Have you noticed how an urge to abolish single-use plastic has turned into a plea for more of it? \u00a0This single use plastic is \"good use plastic\", of course, as opposed to bad use plastic, because it's PPE \u2013 personal protective equipment [ gloves, visors, aprons and masks ] that\u00a0has to be discarded after every patient contact because it might be covered with the virus. \u00a0I read that between\u00a0February 25 and April 18, more than a billion items of PPE were delivered to users in the health and care sector in the UK. \u00a0All of it comes from the vilified petrochemical industry.<\/p>\n
I wondered when I would read my first article about all this usage (and waste). \u00a0It was last weekend when the Sunday Times said that\u00a0official guidance to medical users is that infectious PPE must go into clinical infectious waste streams, usually for incineration. \u00a0It can also be autoclaved (high temperature and pressure scalding) and then shredded and sent to landfill. \u00a0We can, therefore, be reassured that it won't end up on your local beach or in a passing whale. \u00a0If you're the general public, well, these strictures don't apply to you, and you can just throw it on the ground if you're so minded \u2013 as I noted last week.<\/p>\n
Ironically enough, the use of bags for life to carry shopping is suddenly hazardous as the virus can cling to them. \u00a0Heaping irony on irony, the supermarkets are giving click 'n' collect and drop-off customers free\u00a0bags for life with their on-line shopping; government ministers gave special permissions so as to avoid too much handling of purchases). \u00a0You still have to pay for the thinner single-use ones in the stores.<\/p>\n
The point of all this is to hope that in future all plastic usage won't be demonised in schools in the unthinking way it sometimes is. \u00a0Some of it apparently is necessary to saves lives. \u00a0Who'd have thought it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Have you noticed how an urge to abolish single-use plastic has turned into a plea for more of it? \u00a0This single use plastic is \"good use plastic\", of course, as opposed to bad use plastic, because it's PPE \u2013 personal...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}