8 Replies to “Saturday cartoon by Ralph Underhill”

  1. That is depressing. Instead of all beverages having those lids, can we just “not spill things”? It seems like a good solution? Maybe not fill cups to the brim? Look where we are all going so we don’t smack into each other, and not all try and press into the same train carriage? Or maybe just make specific times to sit down and have a cuppa without rushing about?

    I realise that is a bit hypocritical coming from me, all my cups have lids due to my disability, but mine are designed to last a long time and not be disposable.

  2. yes, it’s not even really that the companies are concerned for any marginal risk to someone – it’s so they can’t get sued. Lets stop using disposable cups! There are good re-usable ones out there. They even sell them in Oxfam shops!

    1. Ironically the case which may have prompted that was partly due to a tight fitting lid. And also completely justified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liebeck_v._McDonald's_Restaurants

      She suffered 3rd degree burns over between 6 and 16% of her body which resulted in medical bills costing over 20,000 dollars (and that was back in the early ’90s too) -incidentally, this is why the NHS is such an international treasure and why we should be resisting the Tories privatizing it off willy-nilly. And McDonald’s had had already been over 700 other incidents with their coffee prior to this. The jury voted large damages mostly to send a message to McDonald’s because of those 700 prior incidents. Stella Liebeck only pursued them for her medical bills and a small amount of loss of income.

  3. Yes it would be better if people just didn’t try to spill things, but at least there’s a weak if not totally non existent reason for these lids. The scope for designing out waste, reducing resource use and building in recycling/reuse is staggering. One of my favourite examples are book margins. Flick through a few books and you’ll see there can be radical differences in the size of margins they use – why? It serves no rational purpose it just means some books use an awful lot more paper than they have too. It came as no surprise when I was reliably informed via a third party that a big publisher was doing this deliberately to make people think they were buying more ‘book’. Condescending and irresponsible in the extreme. Just a few different keyboard moves at the design stage and you could cut paper use and with the financial savings use recycled fibre if it is indeed more expensive. Cutting out waste should be so, so easy. Glad Ralph brought this topic up after the mention of an incinerator a few days ago, it’s crap like disposable coffee cup lids we’d be obliged to produce for decades to feed them.

  4. There should be a tax on purchased beverages with diuretic properties, hypothecated for the provision and upkeep of public conveniences. Better yet, eating and drinking in public should be banned altogether on pain of an hour’s detention after skool and the offenders required to walk around sucking a dummy. Or, to avoid the disposal problems caused by dummies, their thumbs.

    As for the aesthetics of book design – my personal gripe is too much or too little leading but apart from that there is enormous scope to reduce the amount of book waste at source. There are only so many books about Mindfulness that the world can stand.

  5. Of course one way to reduce this waste is to make your own coffee in your own (reusable!) mug. personally, I am more than happy not to contribute to the profits of Starbucks.

    1. And…. here’s another idea – take a flask of hot drink with you when you go out! I did just that for a lovely day out in the Peak District today.

  6. About right for our current consumeristic lifestyles.
    Most lids end up on the roadside verges and not in recycling bins or landfill as shown in the sketch.

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