Hotel room shampoo bottles to be banned in Northern Ireland but not in the rest of the UK
New EU net-zero laws on packaging waste will also see plastic shrink wrap and sauces in plastic sachets prohibited under Windsor Framework
Great, so we’ve a natural experiment here.
Hands up anyone who thinks it will be honestly studied?
I can already tell you the result of the study!!
Pollution dropped by 1000%!!!!
We should make Theresa May go around to each hotel personally and put them back.
Is this the modern equivalent of rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic?
I do find it funny that, even those who’ve made up the rules of the game don’t really understand them. For them it’s just a fairy story that doesn’t have any basis in fact. Facts are hard things and require comprehension which can be very tricky. Much easier to just have feelz that you can make up as you go along to prove your point.
Result
Plastic pollution drops slightly, but not by much
Food waste, as a result of things going off before consumption, rises significantly.
I get so fucked off with it all.
We’re banned from having plastic straws to save the polar bears or some shit. Meanwhile, a manufacturer of wings for planes in north Wales shrink wraps wings when they’re nearly done, drags them between a couple of factories for a distance of several hundred yards. In the second factory, the shrink wrap is all cut off to allow some work to be done. Then they’re all wrapped up again to be taken to a third factory.
You might think ‘oh but it needs protecting from the elements’. Except they leave dozens of sets of wings outside for extended periods while waiting to be transferred to the final assembly line.
One rule for us, another for big business.
So every time I go to MaccyD’s, I deliberately grab a handful of their crappy paper straws and chuck them in the bin. Because fuck them, that’s why.
Bearing in mind who occupies most of Britains hotel rooms please excuse me for not giving a flying feck about how Abdul gets his beard shampooed.
How frustrating!
I will have to send the private jet outside the EU to get its bathroom supplies restocked now.
King Charles should be relocated to a plastic tent under the Windsor Framework.
If poverty is good enough for his subjects, it’s good enough for ol’ Sausagehands.
It will doubtless be another example of “policy-based evidence making” rather than vice-versa.
Just think this through. You’re booked in to a hotel for a couple of nights. You’re travelling so you’re trying to minimise the amount of stuff you’re schlepping around. And there’s also the liquid restrictions on flights. You want a shower & wash your barnet. Since the hotel aren’t providing the necessaries & you haven’t brought them, you buy a shower gel & shampoo in the 500ml sizes from a nearby shop. You chuck both bottles, hardly used, in the waste bin before checking out. And this somehow reduces waste?
I actually do buy hospitality size soap bars, gel & shampoo sachets in boxes from Amazon. Usually come in 100s or 250s depending. We use them for travelling & stocking our guest bathrooms & toilet. But I can only buy them because they’re made for the hospitality industry. Without that there’s not going to be the market, make it worth producing them.
Storm in tea cup alert.
Some hotels, particularly lower price hotels, got rid of individual shampoo/shower gel bottles/sachets and bars of soap more than a 25 years ago, to be replaced with wall mounted pump-action dispensers. Many too just have showers not baths.
This was done for reasons of cost reduction, reflected in lower room-rates. So it won’t affect many hotels.
Since there are plenty of formulations of combined shower gel/shampoo this means only one refillable dispenser is needed in the shower cubicle, with a smaller hand wash dispenser at the hand-basin.
It really is of no consequence and hotels can and will readily adjust. The high-end hotels are the ones keen on the little bottles because they usually contain discounted high-end products, and overstock their bathrooms with them because they know clients will take a few bottles home with them. A nice little promo for the hotel and the brands.
My personal experience is, the pump-action dispensers are much more convenient than fiddling with little bottles and sachets.
Before you have a shower in the morning,go down to reception and they’ll give you a squirt of gel in one hand and shampoo in the other from their bottles they keep behind the desk.
It’s not like anyone needed another reason not to go to Ireland, you know.
What’s the experiment?
And I doubt that the article is correct in stating that hotel shampoo bottles will be banned. Most likely what they mean is miniature single-use ones. So the effect will be to turn the bottles into refillable ones (which a lot alrady are) which means using thicker, more durable plastic. But there is very unlikely to be any effective means of preventing guests from keeping them, thus resulting in a steady stream of discarded plastic which is probably more than before the ban.