A look back on World Consumer Rights Day 2021

Sainsbury’s deliveries have gone back to their no-bags policy now but they still bag up bottled cleaning materials and toiletries that have a tendency to leak if they are not kept upright. They also put frozen goods, eggs and flowers in bags.

We haven’t had any problems with dirt and Sainsbury’s emphasise that they do have crate cleansing routines. I have my own large crates for taking the goods indoors; the driver loads them up from the Sainsbury’s totes and I carry them in.

Apart from keeping foodstuffs clean, the bags were very useful for carrying large numbers of small items and for keeping similar items together pending storage in the cupboards; however, I think the world is better off without them.

I still have hundreds of once-used supermarket bags from the time when they put everything in bags – sometimes just one or two items. These get progressively used and then disposed of responsibly, but what is the best method of disposal without having to go into a store and putting them in the bag recycling bin? The council will not accept plastic bags in the household recycling bin so I feel that should be the next major objective in extending recycling facilities. Bags that have already been used more than once go in the general waste bin and are either incinerated or land-filled according to whatever process is favoured on the day. Neither process is environmentally satisfactory so recycling for reuse should be the aim.

I have been collecting my groceries from Morrisons, Tesco and Waitrose and though their crates are well used they looked clean. It’s not difficult for supermarkets to wash their crates and a simple paper liner would not go amiss.

I presume that most councils won’t take plastic bags because various types of plastic are in use. It would be interesting to know the fate of the bags that are collected by supermarkets.

Until coronavirus came along I took my own bags when shopping. Like John, I have now amassed a large collection. If these are oxodegradable plastic (commonly used for supermarket bags) they will be part way along the route to becoming useless, which ends in them falling into pieces and possibly being more of an environmental disaster than ordinary polythene.

Most supermarkets don’t seem to have proper crate washing facilites. One driver I spoke to (can’t remember which supermarket now) said they hose them down when someone has nothing to do.

This is a short film of the Ocado bag recycling process:
https://www.ocado.com/content/bag-recycling-process-148928

I would have expected a daily steam clean function at the supermarket’s motor depot.

Oops. That should read: “A recent achievement has been the ban of the sale of products containing plastic microbeads.”

I did notice the slip but 1. often find I miss letters out when using a screen keyboard and 2. their was some substance to the error https://www.ecowatch.com/scientists-find-bacteria-that-eats-plastic-2645582039.html – they could be describe loosely as plastic microbes.

However, given the millions of tonnes of plastics waste, I wonder what horrors might lie in store if we feed it to these little germs? What kind of huge super race of bugs might emerge, and escape from the confines of waste to devour all our non-waste plastics products. Strip out your car, leave domestic appliances as skeletons, but worse – remove all your wiring insulation.

I think sometimes words get transposed in typing especially if you go back and change a sentence. I noticed there instead of their the other day in one of my posts and I definitely would have typed it correctly.

Plastic eating super bugs? Could be horrendous.

I am well aware of the difference between “there” and “their” and yet I find my fingers (two of them) often type “their” mistakenly as if they are drawn to it. Sometimes the mistake is found too late to edit.

I also suffer from occasional miscommunication between the brain and the fingers with “there” and “their” . I expect that after the first three letters the fingers are in auto mode and repeat the last use of the same three letters for the whole word.

Unfortunately, many people these days do not know the difference and probably cannot actually discriminate the meanings.

I like homophones – they make the language more interesting [albeit more challenging for learners].

I have become too accustomed to hitting ‘Post comment’ and coming back to correct my errors. It does not if the phone rings at the wrong time. 🙁 Autocorrect routinely replaces microbeads with microbes, so I’m usually ready for that one.

I remember we had a discussion about the potential to use microbes to degrade plastic waste when a Japanese research group published an article about Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium that produces an enzyme capable of degrading PET. Since then, other microbial enzymes with the potential to degrade other plastics have been discovered.

When products made of biodegradable plastics were first test marketed in Germany and Japan there were concerns that they could degrade on the shelf but that did not happen because biodegradation requires water. I have examples that have survived for 30 years. We know that petrochemical plastics generally degrade very slowly in soil and water, so nature has not yet produced an effective way of dealing with the waste plastics that go into the oceans and landfill. Although plastics will continue to survive in dry conditions there is a potential threat to those used in wet conditions, such as underground cables used to supply electricity and for telecommunications, and plastic water pipes. Hopefully we will not produce GM organisms that are more effective in degrading plastics without thinking about the potential risks.