1. I don’t own a car. When I go shopping I walk to and from the supermarket and to and from other shops. If its out of walking distance most of the time I catch public transport.
2. I pay extra on my electricity bill for “green” electricity. (Although for a few dollars a week extra how green is it other wise why not just make everyone pay it?) I look forward to the day when I am in my own home and can go 100% solar and not pay any electricity bills and feel less guilty about all the electrical things I run.
3. I have talked to my building manager about recycling and what can be done to make it available. Its not available in my building. It really should be like normal houses.
4. I don’t use plastic bags from the supermarket if its only a few items and I can carry them on my walk home.

Now with that out of the way let the ranting begin…

South Australia has banned plastic shopping bags. That is stupid. And here is why…

Some Australian retailers already provide plastic shopping bags that are biodegradable. You may remember a few years ago they were advertising on the bags that they were biodegradable. Instead of continuing that they are now pushing “reusable green bags” – however how green are they? The linked article quotes:

The green bags, which are made from non-woven polypropylene, are designed to have a relatively long life but they are not designed to break down in the compost heap, he says.

Polypropylene is a byproduct of oil refining, O’Shea says. Produced during the process is propylene gas, which, when put into a reactor, becomes propylene powder. After stabilisers are mixed with the powder, it is placed in an extruder, which produces propylene pellets, which can then be turned into a range of things including car bumper bars and food containers. If the pellets are melted, they can be made into a fibre which can then be made into bags.

Thats much worse than the biodegradable plastic bags that were designed to break down in compost in 12 weeks. Polypropylene is also used to make wheelie bins and car bumpers. Not the easiest thing to break down are they?

But thats OK people say, you reuse the “green bags” so they had better last and not break. Really? Then you must be in the minority because by Coles’ own calculation less than 1% of people ever reuse their green bags. They buy new ones! Worse only 3% of people make use of the provided recycling facility to recycle their green bags. That’s a lot of green bags ending up in the garbage. And that brings me to my next point..

Garbage. Do you line your garbage bin with a liner? Whats it made out of?  Plastic you say? (Note environmentalist recommend not lining it at all. Or using newspaper. I’m sure that works. I’m not so sure you’re bin will smell good after a day without constant cleaning…) – So you are going to start buying plastic bags to line your bin with instead of reusing the plastic shopping bags you used? Doesn’t that seem counter productive? Buying plastic now instead? Of course its good for the bottom line. No more free plastic bags. You want it, you can pay for it. But we care about the environment thats why we are instead providing green bags. Only 99c each! You should buy them. Its good for the environment. (You have no choice) We are doing our bit…

Really? Are you doing your bit? The manufacture of green bags costs 65c. Its probably even come down as its a big growth industry. That’s 34c profit per bag (without transportation costs) – Also include the cost saving in no longer giving away plastic bags AND the now the sale plastic bags (that you use to get for free) and you can see its really pays to be environmentally friendly. Unless you are the customer and you are buying. Now if they were really doing their bit, they would be selling the bags at cost price or even cheaper, considering the savings from not giving away plastic bags.

And thats how this rant got started. The old arrangement I have with my supermarket where they provide me free bin liners (as required by my building) may be coming to an end. I may soon be forced to pay for something that was free.

Oh also the alternative provided in using green bags, not so hot.

Solutions? Post your comments.

Note: Most of the links are old now. Feel free to post updated statistics if you can find any.

URL: http://www.iinet.net.au/freezone/#app=f679&1d4c-selectedIndex=4

(Note the have part 1 and part 2 backwards on the site for some reason…)

Dig were one of my favourite Australian bands. I blogged about going to see them in Sydney last year. Was good even though it was only a cut down 40 minute show. Although their style and sound has changed a lot since their albums – its really more of a live remix they put on a fantastic show. Great grooving music.

I did find some more details on what happened to the band in a SMH review of a recent show. Will they reform and play again? Who knows. I hope to see them live again.

Here is the blurb from the site:

I’m proud of this one:

Extremely well-commented source code

winbolo is written mostly in C.

Across all C projects on Ohloh, 19% of all source code lines are comments. For winbolo, this figure is 38%.

This very impressive number of comments puts winbolo among the best 10% of all C projects on Ohloh.

A high number of comments might indicate that the code is well-documented and organized, and could be a sign of a helpful and disciplined development team.

Here is another widget from the site:

If only it didn’t put a giant space below the widget…

Today I released with source code to WinBolo as well as all the related applications and utilities under the GPL open source license. It was a weird feeling. The game was such a large part of my life for so long. In some ways I feel like a parent whose child is going out into the world, in others I’m thinking about how bad I was a programming 10 years ago. (WinBolo was my second real sized application in C)  – but still its better to make the source code available and let the game continue rather to eventually die out from inaction from me. It still amazes me that thousands of people have played the game over the years, over 2,700 registered players on the community forums (more stats from WBN for the past 5 years) and still on average 80 games are played a day even though I haven’t done anything in the past 2 and a half years.

I started a wiki to documented the design and to make it easier for people to begin developing as well. It’ll be interesting to see what will happen next…

On Salad…

On Cake…

On Religion…

I like the way he does conversations with himself as characters responding to what he is saying.

Want more? How about bacon. (making all foods better) I couldn’t find an embeddable version to put in…

One of the pairs I bought were Wild Rhino Kaka Beige shoes. (pictured left) They are coloured “Dirty White” according to the box. This means they come “pre scuffed” so you don’t look like you are wearing new shoes. I’m not sure what the point is and what they will look like when they are worn for a while and the scuffing continues. I’m sure its just that the kids think its uncool to have clean shoes. But anyway as I was leaving the store the salesperson was trying to upsell me the water proofing stuff to look after them. Here is exactly what they said: “You want to waterproof them before you wear them anywhere so they don’t get wet and dirty.” I looked at her for a few seconds and told her I didn’t need to buy any. My first thought was to say: “Wait? So I want to make sure my pre-dirtied shoes don’t get dirty? Isn’t it a bit late for that?” but I thought better of it.

Oh and does anyone actually waterproof their shoes before wearing them or even know anyone that does?