Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Climate columnist Tricia Clarkson thinks eco-warriors stuck at home because of the Coronavirus lockdown can still help save the world by convincing Tropicana to switch to hemp based juice containers.
Stuck at home? Now is the time to become a climate-change activist
Climate columnist Tricia Clarkson says we may have more time on our hands to start making change
OPINION Apr 12, 2020 by Tricia Clarkson
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Staying at home until the Coronavirus is over, allows us more time to be a climate change activist.
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Tropicana: A friend was picking up groceries for me so I told her to avoid buying anything that was in plastic. However, she couldn’t find Tropicana grapefruit juice in the cardboard carton I usually bought it in so she brought it home in a plastic bottle instead. When I asked her why, she said that Tropicana stopped producing their juice in cardboard cartons and was using plastic instead. I couldn’t believe they would go backwards knowing how harmful plastic is to the environment. 1-800-237-7799 was on the back of the plastic bottle so I called it.
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I suggested that Tropicana use hemp containers instead which is just as strong as plastic and is completely biodegradable. My suggestion has been registered and my call took five minutes.
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Read more: https://www.mykawartha.com/opinion-story/9940136-stuck-at-home-now-is-the-time-to-become-a-climate-change-activist/
Can you imagine what must have been going through the mind of the Tropicana representative during that call? In the middle of a global pandemic, a mob of climate activists call to demand they retool their supply chain to provide juice in plastic containers made from hemp.
“Rincewind rather enjoyed moments like this. They convinced him he wasn’t mad, because, if he was mad, that left no word at all to describe some of the people he met.” – from the book “Sourcery” by the late Terry Pratchett.
If climate columnist Tricia Clarkson only understood how much plastics contribute to her daily life. There are thousands of different plastics. Without them, she would not be able to do her job.
This is me before attending grad school:
This person doesn’t seem to be aware of the recycling scan perpetrated across North America. Those so called cardboard cartons are not recyclable unless the user is prepared to separate the plastic spout and remove the wax. This is why cogen incineration would be a preferable choice, except that the usual crowd is convinced in the sins of CO2 and hate it (along with nuclear generation).
The gormless go on about plastic, but it has so greatly improved life for us all.
Thank you for reminding me of the word “gormless”, an oft used word when I was growing up in Yorkshire. If I might couple that with the word “dork” used on a thread to describe a certain poster on here a few days ago, I might try a new dictionary definition, like “progressive” and “liberal”, another word stolen by the “modern phony-left” to change their meaning into the exact opposite of the original:
activist [ ak-tuh-vist ] = a gormless dork
Used in a sentence: I got paid to protest against something that doesn’t exist because I’m a gormless dork ermmm activist
words
other words even
Yep, where has all the gorm gone to ? We never see any of it produced these days. The entire planet has gone gormless. A total start of gormlessness.
As Monty Python’s upper class twits would say ( no offense to any present here ) :
Gorrrrm ! Nice woody word . Gorrrrm ! Gorrrrrrm , gawwwwwn .
Hi Philincalifornia, – In the spirit of bandying non-American slang I will add that there has been a lot of codswallop posted on WUWT over the years.
Furthermore, there is no direct translation to US English of the supremely useful “w@nker” and, as if that’s not bad enough, we can’t “take the piss” although some of us do. I can’t help feeling though that the climate w@nkers have been spared enormously due to these linguistic gaps.
A Scottish roomate once taught me the subtle differences to get the most out of calling someone either “doaty”, “dobber” & “bampot”.
w@nker refers to what quite a few men, boys frequently do with one hand or the other.
yes gormless is a great word, I use because of an inlaw being a yorkie
and dork is an Aussie word;-) used widely as is wacker
another yorkshire term i like is “frame yousel(f)” meaning stand up straight look tidy;-)
cant say i enjoyed the MIlaws “Parkin cake” much though
she, however, wasnt a great cook, looking back
By the way, biodegradable plastics usually breakdown into water and CO2…oh oh.
Some last 3 months and don’t react well with acidic liquids.
