British Recycled Products

British Recycled Plastic, in keeping with the aims of British Recycled Products, aims to help local authorities, schools, businesses, social enterprise and primary care trusts close the recycling loop by providing sustainable alternatives to traditional construction materials and maintenance-free outdoor furniture.

BRP is committed to sourcing and developing new products and markets for recycled materials, concentrating on transforming plastic into high quality, commercially viable recycled products, diverting it from landfill.

Sounds good to me. Though I must do some more research on issues surround recycling of plastic (energy consumption and carbon footprint compare with virgin plastic manufacture, contamination etc). Still I think my bottom line is always going to be that stopping plastic going into landfill is a good thing.

More on British Recycled Plastic can be found here.

Check out the planter bench

Eternal Lace

How amazing is this?

Textile designer Laura Anne Marsden has developed a technique of making lace from old plastic bags. Simply stunning.

She uses it in decorations as above and jewellery

and even on cushions



More info at http://www.lauramarsden.com

More jewellery

Forgive me for posting more jewellery but it's so beautiful.



These are made by the amzing Becky Crawford of myspacefruit.com from plastic bottles found washed up on the shores of Cornwall where she lives. She cuts them out by hand. Where does she find the time? Plenty more pieces to gawp at and buy here.

Ban Plastic Bags

Even when I'm not giving up plastic for Lent I try always to have a reusable cotton bag with me for my shopping. I'm green like that you see. But convincing people one by one to stop using plastic bags is never going to have the same effect as a blanket ban on them.

Italy's done it.

Mexico City's passed a law giving authorities the power to fine businesses that give free plastic bags to their customers. Though I wonder whether such a law will ever be rigorously enough enforced.

And a whole heap of other countries have either banned them outright, or banned the thinnest ones, including Eritrea, Rwanda, South Africa, Kenya and Tanzania. In Ireland plastic bag used dropped by 90% once charges were introduced. Other countries have been charging or making noises about banning or charging including France, Switzerland, Germany and Holland.

La Belle France

Well not so belle as far as plastic packaging goes it would appear.

Take a look at what one American expat finds in her local French supermarket.

At the risk of sounding like the greeniest treehugging treehugger anywhere, the planet really is too precious for plastic packaged single slices of ham, surely.

Plastic Seconds

I know I promised you more on straws. But in the interim how cool is this



A necklace made from those fish shaped soy sauce bottles you get with takeaway sushi. I always though there ought to be a use for them but couldn't think of one. Genius.

From Plastic Seconds where you can find all sorts of other jewellery from plastic bits and bobs. How brilliant is designer Maria Papadimitriou.

Drinking Straws

It's the straws that are getting to me. Good thing I haven't given up alcohol for Lent as the few times I've had non-alcoholic drinks in a pub they have come plastic straws. Each time I think 'I must remember next time to ask for no straw' but then by the time the next time comes I forget.

Why do pubs do this? And indeed when did they start doing it? For drinks in glasses? I remember as a child being given a bottle of something soft and fizzy and a a straw to drink whilst my brother and I sat outside in the garden, on the step or in a drab, empty side room (children were most definitely not allowed in pubs then). But I don't think any drink that was actually poured got a straw in it.

I do have some fond memories of straws. My mother kept an enormous box of them, paper ones, and for special treats we were allowed to have one to drink with. They were most definitely rationed. In fact so strong is my brother's memory of not being able to have a straw, and sense of being cheated out of something, that he is deliberately giving his small son straws on at random meal times rather than only on special occaions.

Then as what would probably now be called a tweenie, there were the coloured spiral ones that you got with drinks in Bernie Inns. We used to go there occasionally for lunch with a friend of mine and her mother as her father worked for the company that owned them and they got a discount. And we always ordered fancy drinks just for the fancy straws and cocketail umbrellas. And you could KEEP THE STRAWS. Such joy.

And I remember buying for my mother when she was ill with cancer a special long handled silver teaspoon, where the spoon handle was actually a silver straw. I figured it might make intake of fluids a bit more fun.

So straws can be special. But what a waste to have something you don't really need, only use once for a few minutes and then lies around in landfill for decades or longer. How did straws become so prevalent?

A bit of googling reveals that straw use actually goes back a long way. Almost definitely ancient peoples used actual straws., But then in 1888 Marvin Stone patented a process for manufacturing spiral-wound tubes. And the modern drinking straw was born. There's a great little article with pictures of the early patents here. Plastic straws became more popular in paper with the developments in plastic from the 1950's onwards. And if you'd ever wondered how plastic straws were made, the answer is extrusione.

Sadly (ed. really? sadly?), I can't seem to find any data for the number of plastic straws used and thrown away each week.