I suspect that the Green zealots have little understanding of where all their manufactured goods come from and how they are made. Where's the sense in exporting all our industry to China and India and using energy to ship their products here?
There's only one growth industry here, Logistics and warehousing to store and distribute imported goods. Everywhere you go in Britain these days you see massive warehouses
Absolutely: I agree with you that the old mantra of: reduce, reuse, and only last... recycle, got lost to many people years ago and unabated consumption has become unquestioned, so it becomes a matter of bean-counting local carbon quotas and if made in China it's not on our tally. If we outsource manufacture to China/India etc not only do we need to worry about shipping like you mention but we must question if some goods made in China would be manufactured as environmentally carefully as in UK/Europe. Primary steel production is the big one in this thread. If X tons of steel are made in India using their local coal and transported to UK, will that be more or less polluting (not just the CO2 equiv) than making the same amount of steel in UK using UK coal/coke? If anyone has any figures that would be interesting. </RANT>
On a lighter and historical note to do with logistics and maybe interest to people who find bottles in mines. It wasn't so long ago that things like soft drinks were produced and bottled fairly locally, like artefacts for Kay's of Llandudno or W
H Hill in Llandudno (Ginger beer, mineral waters etc in stone and glass bottles).
Anyone here remember returning a bottle to a shop and getting 10p? Bottles don't get returned these days because it'd be the other side of the country to get them back to producer (even if they were all glass). This is another factor for all the logistics on the roads.