Tuesday, January 14, 2014
Primark's Politically Correct Paper Bags
Primark politically correct bastards.
Went shipping last Friday and Primark put our stuff in one of their paper bags. It was raining and the thing came apart before I got home. Why can't they use the traditional, lightweight, waterproof plastic bags that cost so much less of the world's resources (as measured by money) than the soggy clothes dumpers?
Another example of "environmentalism" being nothing to do with protecting the environment (almost always the cheapest option is the one that uses least resources, that's why its cheapest) and purely about enforcing Luddism.
Not knocking Primark for their goods - clearly they are paying 12 year old Bangladeshi's sufficiently little to keep it cheap - though at the same time paying them far more than complainers do or ever would & infinitely more than always wrong Green guru Paul Ehrlich, who gets hundreds of thousands of $ from American foundations, for lying, ever would.
Went shipping last Friday and Primark put our stuff in one of their paper bags. It was raining and the thing came apart before I got home. Why can't they use the traditional, lightweight, waterproof plastic bags that cost so much less of the world's resources (as measured by money) than the soggy clothes dumpers?
A: There are really good things about plastic bags—they produce less greenhouse gas, they use less water and they use far fewer chemicals compared to paper or cotton. The carbon footprint— that is, the amount of greenhouse gas that is produced during the life cycle of a plastic bag—is less than that of a paper bag or a cotton tote bag. If the most important environmental impact you wanted to alleviate was global warming, then you would go with plastic.
Q: Why is the carbon footprint for a plastic bag less than that of a paper bag or cotton?
A: Cotton is typically grown on semiarid land so it consumes a huge amount of water and you also need a lot of pesticides. About 25 percent of the pesticides used in this country are used on cotton. Paper is just typically considered a fairly polluting industry. Whereas the petroleum industry, where we get our plastics, doesn’t waste anything. Chemists have had sixty to seventy years to make the production of plastics fairly efficient and so typically there is not a lot of waste in the petroleum industry.
Q: When you point this out at your public talks, what kind of reaction do you get?
A: A lot of people say they don’t believe it. It just feels good to think that cotton is better for the environment than plastic.
Another example of "environmentalism" being nothing to do with protecting the environment (almost always the cheapest option is the one that uses least resources, that's why its cheapest) and purely about enforcing Luddism.
Not knocking Primark for their goods - clearly they are paying 12 year old Bangladeshi's sufficiently little to keep it cheap - though at the same time paying them far more than complainers do or ever would & infinitely more than always wrong Green guru Paul Ehrlich, who gets hundreds of thousands of $ from American foundations, for lying, ever would.
Labels: eco-fascism, Errata
