Target calls it a wrap on plastic bags
The retail giant Target has confirmed it will ban plastic bags in its 283 Australian stores next month. It will be the first large retailer to break ranks and ban bags on environmental grounds.
Instead of issuing plastic bags to shoppers at checkouts, from June 1 Target will require shoppers to either bring their own bags or buy reusable bags for $1 each or compostable corn starch bags for 10 cents each.
Target says the ban will stop 100 million plastic bags from going into landfill and polluting the environment each year - or just under 3 per cent of the 4 billion bags that pass through Australian checkouts each year.
via hippieflavor: robotsalsa: mhking: thephlipside: peetypassion
I’m not the biggest hippie-thumper out there, but I own 3-resuable grocery bags myself, and enjoy seeing the reduction in waste going out in my trash cans.
Great….except for the part where 90% of those cornstarch bags will go into general waste anyway (i.e. landfill) because there’s no processing infrastructure for biodegradable plastics, and very few people will compost the bags themselves. At the moment it’s just a switch from sending oil-based plastics to landfill to sending plant-based plastics to landfill where they can’t be broken down anyway due to the extreme toxicity of that environment.
Still, it’s a good start and I’m all for retailers not treating people like children (or pandering to their need to be treated like children) because we don’t have the presence of mind to take bags with us to the shops. Also, as the volume of commodity bio-plastics in the market increases, maybe the government will be forced to do something about setting up composting disposal infrastructure and education schemes.
She can sense if I’m not asleep and will wake up screaming on a roughly hourly basis if I’m completely silent and in another room pulling an all-nighter (happens every time), but won’t wake if some gronk does a deafening burnout a few metres from her bedroom window (both of these are semi-regular events). Does that seem weird to anyone else? I must be warping her morphic sleep field or something. Maybe I should get advice from Rupert Sheldrake.
She also happens to send the cute-ometer off the dial…..but that’s unrelated.
A wonderful NY Times article by a dude with a PhD in Political Philosophy who now works for himself as a motorcycle mechanic.
I recommend it to you, friends.
“A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children.”
While “gifted” is hardly the tag I’d apply to myself, everything in this article and particularly the above resonates extremely strongly. Having a PhD, it has almost become intolerable - the pressure to do something worthwhile (i.e. highly intellectually demanding) that is always there in the background. The inescapable sense of guilt at the times when I just feel like making a living doing something utterly mindless. I once pressed ceramic tile blanks from powder for a week as part of getting to understand a manufacturing process, pressing them out for 10 hours almost non-stop each day. That was the one week of work I’ve probably enjoyed more than any other in my life. It was repetetive but involved a certain level of finesse in ensuring they turned out right. I loved it. I could actually think, because I didn’t have the pressure on me to think.
I’m rambling here…..but basically I concur wholeheartedly with this article. Knowledge work is good and necessary, but it’s a pity most of us are guilt-tripped into it from a young age when a lot of the time it just doesn’t suit. Yes, future posts may possibly see me looking to change work. We shall see…
I walked into the Hobby shop to buy some pin drills and got mugged by Revell’s newly-reissued Sopwith Triplane. Dang.
Now I’ve had to drag out my copy of The Sopwith Fighters, and the Camel, Pup, and Strutter, and build them all together. Life can be so tough.
GAH!
New Polish boutique model company has decided to kit out the Supermarine Southampton in 1/72 as their first model. I think I might explode!
The Disco is getting some remedial/preventative rust attention and then a full (probably mission brown) respray, retrimmed (white) vinyl rooftop, funtastic side stripes, and the tyres whitewalled.
BAMM! Can you dig it??
Ford 021C Concept, 1999
Jalopnik’s doing concept cars from 1999 today. I think the Ford 021C is bang on.
Does anyone else get flavours of Austin 1100 from it? No? Just me then.
Also: Orange. We approve of orange around here.
And around here.
Wheels are a bit pants, but overall design is an exercise in retro-awesome. Not getting too much of an Austin 100 vibe….can’t say what I’m getting off it, but whatever it is I’m into it. This may be largely due to the fact that it’s effectively bumperless, and bumperless begets instant awesome on 70s body shape 9 times out of 10.
via fuckyeahstarwars
