Plastic is firmly out of fashion, with everyone from the government to supermarkets
pledging to reduce use and fight pollution. But turning the tide will
require a herculean effort. The US shale gas boom means that the price
of feedstock for the plastic industry has plummeted. Major chemical
corporations have invested $180bn in new production facilities to come
on stream in the next 10 years, increasing global output by 40%. If we
don’t want it to flow our way, we need to stand firm.
I’ve just returned from Penzance, designated the UK’s first plastic-free town
by Surfers Against Sewage. This weekend it hosted residents from
Aberporth, west Wales, with aspirations to follow suit; shop and cafe
owners discussed the best solutions for denting the UK’s annual
3.7m-tonne plastic habit (2.2m of that being packaging). It was an
impressive display of what we might refer to as the Dunkirk spirit.
Certainly some of the solutions now on the table are redolent of
wartime frugality. Some date back even further. By the end of the year,
we may be taking our energy drinks in amphoras. For now, here are some
of the nostalgia-tinted front-runners in the charge to go plastic-free.
Glass milk bottles
The first deliveries of milk in glass bottles took place at the end
of the 19th century, driven by a rather literal desire for transparency:
the customer could see straight away that their milk contained no
flotsam or jetsam. But even now we take that as a given, there is plenty
to love eco-wise about glass milk bottles. Once rinsed and returned to
the doorstep by the consumer, they are collected as part of the morning
delivery, taken to a local bottling plant and sanitised, ready to go
again. Each glass bottle is used an average of 13 times before being
recycled.
The triumph here is in the speed of the turnaround. The plastics
industry might argue that PET and HDPE – common types of plastic for
milk containers – can be collected and successfully recycled into
food-grade material. But in practice plastic recycling often falls
short. Since China’s new recycling laws came into effect at the start of
the year, much foreign waste is being refused. In the UK, domestic
capacity for recycling is tiny.
According to Diary UK, doorstep deliveries have risen to near to a
million a day, up from 800,000 two years ago. This could be the biggest
comeback since Lazarus.
Laundry soap
The last time laundry soap was hot was in the 1920s. Popped into the
script of serial radio dramas, it would be liberally referenced by a
character (female of course), and lo, the soap opera was born.
A revival would spell the end for the moulded mixed-plastic bottles and tubs that laundry detergent relies on. As Rinso
is more likely to be found in a museum than a supermarket, try Sapindus
soap nuts, produced by a shrub related to the lychee. The real
enthusiast can buy a 5kg sack, which should keep you going for a while.
Copper surfaces
In the war against plastic, we’ll soon have picked the low-hanging
fruits. But when it comes to the serious stuff, like hospital apparatus
and infrastructure, we may need a total material shift. So here’s one
that was prized by the Aztecs: copper. Medical researchers working on
infection reduction report copper to be hugely effective at killing
superbugs. In one study,
six items in hospital wards, including surfaces and fittings, were
swapped from plastic to copper. There was a 58% reduction in
hospital-acquired infections.
Water fountains
Michael Gove and Sadiq Khan
have been among those to signal their commitment to water fountains in
the fight against single-use plastic water bottles (Britons use 7.7bn a
year, and fewer than half are recycled).
They are an old idea, but don’t necessarily expect them to be in
Victorian repro style when they finally arrive. The next-generation
water fountains are hands-free bottle-filling stations, ergonomically
fashioned to fit water bottles and with sensors that automatically stop
the flow of water when the bottle is full. Can’t wait!
Cloth nappies
Every day, 8m disposable nappies are shovelled into the UK’s
landfill. That is where – whatever it says on the pack – they will
fester for hundreds of years. Some claim to be biodegradable – but that
requires oxygen, and there’s not much of that under the ground.
The words “cloth nappy” conjure visions of terry squares and
oversized pins. But today’s nappy systems offer an assortment of
washable and reusable options, made from materials such as bamboo and
hemp. There are also “nappy libraries”, which save you the initial
outlay, and collection services. About 2.7kg of raw materials are used
in a full-time set of reusable nappies, as opposed to 120kg if a child
is in disposables. To explore the options, go to Go Real. • Lucy Siegle is the Observer’s ethical living columnist
A group of Japanese students were left shocked when a Venice restaurant charged them £970 for a meal.
The group of four students, who are studying in Bologna, had
eaten at Osteria de Luca restaurant close to St Marks Square when they
were presented with the eyebrow-raising bill for three steaks, fried
fish and mineral water.
The stunned group then went to local police to report the restaurant.
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British tourists charged €526 for lunch in Venice
A spokesman for Gruppo 25, a Venice civil rights organisation, told Venice Today about the escalation in the number of cases involving tourists being ripped off.
“This is just the latest case of many of this kind. The
young people, who are university students in Bologna, made a formal
denunciation to the local police station as soon as they got off the
train.”
The restaurant has a 1.5 (out of 5) rating on Tripadvisor, with 83 per cent of visitors labelling it “Terrible”.
One user complained: “Just got done eating at this place and
the food was very average, wasn’t going to leave a review at all until I
got the bill! They added on almost €50 in taxes and tip, these are the
hidden fees that they don’t tell you and the service wasn’t that good! I
feel scammed.”
Another visitor, who posted a review in December 2017,
wrote: “A coke costs €7.50, the lasagne is just a blob of mince sauce
and a lettuce leaf, the pizzas are defrosted bases probably supermarket
purchased, strong smell of the toilet at our table, the bill was
extremely expensive and we highly regret not checking Tripadvisor before
entering this restaurant.”
