Another small rant about plastic

And . . . supermarkets encouraging people to forget how to cook basic stuff.

                

THIS is a Tesco instant pancake mix in a plastic bottle. The pancake mix (dust) - just add water - fills about a quarter of the container. The rest is air - the space where you presumably add the water.
Two main things about this product: One, why? As in, why instant pancake stuff? - pancakes must be one of the easiest and satisfying food items to make.
Imagine the fun of Pancake Day/Shrove Tuesday without blending eggs, flour and milk. Opening a plastic pot of ready mix . . . a little sad?
The other gripe . . . if Tesco really feel it is a worthwhile thing to promote instant pancake dust, why not put it in a small cardboard box - or something like a small Bird's Custard type container. Less plastic, less trapped air, more space on shelves. Obviously people would have to make the effort of pouring the stuff into a bowl/empty glass jar/ whatever and then shake it but it wouldn't really be a problem. Would it, Tesco's?
Like it says on the label - fluffy and simple. Might also refer to someone who had this idea in the food-strategy/marketing/what on Earth can we make now, department of said store.

Plastic rant

Again . . .
A couple of posts back I'd gone on about the overuse of plastic, mainly in the form of containers in the home. This is a following rant about water bottles and the encouragement to buy them constantly by the manufacturers - not exactly the right word . . . the gatherers/ robbers? of water itself. Actually, do Evian/Perrier/Buxton, etc, etc, have nature's go-ahead to take water, encase it in plastic and sell it to us? Anyway, they do it, and we buy it - a million bottles a minute as a rough estimate (Guardian), bought and discarded.
On a long, cross-city trip yesterday, I decided not to buy a bottle, or even carry a re-used bottle. It was fine. I drank a mug of water, topped up with another in a café along with a cup of tea, peed on the train (in the correct place) and arrived hours later at my destination perfectly hydrated - wee still the right colour and no headache. Sorry for the bodily info, but I do wonder if we all get so bludgeoned with info about fluid intake that it's become a sort of mania - fuelled by the bottled water companies.
Yes, it's vital to drink enough unflavoured and unsweetened water but most (unless you are in somewhere that doesn't have the privilege of good sewage systems) tap water is perfectly good, more than good. We are so bloody lucky to be able to turn on a tap and drink.
Take a bottle of tap water with you - a small glass one, or a fancy little designer bottle for that purpose; resist the urge to buy another small plastic bottle with a special 'feeding stopper'. There's something slightly repulsive about those, to my mind - an ever-ready 'teat' to suck on, made of even thicker plastic.



So, now we are brain-washed into feeling fresh mountain water must be available at every second of the day, what about other ways of companies providing it while still making money?
How about . . . large, (preferably, metal) water containers - a bit like the office ones only bigger, stationed in shops, in stations, everywhere that we normally buy bottles. You could pay, say ten pence for a paper cone of water, throw it in the recycling box and go on your way, happily re-hydrated and free of to carrying anything extra. Companies could jostle/bid/share (ha-ha) for who was positioned where; there'd be less ferrying water about, less plastic at every step, less waste, less space taken up in shops . . . simple! Better still, would be the re-introduction of free water fountains everywhere but then the massive bottled water industry would squirt to a gradual halt - not going to happen. But maybe it has to along with so many other huge changes we need to make to halt the environmental mess we are already in.

                                                

Next stop Mars?

It could be the next planet ready to be covered in a layer of plastic once we've done with this one . . .

Making my way back home, I stopped in Liverpool Street station to buy a bottle of water, having forgotten my own one to refill (tut-tut). Of course, if you listen to all the stuff telling you that you should be drinking your own body weight (actually, possibly a litre, I forget) in pure, clear, fresh water each day, by the time you have spent three hours on a train and have only consumed a creosote-like paper cup of tea, the alarm bells start ringing . . . quick find water.
Delice de France, Pret a manger, etc, only had large bottles and I just wanted a glug as I wished to avoid fighting my way past the aircraft drinks trolley to the loo. Boots had bottles of all sizes including this tiny one (below) containing water from a famous source situated in a French mountain range. Why is this? - I mean, why am I buying water from under a hill in central France when Buxton or Malvern are considerably nearer, and actually all I wanted was a slurp of tap water - something we are lucky enough to have!

                                         

This bottle holds 33cl. Including its very thick 'danger, do not drink' style flip-cap I would think it is constructed of enough plastic to make about, I don't know, twenty syringes? or a vital part of a solar panel? - anyway, something else plastic is actually vital for.
I'm looking around at this one train carriage. The guy opposite me has a bottle - bigger and from some unsuspecting mountain in Scotland (better); the woman next to him is sipping every now and again from a green bottle - that one from Italy with a beautiful name - in fact that's a statement in itself, I suppose: my choice of water.
So . . . why can't we have THIS (bearing in mind I know nothing of economics, market strategies or how this might be realised) - Water fountains - just tap water, like in the olden days before water became fashionable.
And if you need to buy mineral water, commercial fountains, along the lines of those giant upside down office bottles. The companies providing the fountains and Boots or whoever could still rake in their profits, we could have paper cups and then throw them into recycling bins. Fifty pence for a small cup? True we wouldn't have that 'mouth-to-breast' sort of continual comfort sipping but I think we could all cope.
I read the other day the US alone gets through something like 50 million plastic water bottles every day - gets through - and NOT recycled.
So, why can't we stop this? Too much money to be made from H2O; too much mania about 'fresh' pure and straight from the source; too much advertising revenue and not enough willpower or foresight from governments, I imagine.
No more plastic bottles except where really needed - a relatively small thing to implement, compared to mass invasion of another country or space exploration?

Proof

That the world is a mad and dangerous place.
I went into 'Decathlon' the other day (mega sports shop chain in France, and probably elsewhere) to get a pair of sensible shoes as walking the dogs in flip-flops (me, not the dogs) had become unrealistic in November.
I located the shoe section and then had a quick wander around to look at what people actually buy under the umbrella of sport. Mostly, what one would imagine, if not a bit excessive: bikes, swimwear, fishing clobber, tents, a kilometre of ski equipment, pink girly dance wear - for men too; hiking stuff, etc, but then I ventured into the isle of SNACKS.
You go for a walk or a run. Good. What do you need to replace the water you have sweated out? Water. Bit of fuel? - banana, a handful of dried fruit and nuts?
There was an isle as long as a bus full of alternatives: yellow, blue, pink and orange water substitutes, all incased in future landfill. People must buy this stuff - lots of it, the manufacturers continually producing more effective, and more colourful ways of hydrating.
There are millions of people in this world desperate for a container of pure water, folk who walk miles every day to a stinking hole of tepid water and then return so their family can just about survive.
Jog, run, cycle, hike, but just take a bottle and re-fill it with clean, ordinary, but luxurious tap water.