Ya gotta love this: So I’m going through my snail mail IN tray, something I do every month or so whether I need it or not (please, please don’t send me anything urgent or important via snail mail), and I run across this tabloid-sized publication called Environment & Climate News, and of course my usual move with anything unsolicited that is printed on something like newsprint is to toss it in the newsprint recycling bin.
But I can’t, because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC.
So who in the world who’s so interested in the environment be so utterly clueless as to send something so grotesquely incongruous to a crack, trained observer such as myself?
Well, once you know the answer you say "of course:" It’s our old friends Joseph L. Bast and his Heartland Institute, which is an organization that, like our governor, would never ever want gummint to do anything about climate change or anything like that.
Oh, and you say the picture above is hard to read on account of the glare? Well, that’s because IT’S WRAPPED IN PLASTIC!
But before you walk away chuckling, I should point out something that probably would never have struck me if not for my habit of saving up the mail to go through all at once: A few minutes before, I had dispensed with (by which I mean I had passed it on to Cindi because I noticed there was an item related to S.C. state policy) a publication called Health Care News, which as it happens is also put out by The Heartland Institute. Three guesses as to what the Institute wants us to do about health care. You got it: Nothing. (Mainly because the concept of "us" is anathema to such groups.)
This organization now has my attention. Ubiquity will do that. This group may be better funded, and operating on more fronts, than its spiritual brother Howard Rich.
Amazing the amount of money people will spend rather than pay taxes, isn’t it?
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amen. i noticed the other day that my granchildren will be paying for the highest deficit yet from this year. i sure hope they won’t elect leaders who believe in printing money to sell to china to fund imperial adventures. intentionally spend more; intentionally take in less-im glad ther parents get to explain that as the correct way to live.
“Loving me some planet”… who are you, Michael from The Office?
Arrgghhh! Is THAT where that popular idiom comes from? I had no idea.
I’m assuming that you’re referring to the American knockoff — which I’ve made sure to avoid — as there was no "Michael" in the original series, which I loved.
Who is "Michael?" Is he the David Brent character, or the Gareth character?
Plastic packaging products will register the highest gains, with shipments rising 5.4 per cent per year to $51bn in 2009. Plastics will continue to expand their share of the market as technical advances (such as barrier properties, and hot-fill and aseptic processing capabilities) enable further supplanting of alternative materials.
Plastics offer numerous advantages that include clarity (in certain cases), light weight, strength, shatter resistance, favorable (and controllable) barrier properties, tamper evidence, and ease of opening and dispensing. They also enjoy a cost advantage over other packaging materials in many applications, although multilayer plastic containers are often costlier than alternatives. Plastics can be more easily customized than paper or metal containers, and their versatility – stemming both from their flexibility of design and from the number of resins available – has allowed them to penetrate a range of applications. Plastic beverage bottle innovations include the development of cost-competitive polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles in smaller sizes, the blending of PET with oxygen-scavenging materials and the development of aseptic filling for dairy beverages in plastic bottles.
Moreover, improvements in plastic, which enable frosted or metallic finishes at a relatively low cost, have enabled the material to supplant glass and metal in a number of cosmetic and toiletry container uses. Shipments of metal and glass packaging will expand more slowly through 2009, resulting from ongoing inroads by plastics and the maturity of major end uses.