Biodegradable plastic can include additional pollution, such as fertilizer and pesticide in the production of the feed stock.
The breakdown through composing requires appropriate equipment, such as that used in Japan, that most municipalities don’t have and these need a fair amount of space to build. To best way to break these down efficiently is through the use of a ball mill, substituting pieces of broken concrete for the balls, and to slurry the materials with other compostable material (I have built these in a past life). But they smell.
It is indeed a myth that plastics to not degrade. Just like bacteria that have developed around natural petroleum leaks in the ocean, bacteria love to take advantage of any carbon buffet that we or nature puts out there.
When formica was first introduced in the 50s, it was predicted that we would eventually drown in old discarded formica. It only took a few years for more than one fungus to figure out how to eat formica.
Garbage archeologists in Canada found that disposable diapers were completely digested even when buried in the cold north country for decades. It may not be rapid but nature is thorough.
For that matter, I like to mention that you can do anything you want in the north country as the next glacial period is going to clean its clock and set everything back to zero.
🙂 if they REALLY cared they ‘d NOT be buying any prepack juice in any form but growing and juicing their own.
I wonder what does differenciate Climate charlatans from snake oil salesmen.
Wow, that’s a toughie…
The audience.
Confidence men change skins based upon the prevailing mood.
Snake oil salesmen are selling a tangible product. It’s only what it does that they lie about.
Climate charlatans get their money mostly from governments who first steal the money from the people. Snake oil salesmen cut out the mild man and bilk the public directly. Government is much more gullible that the people as the money they hand out is not theirs.
Forcing anyone to do anything such as mandating hemp based plastic should be done on a voluntary basis, especially in our present economy. If it biodegraded quickly and harmlessly, it should have a natural advantage and win out the market place based upon its own merits. If hemp plastic bags were such a product and solved/ended the entire lunacy over present plastic bags, then let’s go for it.
Not that there is anything wrong with hemp based products such as what the world used for thousands of years prior to the much of the last century. The original USA Constitution is printed on Hemp paper, which is probably the best paper product that can be made. Henry Ford used hemp based ‘plastic’ body panels on the Model T whose plastic panels impact strength was reportedly 10 times stronger than steel. Up until 100 years ago or less, hemp products by the hundreds were some of the foundation for the worlds economy and was by and large one of the worlds largest agriculture crops, producing products for much of modern human history. It was in a way, the same as oil and gas is to our modern economy for a very long time.
If we can make something useful out of it which is as good or better than synthetic derivatives made from oil/gas, then the more we can learn and modernize from where we left off less than 100 years ago, the better off for the economy and future. Hemp grows very well where most good food crops don’t, so it won’t be taking out good agricultural land like corn based ethanol does. Just don’t subsidize it, which is where everything gets distorted.
It’s simpler than that. If you have to reach for a gun to get non-aggressive people to do what you espoused, you’re a tyrant and deserve no respect.
Who said anything about ‘reaching for a gun’? Oh..you did. Talk about setting up a classic straw man argument.
How many million acres of new hemp plantings would be required for wide scale use? Will hemp grow well in cleared rain forest?
Having grown up on a farm, and now owning thousands of acres growing millions of trees, I wouldn’t support any clearing of rain forest for growing hemp and you wouldn’t have to, except for logging the timber which will be impossible for it not to revert to the same rain forest land in the future. Eliminating Orangutang notwithstanding or burning the peat to grow oil palm. Plus hemp grows on marginal land where most other food crops don’t grow so well, and also is a good cover rotational crop for a season putting down deep roots and aerating the soil. Just like planting a rye cover crop and ploughing it in, or growing Alfalfa for a few seasons and letting it fix nitrogen before reverting to planting a cereal crop.
