It was good to see tht my Nature’s Home magazine (it’s still a ghastly name) came through the letterbox in a compostable wrapper. Well done RSPB!
The wrapper says that you can recycle it in four ways:
- Put it in your compost heap
- Put it in your green garden waste bin
- Put it in your food waste bin
- Use it as your food waste bin
Excellent. I wouldn’t advocate number 4 though as one banana skin was enough to burst through the bottom of the wrapper!
Good to see the RSPB taking this seriously though.
I must pick up the magazine and read it – I found the wrapper quite interesting.
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Made from potato-starch, can be roasted or turned into chips?
Got my Birdfair programme today with British Birds (paper envelope). Hooray, now to plan the itinerary.
National Trust were the first with this last month, however, they seemed not to make a big thing of it. Full marks to RSPB on this. Which? mag is to ‘experiment’ with it for its next issue, 8000 copies? Still, at least it’s a start.
Potato or paper, don’t really care, but please, no more plastic from anyone. No excuses now it’s proved to work.
Apparently some of these bio-degradable plastics are pretty dubious. Either they bio-degrade into very small pieces of plastic, as only the cross-links are starch, or they take far more energy to make, so the overall footprint is (?) just as large. Unfortunately there are no easy solutions. I don’t want residual bits of plastic in my soil for the next ten thousand years, no matter how small they are. I don’t know quite what type the RSPB has used. Does the wrapper say?
The best solution of all to avoid the problems associated with paper as well as plastic production would be to provide an electronic version of (cringe) Nature’s Home – FoE Scotland has the option of changing from getting a copy of their mag in the mail to an e version. An awful lot of problems fixed by doing that. Come on RSPB!
Totally agree that ‘Nature’s Home’ is a terrible name and also ‘Vote for Bob’ and even calling the hen harrier ‘Skydancer’ all the time makes conservation sound incredibly twee and cringe inducing. It conjures up (an unfortunate) stereotypical middle class wishy washiness, ‘let’s all be lovely and fluffy’. It’s all Neil from the Young ones when we need to be PUNK Chris Packham.
I was pleased too – although wondered about the “Austria” label – is this where it’s produced/shipped from? Felt better about the BTOs move to paper. And cheesed off that National Trust for Scotland was still using plastic this time round. I’ll be cancelling that mag (but not the subscription).