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The Environment Thread

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How simple and obvious is this action ? Who makes this compostable, biodegradable packaging ?

First plastic-free aisle is an example for other supermarkets to follow
There is no logic in wrapping perishable food in indestructible plastic, say campaigners hailing today’s launch in Amsterdam

Letters

Wed 28 Feb 2018 01.00 EST Last modified on Wed 28 Feb 2018 06.13 EST




The plastic-free aisle at Ekoplaza supermarket in Amsterdam. The food is wrapped in a compostable biomaterial made from trees and leaves. Photograph: PR
Today the world’s first plastic-free aisle was launched in Amsterdam by environmental campaign group A Plastic Planet and Dutch supermarket Ekoplaza. The aisle enables shoppers to choose from 700 everyday products that are free from plastic packaging. Before the end of the year, Ekoplaza plans to roll the plastic-free aisle out across each of its 74 stores.

Plastic packaging has no place in food and drink. There is no logical basis for wrapping something as perishable as food with something as indestructible as plastic. With recycled plastics today accounting for just 6% of total plastics demand in Europe, it’s clear that we cannot recycle our way out of the plastic problem. Food and drink plastic packaging does not belong in a circular economy given that it is difficult to reclaim, is easily contaminated, and all too often proves valueless.

The grocery retail sector accounts for more than 40% of all plastic packaging. Plastic-free aisles make sound commercial sense, with a Populus poll last year revealing that 91% of Britons back the measure.

Plastic has replaced so many forms of packaging that consumers wanting to reduce their plastic footprint at the moment find it impossible to do so.

We agree with A Plastic Planet that a plastic-free aisle will help consumers to reduce their own single-use plastic mountain. We call on supermarkets across Europe to follow Ekoplaza’s example without delay.

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...s-an-example-for-other-supermarkets-to-follow
 
So they are going to cut down trees to make packaging ?

Doesn't sound a great idea to me.
 
SirRumpole said:
So they are going to cut down trees to make packaging ?

Doesn't sound a great idea to me.
Click to expand...

Or maybe grow tons of bamboo or other fast growing biomass that takes in CO2 , holds it in the material and then releases it back into the soil ? I suggest that is the desired route.
 
Did you know ? Once-upon-a-time.. it was the Republicians in the US who were leaders in protecting the environment !! Or so it appears.

Environmental Protection Was Once a Top Priority of Republicans

As delivered on the Senate floor
Mr. President, I rise today for the seventy-sixth time to urge my colleagues that it is time for us to wake up to the growing threats of climate change. Not a single state remains unaffected by the unprecedented changes we are already seeing, driven by the excessive carbon pollution that we continue to dump into our oceans and atmosphere.

Yet in Washington, our Republican colleagues either parrot the polluter line that climate change is just a hoax, or stay silent. No one will step forward.

Mr. President, it was not always this way. Environmental protection was once a top priority of the Republican Party. Seems remarkable now, but it’s true. In the early 1970s, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act were all passed with broad bipartisan support, and signed by a Republican President. In the 1980s and 1990s, bipartisan majorities voted to strengthen those laws, led by Rhode Island’s Republican Senator, John Chafee – who served as chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee and whose seat I now have the honor to hold.

Conservation and stewardship were once fundamental principles of American conservatism. From seminal thinkers of the conservative movement to great Republican leaders of the twentieth century, the conservative ideal included a commitment to interests of future generations.

Today, under a relentless barrage of unlimited corporate spending in our elections, much and perhaps most of it by polluters, the interests of future generations have taken a back seat to the interests of the oil companies and coal barons. The disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision let polluters cast their dark shadow over Republicans in Congress who might otherwise work with Democrats on curbing their carbon pollution.