Having another cash crop for farmers to grow, especially one like hemp that takes a lot less nutrient and water to grow than corn, is a no brainer. Hemp was banned for multiple reasons, many of which arguments are being made subconsciously here this very day. It was huge competition for the pulp and paper industry, which Randolph Hearst had huge interests in as an owner of vast forest lands used for making pulp and paper, plus he owned a lot of newspapers. It also was direct competition for a lot of product that was easily replaced by newly utilized oil/gas, which some of was very good including all kinds of new and various plastics that could be made from oil/gas which is also good. Both are miracles and hemp was the miracle crop for civilization for thousands of years. Why it is still dissed here is proof of that disinformation smear against hemp, which usually was promoted as all hemp being equal to elicit Marijuana use. Dope.
Considering we sometimes pay farmers to not grow a crop just to keep prices up, would be good to have alternative cash crops that farmers could take advantage of. No one is starving in America for lack of corn, and we aren’t short of agricultural land either. IMHO, the greatest benefit that corn ethanol offers, other than some air pollution reduction, is that surplus land growing ethanol corn can be converted to growing other food bearing crops within a season and its biggest benefit is an insurance policy on having a lot of land production capability on a near instantaneous basis to growing food crops if necessity dictates we need a to grow a lot of food within a season for any reason. This isn’t the time to be debating the merits of ethanol either, unless you would rather have a Democrat President and Congress. Alienate the farmers and true redneck flyover skeptics, and they will probably just stay home on voting day which could allow for the Democrats to sweep the slate and then we are toast.
When I try and promote WUWT to my redneck farmer and logger friends, they always ask what’s up with all these armchair city skeptics that probably have never driven a tractor on a farm or logged a tree in their life and they are trying to ruin farmers livelihoods. If President Trump talked like this to the farmers of the nation, especially in the case of corn grown ethanol, he would never be reelected POTUS and probably rightfully so. It would be a very good thing to see President Trump talking up the benefits of ethanol and hemp for farmers, which at the end of the day, is just another agriculture product that enriches us all in many different ways.
Thank you WUWT for allowing me to make an opinion that is probably at odds with the vast majority of your readers.
Yes hemp grows where food crops don’t grow well
That means plowing under wild or unused land, reducing biodiversity
Losing again
Sort of a lame Green Peace type argument for limited development on marginal lands that most farms have and looking for a higher end better return than pasture.
Hemp makes the best toilet paper too, and at todays prices would earn a good premium. What would be worse, to clear cut some old growth boreal forest, or grow some hemp fibre to add even 50% to the pulp fibre for a mill? If it is price competitive as is to other timber fibre sources, then why not let the farmers grow a new crop? Change the laws…It is happening and can add a lot more to the portfolio of our high end agricultural products. Lots of pulp mills can’t buy timber now, as is getting pricey or inaccessible.
Earthling2 here in Australia many of our weekend markets, and stores too sell clothing made from hemp. It makes a lovely soft fabric, very comfortable to wear. It’s likely there would be more people on this site open to this product than you think. There are still many people who think of it only as a drug and have no clue that it has many uses.
youd be amazed at how good it is for soils, as mentioned above it saves soil being bare, it could be harvested with roots left in soil if youre so inclined. and the amount of native animals birds etc that find it a useful fodder alone makes it something worth throwing around in less useful already cleared places, and its short annual lifespan makes it good for river edges holding soils and adding nutrient as it dies n rots down.
my old hemp shirt was loved to death and that took well over 10yrs;-)
presently a small purse from hemp cloth is serving hard and reliable use
its now allowed to be grown in Aus but the idiotic regs make it basically once again ONLY for the very rich larger landowners to even consider.
Love the Pratchett quote. “Discworld is more like reality than we imagine…
I’d like to see companies telling the Greenies:NO! Not just NO! but over someone’s dead body NO!
Door slammed in face NO!. Broken Nose in Door, No!Greenie 86’d into Street with prejudice NO!
Sorry to sugar coat it..
How much fossil fuel is required to till, plant, harvest, refine, and manufacture milk and orange juice cartons from hemp? Further, why would we develop this new supply chain for juice cartons when we already have an optimized supply chain making juice cartons from biodegradable wax coated paper? And we should do this as wax coated paper cartons are falling out of favor with consumers and plastic resealable containers are increasingly consumer preferred???
