All those pennies, two pennies, five pennies etc.
Some of them look so gnarly they could have come from god knows what. Maybe from some long dead mans pocket washed up on the Thames, and then put back into circulation.
We get our shopping from Ocado, and pay 5p for every bag. However, they take bags back for recycling and pay 5p each, and not just for their bags, so we give them the annoying charity bags too.
Supermarket shopping and home delivery seems incompatible with plastic reduction. Yesterday we got red chillies, green chillies and stem ginger, all of which came wrapped in plastic, which cannot be recycled in Hampshire.
Interesting - I think Tesco and Sainsbury’s have some catching upto do then HH.
I am very surprised that Hants can’t recycle plastic, I can only guess they have taken that decision and decided to spend the money elsewhere like bonuses, though one may accuse me of being cynical…
They do the usual bottles, but not plastic pots - yogurt etc - or plastic film. It’s because they adopted recycling earlier than many others and therefore their materials recovery facility cannot handle it.
By the way, speaking as someone who worked in local government finance for thirty years, I’d suggest your aside about bonuses is wholly inappropriate. If you’d worked in local government you’d know the immense pressures on the staff. And as for bonuses, dream on!
I do hope you are not trying to suggest that local government is beyond criticism just because you worked in it for 30 years HH. There is “immense pressure on staff” in all areas of life but when it comes to hitting the headlines, local Councils are leading the way. This sort of thing doesn’t help:
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Well, RBKC is not Hampshire and I certainly wouldn’t support those bonuses either. The issue of pay for Council bosses is entirely separate. Hampshire for example spends over £1.5bn, is hugely complicated and needs to pay its senior management appropriately in order to attract people with the right skill set. It’s wrong to expect local government staff to work for a pittance, sit on spikes and wear hair shirts. I wouldn’t believe a word written in the Mail as a matter of principle anyway.
Now, to get back on topic. I had a good moan at Waitrose customer services recently over them wrapping their ‘Essential Swede’ in plastic. It’s ridiculous - not just the plastic but that a swede could be considered essential.
He is on this forum 
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Yep - totally understand your distrust of the Daily Mail HH, perhaps the Hampshire Chronicle is a little more centre ground:
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That sounds very reasonable, given the size of the authority. So long as the Hampshire pension fund keeps paying my pension, I’m happy. Anyway, we are too far off topic now.
Plastic “recyclable” products annoy me the most. Since China has refused to take our thousands of bales of used plastic to recycle on our behalf, the plastic is accumulating by the tonne every day in our clean and green New Zealand.
More recyclable plastics recently introduced are better, but we lack large scale composting equipment to break them down quickly, so instead, they will degrade slowly over decades in landfills.
Like others I really miss recyclable bottles which kids could trade in for sweets at corner stores. Bring them back! I know in the 1960s we kids became quite expert as to what sweets we could get for handing in a few Coke bottles. It was a very self regulatory system.
If someone had told me in the 1970s, that people would pay for water in plastic bottles, for the same price of Coke, we thought they would have been stark staring mad! Now we are drowning in plastic.
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Well we are off-topic HH - it’s tempting to continue to stoke the fire and fan it into an inferno but no good can come of that so happy to move on…
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I recently made a visit to my local “incinerator” & boy oh boy did I learn a lot about recycling & waste disposal
The facility is not a recycling centre, in fact it only treats non-recyclable waste, but the treatment means it converts everything into something reusable & as such is called an energy recovery facility.
It receives sorted non-recyclable waste from the local area & specialist recycling plants around the south of UK. The incoming waste - aprx 326,000 tonnes per year - goes straight into the furnace - & the furnace is a science in itself.
The heat is used for electricity generation & other in-plant applications. The electricity powers the plant itself & connected to the national grid produces power for aprx 53,000 homes.
The furnace waste including gases is sorted for metals & other recyclable products & the ash sorted for use in construction & road building materials.
Exhaust gases are scrubbed & the carbon recovered,
The plant uses, converts & diverts 95% of the areas non-recyclable waste away from landfill & is a significant factor in keeping the local authority at the top of UK’s recycling league for the third year running.
So if you have a modern incinerator in your area, check it out & see if they have public visitor tours.
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We have had full recycling of plastic for quite a few years. They have now told us to only recycle the hard plastic items like bottles, but not plastic film, bags etc, much like yourself. We were told the recyclers were no longer accepting this type of plastic. I did read somewhere that China, India etc were no longer accepting any old plastic waste exported to them…perhaps this is becoming a factor, so we need/ should have resolved our own waste problems.
I agree, Hugh, it’s crazy. I often go for country walks and find beer cans and plastic bottles all over the place. A decent deposit scheme would address much of this. We don’t buy bottled water at home and always try to carry it with us when we are out, but don’t always remember.
If anyone is interested there is an iOS app called Refill, which lists places happy to refill your water bottle. It’s a great idea.
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A lot of political opposition to incineration ration based upon poor understanding of scrubber technology to handle emissions. It’s certainly a part of the long-term solution
Indeed there is, we had a lot of protests over the one in my post, banner waving folks & all mostly well meaning. Now some of the same people have found out what it actually does & how clean it is & are now fully signed up incinerator - whoops sorry I mean energy recovery facility - fans.
Yep. I have worked in private sector, local authorities and government, and only the private sector had bonuses of any sort, likewise other perks like company cars. And the public sector has very rigid controls to prevent corruption, so even a gift like a bottle of wine in gratitude for solving someone’s problem couldn’t be accepted. The flip side was a better pension scheme than the private sector - overall balances out - but perception is a case of ‘the grass is always greener’…
When I started in local government in the 80s, lease cars were very prevalent for senior staff, but as cuts have bitten they have virtually gone. When I was CFO we were lunched by our investment managers, but it was always a cheap pub meal with no alcohol, and the meal was documented in the book of gifts for audit purposes. It’s a good way of doing things and it’s essential to have transparency. That should help to engender trust among taxpayers but it doesn’t seem to. There seems to be fairly a widely held perception that local government officers are on the take and living a life of luxury. Strange.
Plastic bags. I understand that paper bags have a greater carbon footprint, but carbon dioxide is not the be all and end all.
I just don’t understand the need to shrink wrap vegetables.
Cucumbers are the worst as they seem to turn to slurry far more quickly than if they were kept in their natural state.
Broccoli - why on earth sell loose broccoli next to shrink wrapped broccoli? Simply to get you through the checkout quicker I suspect.
I really hate plastic netting say on packs of lemons/oranges - horrible stuff that produces loads of tiny filaments when you open a pack - I tend to buy loose or in cardboard boxes in preference, but some fruits are not available except in a pack.
I’m also annoyed with the trend of some supermarkets to sell loose fruit on a cost per item basis rather than on weight as they used to. Again presumably to reduce weighing time at the checkout.
How often have you bought something at a checkout and been amazed that the assistant doesn’t even know what a piece of ginger or other item is?