Yesterday 200 grams of coffee arrived at a Post Office Box for collection by your correspondent’s wife. The plastic envelope was wrapped in a cardboard box three times its size with paper and tape stuck on all sides.
Can you imagine the volumes of cardboard being used by Amazon, IKEA, Zalando, Verkkokauappa.com, and the hundreds of others with their wrappings and boxes? You can imagine piles towering past the moon…
…it is the same with the construction industry, the electronics and retail sectors – plastics and cardboard are expanding at such a pace that we are drowning in the stuff…
…and huge supermarkets are full to the brim of packaging – be it plastic or cardboard.
To make this material trees are being felled at record and alarming rates. Finland is no exception with huge areas of forest being turned into close shaven bald land. Trees are replanted but they take years to grow, and the carbon sink has the plug pulled out in the wrong direction.
Plastic from palm oil plantations destroy precious rain forests and their natural diversity. Why are we relying on to make “bio-mass & green” plastics for bags and packaging? Your correspondent’s mother had a shopping bag that lasted for decades. Why do we need fancy plastic and card packaging, when simpler solutions exist?
Fossil fuels churn out plastic for our cars and electronics, while bombs and missiles striking Syrians and Ukrainians are being financed by fossil fuels purchases by China, India, Turkey, and other big countries – all happily buying it on the cheap from a desperate despot… The good news is that he has stopped selling us cheap logs from his forests.
This packaging, no matter how much the “Green Washers” claim, are the new fossil fuels of this decade.
