Depending on how much of the heavier, recyclable packaging would in practice be recycled, you might find that the lighter, non-recyclable packaging actually generates less waste.
And once you start looking into plastic packaging, this kind of counterintuitive conclusion comes up all the time.
Some packaging is a foolish waste.
But are shrink-wrapped cucumbers really so silly if it means they stay fresh for 14 days rather than three?
Which is worse 1.5g (0.05oz) of plastic wrap or entire cucumbers going off before being eaten? Suddenly it’s not so obvious.
Plastic bags stop bananas going brown so quickly, or new potatoes going green; they catch grapes that fall off bunches.
About a decade ago, one UK supermarket experimented with taking all its fruit and vegetables out of their packaging – and its food wastage rate doubled.
According to a UK government report, only 3% of food is wasted before it gets to shops.
In developing countries, that figure can be 50% – and that difference is partly due to how the food is packaged.
BBC Radio 4 – In Our Time, Gnosticism
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss Gnosticism, a sect associated with early Christianity.
Donald Trump’s business links to the mob – BBC Newsnight
Donald Trump now looks like the front-runner to be the Republican candidate for the US presidency. One of his big appeals is his business success – and his claim that his wealth means he can’t be bought and sold. But there’s evidence which not only casts doubt on Trump’s wealth claims – but also reveals his history of business relationships with figures connected to organised crime. John Sweeney reports.
C.S. Lewis Bio: BBC
Born Clive Staples Lewis, he announced when he was three years old that his name was Jack, and Jack he was to family and friends for the rest of his life.
.. Wagner meant more to Jack than good music. The epic operas of the Ring cycle introduced him to Norse mythology, the beginning of his lifelong love of ‘Northernness’. The music and mythology caused momentary but intense feelings in Jack that he could not describe, and later called ‘Joy’. His description of Joy sounds like a desire for another world: “the stab, the pang, the inconsolable longing”.
Jack realised he had felt Joy a few times before; he experienced it again in the years before his conversion to Christianity. Jack threw himself into studying Norse mythology, hoping to experience Joy again.
.. Jack was upset, too, by rumours of homosexuality between pupils at Malvern, and wrote an exaggerated and disapproving chapter about the college in Surprised by Joy.
.. An examiner had remarked that Jack was the sort of boy who could gain a Classics degree at Oxford. But if Jack was to attend university, he needed a scholarship. Albert decided to send him to a tutor to prepare him for the scholarship examination
.. as an Irishman he would not have had to serve in the army, he wanted to do his part
.. Edward Moore was a fellow Irishman with whom Lewis served. The two young men seem to have made an agreement that if either of them did not come home, the other would support his family. Lewis was sent home with shrapnel wounds. Moore was killed and left behind his mother Janie and sister Maureen.
.. After four years of study Lewis ended up with three first-class degrees from Oxford: Greek and Latin literature, classical philosophy and English language and literature.
.. It was at Oxford that Lewis met Owen Barfield, who formed a literary discussion group called The Inklings. The members, who included Lewis himself, J.R.R. Tolkien
.. In Surprised by Joy he likens the following process to being hunted down by God, or even being defeated by him in a game of chess.
.. A chance remark by another acquaintance, T.D. Weldon, caused Lewis to rethink what he still was calling “the Christian myth”: Weldon, known for his cynicism, thought that the evidence for Jesus’s life and resurrection was remarkably good. Lewis read the Gospels and was struck by the thought that they did not sound like fiction: the writers seemed too unimaginative to have made the whole thing up; the Gospels read more like reports than stories.
.. On September 19, 1931, Lewis, Dyson and Tolkien took a night-time stroll and began a conversation about myth. They walked and talked until morning. Tolkien convinced Jack that myths were God’s way of preparing the ground for the Christian story. The stories of resurrection throughout history were precursors to Jesus’s true resurrection: Christianity was the completion of all the mythology before it. Dyson’s contribution was to impress upon Jack how Christianity worked for the believer, liberating them from their sins and helping them become better people. His remaining arguments were being demolished. Jack Lewis was about to be checkmated.
.. The seven Chronicles of Narnia were written and published between 1948 and 1956.
.. Allegory or shaggy lion story?
Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I’d write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out ‘allegories’ to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn’t write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn’t anything Christian about them; that element pushed itself in of its own accord.
.. Lewis was not aiming to teach children Christianity with the Narnia books. He wanted to introduce similar ideas that would make it easier for children to accept Christianity: what he called “a sort of pre-baptism of the child’s imagination.”
.. Other characters in the books reveal Lewis’s attitudes to different peoples and ideas. The Calormenes are a dark-skinned race living south of Narnia. They carry scimitars, keep slaves and worship barbaric false gods: they are, all told, rather reminiscent of the worst Western portrayals of the Middle East.