Creating Waste to Save the Planet??

Is this a Sustainable Plan or a Virtue Signalling joke?

Sticky blue tags and torn wrapping paper. Image © Linda Acaster

I have been wrapping the final Christmas gifts and the task has proved less than joyful. In fact, it left me seething.

Most people want to do their bit in cutting back overuse of the planet’s resources. Food is not thrown away in this house, it is eaten; clothes are not worn and tossed, they are donated to thrift shops or recycled, even down to holey socks which go for shoddy. It’s not difficult. It’s not rocket science.

So why do I have to negotiate a huge virtue signalling gaffe when it comes to rolls of Christmas wrapping paper, all to show that the thinner-than-skin shrink-wrap is no longer used in its packaging?

Instead, each roll is sealed by the use of six — read it and weep, six — sticky tags which are supposed to be peelable?

Peelable by whom? Certainly not anyone with poor eyesight. Certainly not anyone disabled by a mild stroke and trying to regain the independence of normal day-to-day activities. And what about the close to 1% of the population suffering rheumatoid arthritis, mostly in their fingers, mostly women?

And those peelable tags are rarely peelable from the paper they bind. No matter how careful I was — and we are talking twenty minutes per…