I was reading the BBC web site and found comments to a story
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/3116318.stm to be exact)
which reminded me of all the enforced waste we're faced with
in daily life:
Everything in the supermarket is covered in
plastic - there's a company that even sells
bananas and oranges in plastic boxes! I regularly
refuse plastic bags in shops, which seems to cause
a great deal of trouble for the staff. In
Debenhams, they tried to tell me that I had to
take a bag. It was only when I said I wouldn't buy
the product if they made me take a bag that they
relented.
...
Whilst with other fruit and veg, you can just put
as much as you want in a bag, all organic fruit
and veg is pre-packed in plastic. It's just daft
when you could end up harming the environment more
by buying organic than not!
These comments were in regard to plastic recycling, but one
could easily find many more bits of enforced waste and other
ridiculousness just by looking around.
So look around. What's wasteful and could benefit from rethinking?
21 responses total.
There is obvious stuff out there that is just pretty wasteful-- certain foodstuffs that just have *way* too much packaging. Nabisco Lunchables have got to be the worst offenders and I think they were on some list as such. I'd imagine a lot of the convenience foods are heavy on the packaging, and any other product that supposedly saves time. And the more dispoable it is, well, no-brainer. I myself need to remember to take a canvas bag to the grocery store, especially where the one we go to allows you to bag your own. (No need to ask or make a hassle.) I hate having to deal with excess plastic bags, so I'd think I'd remember by now.
Haha, the grocery store you go to *lets* you bag your own groceries? At the ghetto grocery store near my house, the cashier rolls her eyes and has this great "oh how I suffer" look if you dont bag your own groceries. She doesnt ask you if you want paper or plastic either. You get what you get.
Boxes on toothpaste tubes. They could shrinkwrap a safety seal around the cap.
here you have to bag your own shit. and you have to pay for the plastic bag. so people generally bring their own bag. inside the supermarket they also have machines which give you money for recycling large plastic bottles and beer bottles.
Shouldn't that be "Go plastically"?
We buy our produce at the farmer's market and freeze excess for the winter (in reusable plastic bags or boxes) and we buy our grains and beans via a buying club (in 25-50 pound paper bags which we find other uses for). Jim says we take in more trash than we put out (boomboxes and the like, and most recently a battery powered electric lawnmower, bikes) and fix it and get it back into use. Yet somehow I keep accumulating plastic bags (which I give to people selling at the market) - I wonder where they come from? Bread comes in bags - get a bread machine.
resp:2 Haha?!? Shit, the prices are lower because you bag 'em. Check it 'out, that's how WinCo, based in Boise, ID, operates.
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for some of the plastic containers, i wait until the cashier is ready to run the credit card or receive cash frmo my hand and then calmly state: "i'll be happy to pay for all this as soon as you remove what i'm buying from these plastic tombs, in which i have no interst whatsoever." cashier usually has mental meltdown at the immediate prospect (cause *they* cant stand the damn thigns eitehr) or att the prospect of stalled checkout line. always gotten the service i need - some times with store-rancor though. gee, whoda thunk it?
passive aggressive bullshit.
re #3: I imagine a big part of the reason for the boxes is that they're much easier to stack on store shelves than tubes would be..
(Another reason for boxes around tubes is to prevent sharp edges from puncturing them, causing losses and making a mess.) More ridiculousness I see every day: waste designed into architecture. Take lighting. I have not worked or shopped in a single modern building that was actually designed to use daylight! Even when the sun is flooding down outside these buildings take pains to filter it out at the windows so it doesn't glare, and then they fix the darkness with ceiling or hanging fixtures. The costs are considerable. For every watt of light a typical fluorescent fixture makes roughly 3 watts of heat, which in turn requires at least one more watt of air-conditioning to pump outdoors; that comes out to roughly 1.3-1.5 watts total for every watt fed to the light fixtures. Sunlight is roughly 50% visible and 50% infrared, so even if the IR isn't filtered you'd get only half as much total heat. Another alterative is to accept the same heat load but get twice as much light. Good lighting is supposed to improve productivity as well, which also adds to the bottom line. Lots of businesses pay time-of-day rates, so the rates they're paying for the need to use electric lighting on hot, sunny summer days would probably make daylighting pay for itself. Why aren't they doing it? Shortsightedness and lack of will to change, I guess. I'll really know energy-consciousness has arrived when every computer workstation has two fiber-optic cables running to it: one to carry data to the computer, and one to carry captured sunlight to the LCD. (You want BRIGHT?)
I think office managers want consistent lighting, night or day, summer or winter, clear of stormy. You can't get that with sunlight alone. However things could be better arranged so that sunlight is used more when it is available, and won't cause other problems (harsh and shifting shadows, color imbalances, heat, etc).
Indeed. But I wonder about the initial costs, especially where you'd have to renovate. I currently work at Richland (WA) City Hall, which could really stand a remodel for some natural lighting in places-- so much of the building is just dark. For that matter, I don't think many of the fixtures are fluorescent. I think there are some incandescents that could be replaced with compact fluorescents, and even the standard tubes could be updated.
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Re #14: Easily achieved with dimmers on the ceiling lamps which adjust to maintain light level if e.g. the sky clouds up. This is off-the-shelf technology, it's in use today. With all the products out there like Solatubes, it really amazes me that the commercial market isn't going for them like crazy. It looks like a huge potential savings; heck, you could even put Solatubes through existing HVAC roof penetrations and not even have to worry about new leaks. How about light shelves? You put a flat white surface by the window, and it bounces sunlight up and off the ceiling so you don't need as much electric light. I don't think I've seen one outside a magazine.
resp:16 That's not exactly what I said. I said some areas were pretty dark.
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Re #17: The problem, I think, is that office buildings (at least the small, one-story type) are often built on spec, so the goal is to put up the building as cheaply as possible and to allow for the eventual owner to choose their own internal arrangement. The result is you end up with a cement-block shell and a flat roof with minimal insulation, dropped ceilings with fluorescent lights, and modular panel walls or cubical farms. This is not conducive to giving everyone a window for natural light, or using skylights and other light sources that are not easily rearranged. Skylights also have a reputation for leaking and driving up maintenance costs. The sheer amount of wasted space in these buildings is stunning. Popping up a ceiling tile in the one I work in shows nearly enough wasted vertical space for another story.
This isn't quite the case-- you'd have to see it... the building was made in the 1940's, I think.
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