Not so slow boat from China

Husband alerted me to this article by Michael Sheridan on Timesonline . It quantifies what we have known for a long time.

To China for the holy grail: a price of 99p

I particularly like the comment by Russell Brocklehurst which follows the article.

The point is: do we need to buy all those things that are being hawked at 'cheap' shops, websites and auction sites?

Who pays the price of the poor health which the young factory girls suffer in return for the pittance they are paid so that we can have our trinkets?

We must begin to retreat from living in this disposable world before these non-biodegradable 'disposables' bury us ... literally.

Back to Organic-Ally.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Upcycling clothing labels -- don't throw anything away!

Image
Over the last two years I went through a period of buying new clothes to replace some "holey" ones. Each time I find a hard board label that comes with a punched hole and string, I say to myself: these are too good to go in the bin , even the recycling bin. (I am not sure if mixed materials like cardboard and metal can be recycled.) As I started to write this, I googled and learned that these are called "string" or "swing tags". They are basically custom "travel tags" which you can buy at stationers. In fact, there are crafters who personalise travel tags and sell them on market platforms (five for £3.50!). This is what I did for Christmas 2023. I started with these tags, all of sturdy cardboard, with punched holes. I removed the strings, but kept them, and you can replace them later. I then found my stash of Christmas cards from last year (ie those sent to us and saved from the bin). On the spot, decided to cut them into 1/2 inch strips. They co...
Read more

Going organic -- slowly

I was 'in conversation' with another happy customer. He tells me that "when things need replacing we try and replace them with an organic/fairtrade option". I think that is just such a sensible way to go. Like him, we are slowly switching over to organic bedding. Although the definition for 'need replacing' is slightly modified in my case. My son and I both have sensitive skin and some things have been making us itch. I wonder if it is the cheap cotton sheets we've been using. Up till now we've been buying bedding on the basis of whether they look good. For example, son was into anything to do with space/exploration, so we went and got him bedding with a 'space' theme on it. At that time I had no idea what harm conventional cotton was doing and the effect of conventional cotton on the skin. Some places offer such 'cheap' options that we -- I, really -- had succumbed to the temptation and had bought what I thought would suit us and our s...
Read more

Linguistic Hegemony: Cockles and Muscles

(A shorter, less controversial version of this was published in the Straits Times online section on 11th October. I had assumed that the Editor was not going to run it. Apologies for the overlaps.) The English-Singlish debate has thrown up a vociferous group defending the use of Singlish, largely because they see Singlish as being tied up with a Singapore identity. (I tried to explain how being a good Singaporean should not preclude us from learning to speak good English in a letter to the press .) This group seems to be made up of people who are able to speak (or at least write) excellent English when they choose to. There is a deafening silence, at least in the English cyber-media (and understandably so), from the Singlish-speaking group who could most benefit from learning to speak good English. If I were a Marxian sociologist (not the same as being a Marxist, nota bene ) I would say that this ‘good English’ group own the “means of production” and the ‘Singlish’ group do not. In or...
Read more