Re: Pearls Before Swine: Rat The Luddite

On Thu, 15 Aug 2024 18:17:41 -0700, Bobbie Sellers
<blissInSanFrancisco@mouse-potato.com> wrote:

On 8/15/24 09:03, Paul S Person wrote:

On 15 Aug 2024 00:21:40 -0000, kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) wrote:
 

Scott Lurndal <slp53@pacbell.net> wrote:

Paul S Person <psperson@old.netcom.invalid> writes:

He is explicitly including milk and juice, suggesting we go back to
glass.
>
Which is fine, so long as, when I drop one on the floor and it breaks,
he comes over, cleans up the mess, and gives me my money back.

>
Why should I pay for your clumsiness?

>
Returnable glass bottles with a deposit on them don't turn into litter.
And if they should turn into litter, kids will collect them to reclaim them.
>
And, in the modern age where gorilla glass is not expensive to make any
longer, the issue of breakage should be a non-issue.  (In the past, of
course, reusable bottles were made thick enough to be very hard to break,
witness returnable coca-cola bottles as an example.  But gorilla glass
can make them thinner and cheaper to transport.)

 
Try it and see if the market will buy it. Or if plastic is so strongly
preferred that glass is purchased only if no alternative exists.
 

The Trader Joes produce bags are biodegradable.

>
The biodegradable plastic bags usually are starch and an unstable
vinyl polymer.  The idea is kind of cool, but don't expect to use them
for long term storage.  I have kept electronic parts in grocery bags
to discover the bags were disintegrating in my cabinets.

>
Such bags are not meant for storage of electronic or hard
goods I have ascertained over years of experience and I use the plastic
vial that my medications come in for small parts or the anti-static bags
I buy locally or via mail order.  I also long ago when I was more active
invested in small plastic cabinet to keep screws, nails and hard parts in.
>
>

I was appalled to find that the biodegradable bags that I bought
(together with a small bin with lots of space in the sides to keep the
smell down) when the fad first started have long-since degraded in a
closed box sitting on a shelf which is mostly kept in the dark. When I
was told to bag my trash, I ended up buying plastic garbage bags
because I couldn't anything else locally and I don't want to buy 1000
biodegradable bags and find then unusable aftor only 20 or so have
been used. Once bitten, twice shy.

>
Well my biodegradable bags in the boxes they come in sit on
top of my refrigerators.  I live alone in a Studio Apartment and take
out bags of fruit and vegetable waste several times a week to keep the
insects and odor down.  In San Francisco this stuff goes to a
Compostable bin.  For other trash I use non-biodegradable bags with odor
suppression and that also carries out the animal food waste produced.
Paper and other recyclable materials go into their own bins.
I buy the bags i use locally in boxes of about 25 bags.
Buying a lot of bags is asking for losses.
Now whether or not the recycling is efficient I do not know
but that is the business of the city contractors picking up and
emptying these bins.

I have so little kitchen waste that it was a decade or more ago that I
discovered the problem (when I finally had enough to actually close
the bag and put in the Yard Waste cart), and it may be decades more
before I have another.

So buying them was definitely not as good an idea as I thought at the
time.

My 4-gal trash bags are plastic, sadly (compostible may be out but
paper would be fine if I found any), but they do come in large numbers
in a cardboard box (eventually recyclable) and feature a pull-string
(well, pull-plastic-tape) closure. Putting them a step up on the
locally available 4-gal trash bags with I had to close with leftover
bread bag fasteners because I couldn't figure out how to use the flaps
to close them (not that I tried particularly hard).
--
"Here lies the Tuscan poet Aretino,
Who evil spoke of everyone but God,
Giving as his excuse, 'I never knew him.'"