Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts
Showing posts with label waste. Show all posts
Sunday, June 03, 2007
This week, I asked my mother in law to pick up some bay leaves for me at the store. I am making a roast today, and I had run out. Unfortunately, she went to Wal-Mart and picked me up their store brand. She is one of the people who still enjoys shopping there.
As I opened the cap, I noticed both the foil seal protector, and the plastic shaker cap. For anybody who cooks, a shaker lid on a bay leaf jar is a silly redundancy. People can choke on bay leafs so you put them in whole, and take them out when you are done cooking.
But, Wal-Mart in it's infinite wisdom put these caps where they weren't needed. Trying to pry the thing off with my fingers for two minutes ended up being a futile effort. It took a sharp knife cutting the cap in the top, twisting around to finally release this extra packaging.
All this did was piss me off, and waste Wal-Mart plastic. Sure the tiny piece costs fractions of a penny on the dollar, but in volume it adds up. I keep being told that Wal-Mart is the champion of reducing unneeded costs from the bottom line, but they must have been asleep at the switch this day. When you think of ten million of these caps stacked into a big pile, it can be easy to see how we fill up landfills with plastics that is incompatable with biodegradability.
That is just one measly tiny 2" round plastic cap. Multipy this waste amongst all our unnecessarily packaged products and our problem becomes quite distressing.
Friday, February 16, 2007
WASHINGTON - About $10 billion has been squandered by the U.S. government on Iraq reconstruction aid because of contractor overcharges and unsupported expenses, and federal investigators warned Thursday that significantly more taxpayer money is at risk.
The three top auditors overseeing work in Iraq told a House committee their review of $57 billion in Iraq contracts found that Defense and State department officials condoned or allowed repeated work delays, bloated expenses and payments for shoddy work or work never done.
More than one in six dollars charged by U.S. contractors were questionable or unsupported, nearly triple the amount of waste the Government Accountability Office estimated last fall.
We have to cut funding for the VA, can't afford a whole slew of social programs because the federal budget is so tight and disciplined. Isn't that what Tom Delay was saying a few years back? Hogwash. This is big welfare program for the President and Vice President's friends. This money is surely to be recycled into donations to the RNC and to Swift Boat efforts come 2008.
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