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This is, umm, weird

Sachets of sauce and small bottles of shampoo will be banned from European restaurants and hotels after a deal was struck to ban single-use plastics in the EU.

Belgium, negotiating on behalf of EU member states, reached provisional agreement with the European Parliament on the law to cut packaging waste late on Monday.

Because I’m reasonably certain that they passed another law, a decade back, which insisted – on food safety grounds – that little refillable bottles of oil and so on were not to be allowed in restaurants and sachets had to be used.

I’d need to make sure that was true before making much of a fuss about it but that is the recollection….

12 thoughts on “This is, umm, weird”

  1. I remember that too!

    I posted about it in the Brexit debate over here…

    If it ever became law though it is widely ignored in Cyprus.

  2. I yield to no one in my hatred of the EU, of all petty bureaucracy, and in my belief that little sachets are horrible but should be allowed if the caff owner wants to use them.

    Obviously I think all green policies are balls.

    But there’s nothing necessarily inconsistent about this – if the facts (which they pretend are involved here) change, they should change their minds.

  3. Imagine if “Belgium” (i.e. some chinless fiddy kiddler bureaucrats in Brussels) was “negotiating on your behalf” though.

    You might as well shoot yourself in the face now, to save time.

  4. The Meissen Bison

    The proposed regulation, I think, concerned unbranded and unsealed flasks/bottles of olive oil that are often found (though less in the UK) on tables in restaurants along with other condiments. This was particularly resented in Italy where small establishments sourced their olive oil locally or indeed produced it themselves.

    In the resulting brouhaha it turned out that ‘nobody’ was responsible for initiating the proposal and the large commercial olive oil producers denied lobbying for the change. It was ultimately abandoned and thought to have been the brain-child of some zealous apparatchik in the Berlaymont.

    The effect would have been to introduce small sealed bottles of olive oil for the restaurant trade resulting in increased costs and a waste of oil and of glass so pretty sound stuff from the EU’s perspective.

  5. Is this why I don’t seem to have seen those plastic tomatoes of tomato sauce in ages? And whatever happened to Jif lemons?

  6. And whatever happened to Jif lemons?

    They can still be found, if you look hard, in HK – not yet a threat to national insecurity.

  7. Dennis, Pointing Out The Obvious

    Another day, another law… That’s how enormous bureaucracies work, isn’t it?

    And only yesterday you wogs were warning me about France being overtaken by crooks and Muslims that would take away your freedoms.

    Hell, you already got the crooks. The crooks in the EU will finish you wogs off well before the Muslims get around to doing it.

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