charlytune

Yeah but you try saying 'ununderstandable' after a couple of drinks

How about carpet beetles and clothes moths?

Thank you for writing this out.

Nah I'm not a fan of advocating for rape as punishment. It's pretty, erm, rapey.

I am a huge tea drinker and also like the Tiger tea like that, just with oat milk not cow juice.

My favourite place close to me is Hilbre Island, just off the coast of Wirral (Merseyside). When the tides are low you can walk out there, at high tide it's cut off. It's so close to Liverpool, and yet a world away. When I start walking from the beach towards it I feel like I'm leaving the world behind me and walking out into the wild. On a sunny day it's absolutely beautiful. It's a nature reserve and an SSSI, with loads of wild birds, butterflies etc, and there are small caves to explore at the beach level. It's one of my favourite places in the world.

Ok, but we're getting dragged into a tangential debate about farming when really my point was that we need to look at waste through the whole supply chain, from farming ingredients to getting put on the shelves. I'm sure we could pick apart the contribution of any one part of that chain and debate how significant it is. Together, at all points in the chain, there is plastic waste that the consumer doesn't see.

(And btw Canada isn't in the top 20 of global producers, according to the IMF / CIA World Factbook as at 2018; the EU is number 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture)

Edited to add: this 2022 UN report states that plastics are used extensively in agriculture and goes into how they are used and how they enter soil and water supplies: https://wedocs.unep.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.11822/40403/Plastics_Agriculture.pdf

And this is another UN report on the issue, stating that Asia is the largest user of plastics in agriculture. When China and India are two of the largest agricultural producers, that's an issue https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/12/1107342

So according to this link https://www.ciwm.co.uk/ciwm/knowledge/agricultural-waste.aspx

"Plastic packaging waste from agriculture represents approximately 1.5% of the overall volume of plastic packaging in the waste stream in England. The types of plastic wastes arising can vary and be both bulky and dirty often making the management of these wastes difficult. Around 135,500 tonnes of agricultural plastic waste is produced each year in the UK with;

Approximately 32,000 tonnes being produced from plastic packaging waste; and
Approximately 103,500 tonnes being produced from Non-Packaging Plastics (including contamination)."

That's just England. The data is old (2003 I think), and yes 1.5% is not huge, granted, but that's of total plastic waste, not just from the food chain. A lot of our produce comes from Asia and North Africa where generally there just aren't the same facilities for recycling, and environmental issues are not as prioritised. It's great that there's very little plastic waste in your farming methods, but it's not the same around the world.

Which country are you in? Where I live my food comes from all around the world. Recycling is mostly a Western thing. It doesn't exist in many of the countries that supply our food. I was just going by the amount of crap I've seen in many agricultural areas. Plastic sacks, containers etc.

But I bet those paper packages of paper straws were bundled into cartons that were wrapped in plastic, and then those were wrapped with other bundles in more plastic. And even if they're using cardboard boxes as part of that packaging who knows what percentage of that is recycled, or made from recycled waste. Anyone that's worked in retail knows the incredible amounts of packaging that get binned every day that's invisible to consumers.

The problem that strikes me reading through this thread, and similar conversations about packaging, is that we can do all we want to reduce packaging and plastics at the consumer end, but there's a huuuuge amount of packaging all the way through the supply chain. From farming supplies, to ingredient packaging, and the packaging used to transport food products to stores. By focussing solely on the consumer end we're not addressing the whole issue. It's like the obsession with bamboo toothbrushes and paper / metal straws. They're consumerist solutions to a problem caused by consumerism.

Yeah I think it was the Wikipedia page that I read when I looked up who they are. They're also fixing search engine results because there's no reason why I in the UK should be getting so many results for an Israeli organisation when I'm looking for information on organisations in a different country. Well I mean there is a reason but it's not a good one.