually wrapped in another plastic sleeve then bagged the whole lot in a plastic bag.

[Skippy]

Some time back there was a small factory near me that made pallets with recycled plastic. The process was open to all types of plastic as the waste wasn't melted but simply chopped up finely and used as a filler component to a resin to form the pallets .Wheather this was any more envoiromental than what is done otherwise I'd only be able to guess but it did seem to solve the problem of mixed plastic waste.


Pete

[the.fee.fairy]

crickleymal that reminds me of packaging here - it's ridiculous!

I bought a tube of cadburys eclairs. They were in a cardboard tube...inside that was a roll covered in plastic...and then each individual eclair was wrapped in another plastic layer....and then in a paper layer!

Why?!!

[Flo]

It provides jobs - making all the forms of wrapping and then getting rid of them.

[Pumkinpie]

I reused plastic bags yesterday, ones that had been collected . We simply fused them and reused the fused plastic sheets to make other things.
Decorative things like tea light shades and napkin rings. There are lots of useful things I could make using the technique so I think I might ask the neighbours to save their plastic bags rather than send them to landfill . Reuse, recycle.

[niknik]

that sounds interesting Pumpkinpie!
How do you fuse them?
How about some pics of finished items? or some instructions..maybe even a new thread, see what other items we can come up with!

[Pumkinpie]

Here is a photo of my tea light cover. My friend at craft club made a Christmassy one using the Christmas plastic bags and last year a Christmas tree one to use as a night light cover. It is very versatile. I'll have to ask my craft club lady if I can post the method here . She has developed the her own technique.

Plastic tea light cover

image.jpg (233.91 KiB) Viewed 27487 times

.

[Skippy]

Seems it's going to get just that little bit harder to completely banish plastic in the near future
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-25427663
yet another item that will no longer be made of bio degradable/reusable material.


Pete

[Flo]

Someone tell the folks with charity collection bags to be a bit more frugal. Two out Monday last week to be collected last Thursday. Two out this Monday to be collected today I think.