Hazards Of Bagged Pre-Washed Supermarket Salads
Bagged pre-washed salads are popular items in supermarkets. Yet for the convenience of an “instant salad” you are given significantly less leaves than if you bought a whole lettuce. Worse still the pre-packaged leaves are washed in chlorine, (some chlorine compounds are known to be carcinogenic). The leaves are then place in plastic bags pumped with gas where the normal oxygen and carbon dioxide levels are altered. This process slows down discolouration. Normal leaves will wilt within a day or two indicating loss of nutrients. Bagged leaves may look fresh but could be several weeks old, thus depleted of vitamins.
Find the time to buy whole fresh lettuce and get better value for money. In addition you’re saving the environment from excessive packaging. Wash the lettuce yourself and you can be sure it’s clean and fresh.
Vapour trails in the sky
The long white ‘contrails’ that stretch out in straight lines behind high altitude aircraft can look attractive. Often the skies over Europe and North America are littered with these trails. Sometimes, these trails will stay in the sky long after the plane has passed. A recent article in New Scientist outlines how these contrails are a very serious contributor to global warming. It seems the contribution of these trails are on a par with the actual aviation exhaust CO2.
These trails are only formed at high altitudes where the atmospheric conditions are such that these trails of water vapour and ice form. This gives a solution to the contribution to global warming - fly at lower altitudes. Unfortunately, flying at lower altitudes uses more fuel and therefore produces approximately four percent more CO2 emissions. The article detailed researchers findings that even with this increase in fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, there is overall a lower contribution to global warming. It seems there is a trade-off between a short-lived effect (contrails) and a cumulative one (CO2), and for this reason some are expressing caution about how the costs and benefits of lower flying will play out in the longer term.