‘Climate Activists’ such as Tricia Clarkson are not the sharpest or brightest crayons in the Big Box, apparently!
??? We’d like a little weed in our juice???
Hmmm… we have this petrochemical industry that uses petroleum that comes from deep underground to make plastic bottles, and most bottles/containers have recycle symbols on them per government mandates. You can also get containers made from treated , wax paperboard boxes. Before both of those there were glass bottles, like the milk man used to deliver and pick-up to be re-used. But washing and sterilizes uses considerable resources, and the glass gets chipped and scratched and probably only get a dozen uses before getting tossed to the land-fill.
Now they think hemp based bottles might work??? Have they ever seen a commercial hemp farm? Here’s one at harvest.
Wait!! what’s that big machine doing there???
Have they considered how much natural gas-derived fertilizer and petroleum fuels goes into each acre of hemp? Only to have the hemp bottle tossed to the landfill after 1 use?
Yes but hemp is “cool”. You can have a giggle about smoking it ..
So San Francisco, the city by the Gay Bay, just outlawed re-useable bags for supermarkets and insisted on returning to single-use plastic bags, and the CAGW crowd is somehow in possession of evidence that says disposable hemp containers are better for the environment? I get it , there’s an insanity competition underway and the winner will be totally crazy and dysfunctional and gets to be the next Major of San Francisco! Excellent!
I don’t get the single use grocery bag thing. Every person I know stores plastic grocery bags somewhere in their home. Including my greenie friends.
Why would anyone store a single use bag? Because they have multiple uses of course.
Leftism truly is a mental disorder.
My store has compostable ones, I bring them home and use them in the kitchen compost buck that goes into the green bin that goes to the city of calgary compostor
I have no idea how cost effective it is but it does make lots of compost
You drink from it and then you smoke it … killing two birds with one stone (pun intended).
Here in Canada, reusable cloth grocery bags have been banned because of the strong possibility that they can carry viruses and other germs. Guess what, back to plastic and paper bags.
Go Brown, Plant a Tree, Clear the Blight.
Will the @RealDavidMiddleton please stand up???
Those criters do not understand that the final plastic is THE SAME substance, wether it was made from oil or from vegetable products?
… Or are they expecting to have some pot residues (hemp is the common name of Cannabis!) flowing from the container to the beverage?
“critters”.
My apologies for the lack of one “t”…
Fruit juices are high in sugar and fructose that goes into the blood quickly. They promote diabetes and fatty liver disease.
Not at all healthy.
Maybe Elon Musk could just fly us into space for morning tang and we wouldn’t have to use any container or straw because it would float right in front of our faces. Of course, we would have to use hemp powered rockets.
What guy doesn’t like some morning tang?
Poon flavored is the best IMO.
Salute!
GASP, Joel.
I don’t think your choice of words was recognized by the mods. Heh heh.
Of course, most mornings I would be rating fast, neat, average,……
Gums sends…
With all this free time on their hands it might be more beneficial to educate themselves on the fundamentals of hard sciences.
However, it is all probably wasted advice as these don’t seem to be serious people anyway.
Like free markets and centralized control, science and greenuism are mutually exclusive.
On their Venn diagram, there is no area of intersection.
“My suggestion has been registered and my call took five minutes.”
By “registered” he means “ridiculed and round-filed”.
Oh! the colorful comments from the customer service representative to his cohorts after he politely hung up!
I can only imagine the comedy material these poor sods collect on a daily basis. The punch lines are endless.
LOL. I avoid call centers for the diminunition of my IQ, points being sucked through the wires to their dumb sink.
D’ja ever wonder why businesses prefer to interact with the public by voice call and not by any sort of text? Literacy is expensive and text is easily recorded.
Companies should just give the activists lip service and ignore them just like the activists ignore all the harm their dictates have done to humanity.
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/30/world/bacteria-degrades-plastic-scn-trnd/ https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2020.00404/full
Toward Biorecycling: Isolation of a Soil Bacterium That Grows on a Polyurethane Oligomer and Monomer. “The biodegradation of synthetic polymers in general is a two-step process. It involves the attack by extracellular enzymes overcoming the macromolecular structure of the polymers and providing monomers and oligomers for the second step, which is the mineralization of the latter inside the cell. The two steps can be carried out by a single species, or more likely by at least two.” Interesting, how important?
