This piece avoids mentioning why it was written- around this time, it came to light that new UK bank notes contain beef tallow so are problematic for Hindu and vegan people who rightly have problems with these replacing old paper notes.
I remember when I visited my friend in Cambridge (UK) we ate at a quite cool vegetarian restaurant. I was surpised at the time that they had a policy of not accepting 5 pound banknotes. Later I learned that this was a protest against the tallow content of those notes.
Quite so if you hold cows sacred or are otherwise opposed to using animal products - I’m neither it’s not that different to McDonald’s not disclosing that their french fries contained beef flavouring. I’m neither and it can sound trivial, but a lot of people are and really care about this kind of thing.
"This process of using fatty acids derived from animal fats has become headline news as different groups have protested against the use of animal products in the production of the new £5 note."
The likely reality is that shifting to a replacement will just result in the animal product being dumped. It's likely a byproduct of meat consumption that is inexpensive to use because there is lots of meat consumption.
Another 'huh?' product that contains animal derived ingredients are various dryer sheets (they don't all, but many do).
Perhaps the main thing about tallow is that there's a glut of it, likewise lard. People want more and more meat, but want it to be leaner, creating a surplus of tallow. Also, its use in deep fryers, e.g., by the fast food industry, was curtailed when vegetable oil became preferable in the market.
A relative of mine worked in a chemical factory in Detroit, that made lubricants for metal working. Many of them were either formulated directly from tallow and lard, or were soaps. The materials were cheap, they worked, and were considered to be relatively non-toxic.
One thing I've noticed is that detergent based "soap" has disappeared from the market. It used to be that you could get detergent bars that contained no soap. They also didn't produce soap scum in hard water areas. Remember, "You're not really clean until you're Zestfully clean." Well, Zest was a detergent bar.
Today, looking for detergent "soap" at the store, it's gone. Even Zest is made from lard or tallow, last time I looked at the ingredients. I've banned soap from my house because I hate cleaning up the soap scum. We use liquid body wash instead.
I have a question, I live in a soft water area so I'm not familiar with the problem.
Would you have the same issue if you were using vegetable oil-based soap (e.g. Marseille soap, Castile soap etc.)? Or is any type of "fat" going to cause the same issue?
They are all made from some type of oil/fat. Things with sulfate at the end of the ingredient don’t form soap scum, but classic soap made with fat and lye produce a salt of a fatty acid which combines with hard water to make soap scum.
I was curious, and found the ingredients for a 1992 bar of zest from an eBay photo. It was a mix of soap with the detergent sodium cocoglyceryl ether sulfonate. The current recipe is all soap but they added a couple of chelating agents: Pentasodium Pentetate, and Tetrasodium Etidronate. The problem with the new recipe is these chelating agents suck. The only thing that can jail Mg/Ca2+ faster than soap scum forms is sodium triphosphate, but that is no longer allowed and doesn’t belong in bar soap. It makes no sense that they changed the recipe.
Detergent products have gotten so bad that I have started mixing my own. I add STP to laundry and dishwasher powder and I never rinse dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. They come out sparkling. The whole phosphate thing is overblown. Phosphates promote algae growth, but the algae also breaks down loads of other contaminants. The problem can be mitigated with a simple fountain in the discharge pond.
Removal of STP from everything is great for plumbers as pipes are now all lined with sticky soap scum which means periodic snaking.
There are a few industrial detergents which haven't been reformulated (or at least not noticeably). Alcojet [0] does a fantastic job in the dishwasher... but I don't recommend it in the laundry. Turns out modern dyes are colorfast against a lot of things, but not this stuff! It is rather expensive, but for irregular use (machine-cleaning or special-stain problems), that's not an issue.
Alcojet has bleach. Adding phosphates to dishwasher powder ends up at the same place except my generic Target powder has sodium percarbonate (oxyclean) instead of chlorine. Alcojet uses a shit ton of STPP, MSDS says 25-41% by weight. I have been mixing closer to 10%.
