Lidded Logic

Thursday, November 13, 2008

Today’s Toronto Star carries a story ( http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/536020 ) about the debate over trash and our lead-the-consumer-by-the-nose society.

I have strong views on consumerism, our spoon-fed society, too much TV, not enough reading, trash, the throw-away society, and so too, no doubt, have you. Perhaps your view is opposed to mine.

But these articles I write are supposed to focus on LOGIC, so that’s what we’ll do.

I think that a 20c deposit on water bottles, coffee cups, and styrene food containers would be a Very Good Thing. You may not. That’s not the point here.

Please read the article (at http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/536020 ) and then go back and re-read this little beauty:

“The restaurant industry ... mounted a furious lobbying effort against the move, arguing that no suitable paper lids exist that would make the cups recyclable”.

No suitable paper lids exist!

Eh?

Here’s what baffles me right now: We can manufacture and use a paper-based recyclable container that holds up to one liter of near-boiling hot fluid, and we trust that container to last over an hour, without collapsing in our firm grip, or leaking into the cup-holder in the rented car.

As an aside, I bring the darn things home and plant orange and lemon pips in them, make little trees and give them away. You can see one in the last image of Greaves’s Groves. But I digress.

The paper cup does an excellent job of holding one litre of boiling hot coffee.

What does a lid have to do?

It has to stop a small amount of liquid sloshing over the top.

A few drops.

Not even a storm in a tea-cup.

I could use my own hand without much danger, palm downwards, did I not need both hands on the steering wheel.

Logic: If we have a CUP made of paper that does an excellent job, what is so difficult about a LID?

Now I also like Tim Horton’s. Say what you will, their stores are clean and consistent. The staff are friendly. I could use more chains like them.

Tim Horton’s has its Roll Up The Rim To Win contest each year, and the rims on the coffee cups are so darned hard to unroll, that some guy Down East has started a mini-industry manufacturing a metal doo-dad to help people unroll the rim and win anything from nothing, through a free coffee, to a luxury SUV; usually NOTHING. (You can read about it in yet another Toronto Star article at http://www.thestar.com/living/article/516703 )

If we can have paper cups with rims so solid and unyielding, strong and robust, that a small INDUSTRY starts up, where’s the problem with a lid with a similar rim or ribbed strengthening component?

Again, it’s the (bad) logic that fascinates me.

Myself I’d ban all take-out containers from public use. (I’ll make exceptions for intensive care units in hospitals etc).

But I just can’t stand bad logic.

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