Plasic waste should not be recycled – instead it should be burned in power plants to make electricity, as it is in fact fossil fuel in solid form. If burned, it leaves fresh oil/gas in the well. Only if it is possible to make a sound business out of cleaning and recycling plastic waste, it should be done. The CO2-emission is almost the same: Burning of used plastic/burning af fresh fossil fuel.
Very often, more energy is required to get it to a p;ower p;lant than would be produce by burning it, no?
Same energy has to be used to get it to the landfill, maybe more if the landfill is further away than the energy plant. In the final analysis, the landfill gas that is recovered in future decades will also provide similar energy equivalent as the present electricity equivalent. On the plus side for the energy plant is less time is required to get the energy than waiting for the landfill to ‘digest’.
Waste to energy can be done safely as Burnaby, BC has shown, with this particular waste incinerator located within the city limits. 25% of all garbage in the Greater Vancouver area and surrounding cities is utilized at the Burnaby waste to energy generator. Each year, approximately 285,000 tons of municipal solid waste is converted into 940,000 tons of steam and up to 170,000 MWh of electricity, providing both economic and environmental benefits. About 9,000 tons per year of recycled metal is recovered at the facility. I would say waste to energy makes more sense than a landfill, even though I believe landfills will also be completely mined some day for energy and recycled materials in the future.
https://www.covanta.com/Our-Facilities/Covanta-Burnaby
We do that here in Virginia. Works quite nicely, unless the loading bay catches on fire, like ours did a few years ago.
https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/publicworks/recycling-trash/energy-resource-recovery-facility
hemp based plastics make sense, but that has nothing to do with the climate
Bill, if you can make plastic out of hemp more effectively than we already do from ethane…..go for it….but you’ll probably use up a lot of good farmland growing that hemp that you need to allow for…
While we are at it, we could get farmers to pelletize their extra hay crops and use them to heat our houses…made with CO2 out of the air by photosynthesis…oops no extra hay crop they say….
you need to do the research for yourself…..as i posted co2 has nothing to do with it……
They ought to wait until April 20, and then they can all call at once, on that special day. It will be symbolic.
If hemp containers were less demanding on labor, resources, or real estate, and better for inventory, and shelf life, then that’s what the containers would be made out of….because thats how the economic system works. Factors the green weenies often miss…..all keeping CO2 emissions due to waste minimized. Not always…. but usually.
In the U.S., until recently, little hemp could be grown legally, regardless of its psychoactive properties.
The”market” had no choice. It is still pretty tightly controlled.
True statement, and is in part is what is still driving this very debate today.
Tropicana is one of 22 brands owned by PepsiCo. Don’t think her suggestion is going to make it to the person/persons she thinks it should.
Really, if they are so concerned about natural packaging, why don’t they just buy oranges?
Oranges sensu stricto will likely be rare shortly, if not extinct. Citrus greening disease (Chinese: 黃龍病; pinyin: huánglóngbìng; literally: ‘yellow dragon disease’; or HLB) has no cure.
I escaped the Florida lockdown while vacationing there to enjoy the dwindling supply of Valencia Orange juice. Fruits sold in markets are mostly other orange citrus fruits, but not oranges.
Hmmm, I just noticed the coincidence of ‘green’ disease. Also from China?
It there is cause, but people aren’t so green, to go green, for Green.
Where do they find nutjobs like Tricia Clarkson ?
Is it possible for someone to graduate from a reputable college and have such a complete lack of knowledge of economics, mathematics, chemistry, and physics.
To be honest, I didn’t think it was possible to graduate from high school with such astounding ignorance.
At the root of it is an attack on our natural gas and petro chemical industries.
The following should be required reading for all middle-school to college students:
https://andersen.sdu.dk//vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html
Seriously, at no time in history has a better reference been more appropriate to teach a very basic reality.
