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August 13, 2009

Glastic Brands

I occasionally watch Dragons' Den, normally by accident desperately trying to avoid the 'oh so dull' formulaic British terrestrial TV offerings (which mostly consist of patronising chefs, other peoples dull houses, fabricated news, rubbernecking real life/drama emergency services and yet more repetitive sensationalist news).

I hardly need to tell you how hard it is to find even thirty minutes of meaningful solace on the TV these days. For example this year's Ashes series is only viewable by paying vast sums of money for Sky, then letting a half job stranger put up some cheap shaped blot of chicken wire on the side of your house and violate your outside wall with a masonry drill to pipe it in. Your own personal intravenous feed.

So this week I was squeezed into the cosy Dragons' Den again to watch more ordinary 'entrepreneurs' get disappointed by a bunch of venture capitalists who appear to gain more from the infamy of their own personal branding on prime time TV than any crumbs thrown to fledgling companies.

My interest perked up when some chap was raising capital for a wine innovation. It was a very durable plastic wine glass containing wine, sealed with an inert gas to prevent oxidation, and therefore providing a shelf life of up to a year. The seal was much like the sort of pull off foil thingy you would find on a supermarket sherry trifle.

I find plastic glasses vulgar at the best of times, no matter how convenient they are for large functions, transatlantic meals, or even picnics. I still struggle to respect a wine that is in a screw top, so peeling back a 'glastic' seal would feel even worse.

Then there is the waste of course.

The pre-sealed plastic wine glass feels both over convenient and ground fill bound for hundreds of years. It reminds me of the Nespresso aluminium capsule which at a seemingly large environmental cost perhaps delivers one of the most over perfect domestic espressos attainable without buying an industrial Gaggia the size of a steam engine. Unless you have abnormally large fingers, are keen on needlework and are in short supply of thimbles, or indeed live in Switzerland (where they have a Nespresso recycling scheme), the capsule appears to be a litter bug, much like the sealed 'glastic'.

This recycling issue has a more interesting recent spin as there is currently an expedition to the Pacific ocean to examine a floating island of plastic that is meant to be the size of Texas. The currents have gathered it together into a massive never to melt 'plasticberg' (unless global warming really kicks off).

With the icecaps melting we may well end up with plastic caps on the world's poles. Polar explorers would have to negotiate the 'Evian' mountains, 'Muller Light' hills and the PET pinot plains. They may well be core drilling the poles in the next millennium, the various layers of brand labels will be a way of revealing the past.

No carbon dating required, just a bar code reader.

The thing is, almost everything could be recycled if certain schemes were expanded or new ones were set up, but in reality that sort of infrastructure globally is certainly not around the corner. New individual portion products that create more options for permanent waste are just depressing and will probably only add to the growing island in the Pacific.

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