[Edmund Burke chart]

Edmund Burke, an Irish-born Member of the British Parliament, is considered by many the father of modern conservatism. Sir Winston Churchill called him “a foremost apostle of Liberty.” Burke was a staunch defender of our American Colonies and his statue stands here in Washington today. His 1790 conservative manifesto, Reflections on the Revolution in France, cautioned that we are but “temporary possessors” of our society. If individuals are “unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity,” he wrote, “[n]o one generation could link with another. Men would become little better than flies of a summer.”

In our case, flies of a carbon-fueled summer.

[Russell Kirk chart]

Russell Kirk was a Distinguished Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, who none other than President Ronald Reagan dubbed “the prophet of American conservatism.” He wrote a 1970 piece for the Baltimore Sun, “Conservation Activism is a Healthy Sign.”

“Nothing,” Kirk wrote, “is more conservative than conservation.”

The noted essayist and Kentucky farmer Wendell Berry—known for what The American Conservative magazine called his “unshakable devotion to the land, to localism, and to the dignity of traditional life,” wrote in 1993: “Our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy.”

(Berry would also remind us in this chamber that “[w]hether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is a party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes.”)

https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/n...ection-was-once-a-top-priority-of-republicans
 

Howard Zinn and Chris Hedges, not at the same time, said that it wasn't really a party or a politician that ever does anything... it's the people, the activists, that rises up and demanded it.

I think it was Zinn who said that all it take is about 1% of the population to organise and demand change, and it'll happen.

Hence the war on unions, social solidarity; the gutting of education; the defunding of public (everything)... It's not so much because the ruling elite needs the money, though it doesn't hurt either... it's to drive a wedge between citizens/plebs... It's to make resources scarce that one group envy or fight another over scraps.

That and free TV, plenty of sports and other circuses.

Though what they fail to remember is that, like Rome, the plebs need both bread and circuses.

Without bread... can't really pay attention to circuses. Then the focus is back on union organising, worker strikes shutting down en entire school system, transits other other public works.
 

It seems that sea walls are being built to reclaim estuaries from the sea so that the land can be used for other things, thus destroying the wildlife there.

Just another example of the human predators destroying the environment that we as well as other species depend on.
 
basilio said:
A new generation of manufacturers and scientists is working to tackle the global plastic waste crisis head on
Click to expand...
If they're using something made from wood then I can't see a major drama with that but before supermarkets get rid of plastic I'd rather they got rid of non-recyclable metals use in packaging.

That's a borderline crime against future generations in my view to be wasting resources in that way. I mean seriously, foil lined chip packets? What was wrong with just plain plastic like they used to be?

Plastic has issues but it's not the worst thing around that's for sure.
 
Amazing display of whales and dolphins just off the coast at Sunshine Beach happening now, in front of the surf club.
 
I was chatting with a mate of mine, who is a recycling technician(garbo), he was saying the banning of single use plastic bags was madness.
He said the cheap bags broke down really quickly, now people are using the better quality ones as bin liners and they don't break down at all.
I wonder if any Government Dept is monitoring the effect of the ban ?
My wife has always taken her own bags shopping, so it doesn't effect my personally, but maybe the ban will cause more environmental problems than it will cure.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-08-...many-landfill-coles-woolworths-shops/10081496
 
One of the most noted environmentalists in the US is Wendell Berry. He is both a hands on farmer and prolific writer.

One of his more astute essays was called "Solving for Pattern" . Essentially "How do we come up with solutions to problems that alleviate more than one issue and don't create their own forseeable future problems"

Well worth a read and think as we attempt to tackle a raft of inter related issues.