Your comment applies to all of Classical Literature. Most recently 1984, Gulliver’s Travels, Atlas Shrugged, …
Classical Literature is full of forgotten lessons, that better be recalled before its too late.
Democles’ Sword of Truth must needs to cut long and wide and deep through the elect when ‘this’ is over.
Are there sufficient graduates of a Great Books curriculum to save US? Alexander Meiklejohn!
I’m not a greenie by any means, but hemp is an amazingly versatile substance that could replace many of the less environmentally friendly substances used today. I’d like to see it used extensively, but not forced on any industry or company.
ty for that post, far too many people have chosen sides and are playing some game…….the marijuana plant is one of the most useful plants ever cultivated and it should be used to the maximum and that has nothing to do with politics or climate just common SENSE.
The version used for rope and plastic generally has little THC in it anyways.
wrong, it is the same plant……the stems are used to make rope and the oil is used to make plastics…….indeed those parts do have less thc but they still are from the same marijuana plants, the male plants also have less thc……Jefferson and Washington discussed this in letters to each other.
There used to be a law in some of the early colonies that a farmer legally had to grow hemp, which was deemed an essential product in the 17th and 18th century. Both Washington and Jefferson grew hemp in great quantity. Considering sails and rope, and a thousand other products were made from it, it is a sad reflection that somehow hemp, even with hardly any THC in it was classified a Schedule 1 drug, the worst of the worst. In 1937, hemp was strictly regulated by the Marijuana Tax Act and was partially lifted for WW2 as an essential product for the war effort.
As an agricultural crop, hemp produces 4 times as much pulp as does an equivalent area of forest in the same time frames. It is still a major pain in the butt to grow hemp just getting permits and licences and is getting better, but hopefully common sense will prevail and it will become another useful agricultural crop for our farmers to grow, that will also assist many different industries in creating old (and new) products.
Unfortunately, in many countries it is still straight up illegal as some have even pointed about Oz. The Philippines used to be one of the worlds largest growers, but now you are just as apt to be shot if found growing any type of hemp. This was always about politics and certain powerful interests, and blame was attached to it being Dope, which was also blamed on Black people with the reefer madness and criminality. It wasn’t about the miraculous properties of one of the oldest and most versatile agriculture products of all time, otherwise plain old hemp would have never have been banned. Or maybe it was, if the Hearst Corporation had signifiant interests in forested pulp for his newspaper empire.
Ease of manufacturing, transportation & handling, stacking strength, space limitations, shelf life are probably just few of the considerations when designing packaging for liquids.
Tricia Clarkson is making suggestions regarding what activists can come up with to fight AGW seeing as we all have more time on our hands.
Maybe we should be trying to come up with better ways to fight the activists!
Avoid the social justice networks and their #FakeNews. Read a book.
Unfortunately I chose to re-read Atlas Shrugged; and hopped from the current real frying pan into the fire of Ayn Rand’s burning prediction. It is eerie!
My husband is currently reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley first published in 1931 and revisited in 1958. It’s like he had window to the future/present.
Most plastic does nothing bad to the environment. Most people assume it does. I had someone say ‘well it’s plastic’ and I said so? She was like it’s bad and I asked in what way. She said litter and oceans. I said OUR trash doesn’t get put on the ground or the ocean, it goes into landfills. She said it doesn’t go away. I said neither do rocks. That finally ended the conversation.
According to an article I recently read in a national newspaper, Tropicana’s stated reason for switching from waxed cardboard to plastic is… Plastic is more easily recycled than waxed cardboard.
Makes sense to me. I recycle all plastic containers, while I unapologetically fill most empty milk and juice cartons with food prep residue and other garbage.
It also doesn’t hurt that the juice looks more appetizing in a transparent container.
And finally, the new plastic jugs are smaller than the previous cardboard containers, meaning it’s also a price hike.
Has she tried to convince the medical profession to switch to autoclaved hemp PPE supplies? Or perhaps they would like to start reusing plastic bags for shopping – to stop possible coronavirus transfer.