Saturday, November 27, 2010

Handy=?

This lunchtime I was squeezing out a little dab of honey mustard for my sandwich, knowing that when I discarded this squeeze bottle, it would not be completely empty.

I recalled the summer of 1968, when I purchased my first plastic tube of Brylcreem. I thought it was such a wonderful thing, and wondered why it would not work for toothpaste, etc. Apparently it would.

In 1968, toothpaste was still packed in metal foil tubes, which could be squeezed flat and rolled from the bottom until the very last drop of toothpaste could be evacuated from the tube. Some rather short time after I'd discovered the plastic tube for Brylcreem, I began finding toothpaste also in plastic tubes. Now, as far as I know, there's no place in this country where one could buy a metal tube of toothpaste.

My wife bought me a new tube (plastic) of toothpaste about three or four months ago, thinking I'd just about exhausted my old tube.....BUT, I'm still squeezing toothpaste from it. And you know what? When I finally decide I'm finished with this tube, and discard it, I'm sure there'll still be toothpaste lingering inside the plastic tube, which can't really be flattened as were the old metal ones.

After the plastic toothpaste tubes I began to see squeeze bottles for all sorts of food products, such as mustard, mayonnaise, honey, etc. It is very, very difficult to completely empty these squeeze bottles using the recommended procedure.

Is it essential that "convenience" also involve waste?



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