Friday, July 24, 2009

Recycling tautology

In the washrooms on the campus of the University of Waterloo, all the paper-towel dispensers have been replaced with ones that look like this...



The front face of each unit displays the following environmental feel-good message:



Hmm... isn't EVERYTHING made of "up to 100% post-consumer material"? I've never heard of something being made out of more than 100% of anything. Rather than an upper-bound on the amount of recycling, wouldn't a lower-bound be more informative? For example, they could use zero recycled material, and still claim that they use "up to 100% post-consumer material".

On the more positive side, perhaps the paper-towels are entirely made of recycled material, but they wish to point out that a large portion of it comes from post-consumer material (that would have been garbage), as opposed to materials recycled from factories, etc.

This blog post is from
intelligent-falling.blogspot.com

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