Life's too short to eat bad food - Me

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic - Arthur C. Clarke

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Meditations on a Coffee "Can"

Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it - Barry Commoner


Just a short rant for today.  We recycle.  Better yet, we reuse when we can.  Jars for spices and spice blends as gifts, bottles for herbed vinegars and hot sauces. There is one brand of otherwise unremarkable wine vinegar I buy for the bottle as it has a little sprinker gizmo over the mouth - perfect for BBQ "mop" (I gussy up the contents and re-bottle for gifts).

But packaging is changing. Take the yogurt container.  They're not recyclable here so we reuse them for storage (yeah, they'd be better if they were square, but they work). Suddenly the lids are gone - replaced by tear-off foil or plastic. Can't recycle, can't reuse.

Then there is a coffee can.  The very word "can" implies metal. Tin coffee cans have been the storage device most used by (mostly) men to store assorted screws, nuts, bolts and other hardware that will never be used but are too good to discard.  The plastic ones can be used for geocaches. The cardboard ones still will contain oddments, but they are not as sturdy.  Neither provides that satisfying "klink" of days gone by.

Oh well, in a world where a pound of coffee is 11.5 oz, what do you expect.

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Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
- Arthur C. Clarke

Life's too short to eat bad food -
Me