Ooh look, a tea crate
Ooh look, a tea crate, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.
I recently pondered what had happened to all the old tea crates. Well, here’s one of them, at least, found at TRiM (Timber Recycling in Manchester) yesterday.
Packaging
Ooh look, a tea crate, originally uploaded by spinneyhead.
Where have all the tea crates gone?
That was my thought just before going to bed last night. An odd one, I know, but somehow my brain had worked its way around to packaging.
I seem to remember that wooden crates of a standardised size, generically or accurately- my memory’s a little fuzzy- described as “tea crates”, used to be the default packaging medium for moves. Nowadays there are any number of plastic boxes or origami cardboard constructions available and it seems the old fashioned tea crate has been consigned to history. They have been relegated to collectors’ items and subjects of nostalgia tinged blog posts.
(A little digging revealed that you can still buy “tea crates“, but these are not the old fashioned, recycled kind. Rather, they are modern plywood boxes with a similar construction to their namesakes.)
Nil Rubbish
Bryn Fogden challenged himself to produce no landfill for the whole of May. To do this he had to change his shopping and some of his eating habits, but he did manage and intends to carry on. He blogged the whole experience at nilrubbish.blogspot.com.
Supermarkets against excess packaging? Who'd have thought
Asda are setting up a pilot scheme where they will collect examples of over packaging from customers to build a case to present to their suppliers. The Daily Mail is supporting it because they think it will mean a return to weekly refuse collections.
I try to buy as much as possible from the local grocers, which reduces waste quite substantially. I just need to remember to take my backpack with me so they don’t put everything into a carrier bag.