Word: plastics
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...soon as ordinary people from Dresden and Potsdam, wearing tennis shoes and loaded with plastic bags and perambulators, were seen hobbling through the underbrush across the Hungarian border in the fall of 1989, crowding embassies in Warsaw and trains in Prague, there were raised eyebrows and mixed feelings in Bonn and elsewhere. For there is nothing dearer to the heart of responsible statesmen than stability. Yalta may have had certain drawbacks, but it was an arrangement one had learned to live with -- and in the end any situation seemed acceptable as long as it was "under control...
...find a store that is open, other skills come into play. Grocery checkouts involve a race against time: the checker shovels your purchases toward you while you try to stuff them into a bag. Don't forget your market basket either, else you'll have to buy a plastic bag -- or several, since each sack only holds approximately 2.3 items. Meanwhile, the people in line behind you start to grumble and push...
...nearly a half-century, East German workers have held lifetime jobs in companies that had only to meet production goals, without much concern for costs, quality or innovation. The madness in this method is symbolized by the Trabant, the plastic-enclosed, four-wheel motorcycle posing as a small car. Until last November, customers waited up to 15 years for the privilege of buying one for then 22,000 ostmarks, or about $4,000; currently, the Trabant cannot be sold at any price...
...packaging can be recycled far more easily than the treated paper used for wrapping food. McDonald's recycles such containers from 500 of its 8,200 U.S. stores and expects to include 1,500 more outlets by the end of the year. After the material is broken down into plastic pebbles, it can be reconstituted into artificial lumber, trash cans and other plastic products. Says Shelby Yastrow, McDonald's senior vice president for environmental affairs: "We used to use paper only. We could do it again. It's not that we can't. It's just that...
Maybe not, but the company could take an even harder look at its packaging policies. In the most obvious case, McDonald's should distinguish between customers who eat in the store and those who carry out the food. Every hour, tons of unnecessary paper bags, wrappers and plastic boxes are discarded a few feet from the cash registers. Moral: McDonald's has already given the planet a break, but Mother Earth could use a few more...