Solving for Pattern
by Wendell Berry
Chapter 9 in
The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural & Agricultural
(North Point Press,
1981). Originally
published in the Rodale Press periodical
The New Farm
.
Our dilemma in agriculture now is that the industrial methods that have so spectacularly solved some of the problems of food production have been accompanied by “side effects” so damaging as to threaten the survival of farming. Perhaps the best clue to the nature and gravity of this dilemma is that it is not limited to agriculture. My immediate concern here is with the irony of agricultural methods that destroy,
first, the health of the soil and, finally, the health of humancommunities. But I could just as easily be talking about sanitation systems that pollute, school systems that graduate illiterate students, medical cures that cause disease, or nuclear armaments that explode in the midst of the people they are meant to protect. This is a kind of surprise that is characteristic of our time: the cure proves incurable; security results in the evacuation of a neighborhood or a town. It is only when it is understood that our ag ricultural dilemma is characteristic not of our agriculture but of our time that we can begin to understand why these surprises happen, and to work out standard s of judgment that may prevent them.

To the problems of farming, then, as to other problems of our time, there appear to be three kinds
of solutions:

http://ceadserv1.nku.edu/longa/haiti/kids/history/Berry_Solving_for_Pattern.pdf
 
My local supermarket is now giving away their more durable plastic bags by discounting the $0.15 charge. I suspect they're worried that people might shop elsewhere unless they do so. Certainly a great example of mankind meeting destiny on the path taken to avoid it.
 
Aldi plastic bags that you put fruit in have biodegradable written all over them.
 

This should only be .01% of how we resolve the problems caused by plastics in our environment. Plastics in our food chain, eco systems, oceans are causing catastrophic problems which are getting worse every day.
 
Plastic is like many things.

From an environmental perspective its invention is a truly brilliant thing, in that it is vastly superior to the alternatives, if used sensibly. In so many ways it leaves metals and timber for dead and that's just on environmental grounds. Far less CO2 emissions for a start.

It is however an outright disaster if used inappropriately and especially if dumped in waterways or the ocean where it causes serious damage to wildlife.

How to stop dumb animals, and by that I mean humans, doing silly things is the real problem not plastic itself.
 
As Australian farmers deal with another drought and the ongoing effects of global warming it's worth looking at a farmer who has taken a more conservative and highly profitable approach to his farm

How a farmer went from 'the moron approach' to a farm full of water
Blake Foden18 August 2018 — 12:00am
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Talking points
  • Martin Royds has 14 weirs on his Braidwood farm that remain almost full despite the drought
  • He also had a new dam dug just two weeks ago. It immediately started to fill with groundwater
  • Mr Royds takes a holistic management approach to farming. A new analysis shows his profits are 230 per cent above average
Martin Royds used to take what he now calls "the moron approach" to farming.

"I used to go out and spray and kill everything," the Braidwood farmer says.

Braidwood farmer Martin Royds beside his new dam, dug two weeks ago, which immediately started to fill up with groundwater.

Photo: Karleen Minney
"When you look at the way Australian farmers developed, it was fighting the land, fighting droughts, fighting fires, fighting weeds.

"I’ve now realised that if we work with it, the land will work with you and it really gets a lot easier."

These are not times any farmer, including Mr Royds, would describe as easy.

But the holistic management approaches he has taken on his 457-hectare farm, Jillamatong, mean his costs of production are minimal, allowing him to cope better than most with the drought that has hit NSW and the ACT hard.

Mr Royds has not sprayed chemicals on his property for nearly 30 years.

Martin Royds beside a contour channel that extends from one of his 14 weirs, which remain almost full despite the drought.

Photo: Karleen Minney
One of the biggest changes he's made is the construction of 14 weirs along a four-metre deep erosion gully, which was taking water and fertile soil off his farm and out to sea.

For just $10,000, he was able to "put a plug" in the erosion gully with the weirs, which remarkably remain almost full at a time when farm dams across eastern Australia are drying out in the middle of winter.

https://www.canberratimes.com.au/na...-to-a-farm-full-of-water-20180817-p4zy23.html
 
basilio said:
For just $10,000, he was able to "put a plug" in the erosion gully with the weirs, which remarkably remain almost full at a time when farm dams across eastern Australia are drying out in the middle of winter.
Click to expand...

The thought that immediately comes to mind is why is he filling dams with groundwater which then evaporates instead of irrigating directly from groundwater ?
 
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