Huge tourist numbers in Venice mean prices in restaurants can be high (Getty Images/iStockphoto)
There have been a number of incidents involving tourists
alleging that they were ripped off at Venice restaurants in recent
months.
In November 2017, a British tourist dubbed a Venice restaurant “horrible and disgusting” after being charged €526 (£463) for lunch for three.
The tourist from Birmingham ate with his parents at Trattoria Casanova
in the central San Marco district, ordering a spread of food and sharing
it between them. Italian restaurants often charge by weight rather than
portion, and the restaurant denied any wrongdoing.
Venice mayor Luigi Brugnaro introduced fines last year to
dissuade tourists from littering, walking around topless and other acts
deemed inappropriate, but also said tourists “need to shell out a
bit” when eating in the city, following criticisms of extortionate bills
at restaurants.
You know nothing about meteorology, Jon Snow. (Helen Sloan/HBO)
The
climate has been a persistent theme in “Game of Thrones” ever since Ned
Stark (remember him?) told us “winter is coming” at the start of season
one. The Warden of the North was referring, of course, to the
anticipated shift in Westeros’s weather from a long summer to a brutal
winter that can last many years.
An unusual or changing climate is a big deal. George R R Martin’s world bears many similarities
to Medieval Europe, where changes in the climate influenced social and
economic developments through impacts on water resources, crop
development and the potential for famine.
We’re interested in
whether Westeros’s climate science adds up, given what we’ve learned
about how these things work here on Earth.
It’s not easy to
understand the mechanisms driving the climate system, given that we
can’t climb into the “Game of Thrones” universe and take measurements
ourselves. It’s hard enough to get an accurate picture of what’s driving
the world’s climate even with many thousands of thermometers, buoys and
satellite readings all plugging data into modern supercomputers — a few
old maesters communicating by raven are bound to struggle.
The
fundamental difference between our world and that of Westeros is of
course the presence of seasons. Here on Earth, seasons are caused by the
planet orbiting around the sun, which constantly bombards us with
sunlight. However, the amount of sunlight received is not the same
throughout the year.
If you imagine the Earth with a long pole
through its center (with the top and bottom of the pole essentially the
North and the South poles) and then tilt that by 23.5 degrees, the
amount of sunlight received in the Northern and the Southern hemispheres
will change throughout the year as the Earth orbits the Sun.
Clearly
the unnamed planet on which “Game of Thrones” is set is missing this
axis tilt — or some other crucial part of Earth’s climate system.
How longer seasons might work
The
simplest explanation could be linked to spatial fluctuations in solar
radiation (sunlight) received at the surface. A reduction in incoming
solar radiation would mean more snow and ice likely remaining on the
ground during the summer in Westeros’s far north. Compared to the more
absorbent soil or rock, snow reflects more of the sun’s energy back out
to space where in effect it cannot warm the Earth‘s surface. So more
snow leads to a cooler planet, which means more snow cover on previously
snow-free regions, and so on. This process is known as the snow albedo feedback.
The collapse of large ice sheets north of the Wall
could also rapidly destabilize ocean circulation, reducing northward
heat transport and leading to the encroachment of snow and ice southward
toward King’s Landing.
To descend into glacial conditions would
require a large decrease in solar radiation received at certain
locations on the Earth’s surface and likewise an increase would be
needed to return to warmer conditions.
This is roughly what
happened during the switches between “glacial” and “interglacial”
(milder) conditions throughout the past million years on Earth. This is
controlled primarily by different orbital configurations known as “Milankovitch cycles,” which affect the seasonality and location of sunlight received on Earth.
However,
these cycles are on the order of 23,000 to 100,000 years, whereas “Game
of Thrones” seemingly has much shorter cycles of a decade or less.
When winter came back
About 12,900 years ago, there was a much more abrupt climate shift, known as the Younger Dryas,
when a spell of near-glacial conditions interrupted a period of gradual
rewarming after the last ice age peaked 21,000 years ago. The sudden
thawing at the end of this cold spell happened in a matter of decades
— a blink of an eye in geological terms — and led to the warm,
interglacial conditions we still have today.
Various theories
have tried to explain why this spike occurred, including the sudden
injection of freshwater into the North Atlantic from the outburst of North American glacial lakes,
in response to the deglaciation, which destabilized ocean circulation
by freshening the water and reducing ocean heat transport to the North
Atlantic Ocean, cooling the regional climate.
Less likely explanations include shifts in the jet stream, volcanic eruptions blocking out the sun, or even an asteroid impact.
The
shift from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age that began
around AD 1300 represents a more recent, and more subtle, example of a
“quick” climate change. Although the overall temperature change wasn’t
too severe — a Northern Hemisphere decrease of around one degree Celcius
compared with today — it was enough to cause much harsher winters in
Northern Europe.
None of these events indicate the abrupt
transitions from long summers to long winters as described in “Game of
Thrones” — and they still all happen on a much longer timescale than a
Westeros winter. However they do demonstrate how extreme climate shifts
are possible even on geologically short timescales.
Regardless
of the causes of the long and erratic seasons, winter in Westeros won’t
be much fun. It may even make the struggle for the Iron Throne between
the various factions seem irrelevant.
Indeed the House of Stark’s
motto “winter is coming” may have a lesson for us here on Earth.
Anthropogenic climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing
humankind today and if left unmitigated the potential environmental
impact on society may be far greater than any global recession. Stop
worrying about the Iron Throne, everyone, winter is coming.
There have been a number of incidents involving tourists
alleging that they were ripped off at Venice restaurants in recent
months.