Also Alcojet is STPP not TSP. TSP is as alkaline as lye.
I did some research and it has benefits from as little a 2%, and the top performers use 35%. Not only does it chelate hard water, it effectively turns any oil on your dishes into soap.
This submission claims that "traditional banknotes which are based on special and expensive paper suffer from poor tear properties and they have limited life", and touts tallow-dependent plastics as a solution.
US currency is made of a cotton-linen blend, so (pedantically) it is not paper. Per US Currency Education Program [1], "it would take 4000 double folds, forwards and backwards, to tear a banknote". Is this insufficient for UK uses? In my wallet I currently have a couple hundred in US currency from years 2003 to 2014. None of them are falling apart. (The US Federal Reserve [2] estimates that US currency lasts between 4.7 and 22.9 years, depending on denomination.)
Given the societal shift to digital payments, cards, etc, is the UK hoping to create banknotes that last until the end of time or something? (If so, plastics are probably a great choice. But I'm guessing that indestructible bills will eventually become quite economical to counterfeit, so you'll still want to cycle through security measures every few years.)
They say “paper” but it was a cotton blend much like USD. They’re shit talking old notes because it’s good for business. I haven’t touched cash in a while but I don’t recall any meaningful difference in the durability of “paper” GBP and USD.
Edit: the additional context for this article is at the time the notes were released, there was a lot of anger when people discovered the notes contained animal products.
There's £2Bn worth of fivers in circulation. A note weighs 0.7grams and contains less than 0.05% tallow. That means that between one and three cows supplied the tallow necessary to produce the entire monetary supply of the country.
This anger seems somewhat misguided considering the number of animals that are butchered for food in the UK every day.
The polymer ones always look pristine, which is nice, and they're fairly difficult to tear.. however as soon as you do manage to get a nick in them, they tear right the way across almost immediately.
I suspect most notes end up being replaced mainly because they get tatty rather than being torn, though, and I would bet a high denomination that by that metric, polymer notes last far longer.
Polymer notes would be yet another vector for plastics in our bodies and environment though. Especially for store clerks who already get a measurable amount of exposure from plastic receipts.
Old UK banknotes, made of 'paper', had no real durability issue.
I think the key benefit of polymer notes is the opportunity for far more security features. Holograms, Prismatic effects, braille printing, variable transparency, etc.
Also, they're probably cheaper, considering most of Europe uses polymer notes too.
The UK had issues with banknote forgery, so a change over to a new base material makes a good clean cutoff to say "no paper notes are valid anymore", which cuts off forgers too.
The US also has major note forgery issues, but to my knowledge they have never taken serious action against fake notes. If they did, they would probably switch to polymer too.
Cuts off tax dodgers too. I have heard of people that had a lot of problems when the notes changed over because they had tens of thousands of old notes from cash in hand work over the years that hadn't been declared.
Even more pedantically, paper made from cotton and linen is paper by most definitions.
Wood pulp paper is by far the most common these days, but that's surprisingly recent (mid-19th century). Before that it was mostly cotton, linen and hemp.
You can also still buy cotton resume paper, although with how digital things are these days I’m not sure how useful it would be unless you really want that Target job.
Cellulose in wood is contained in a block of wood, not like the easily accessed strands of cellulose in cotton. It's mixed together with lignin and other components in wood. It is possible to make a weak, brittle kind of paper with straight wood pulp that's mashed and cooked and pressed. Mixing in a little sawdust to rag paper is an old practice. But properly freeing the cellulose requires both extensive mechanical shredding and chemical treatments. As far as 19th century technologies goes it's underappreciated. From what I can piece together, around 1800 in England, a labourer's daily wages would buy a few dozen sheets of paper. By 1900, they could buy literally reams and reams of the stuff.
Oh, neat! I was repeating a thing I'd heard, but is apparently misleading.
According to a few sources I've found, paper is the name for anything primarily made of tangled cellulose fibers, which can be harvested from many different plant products. The more restrictive "definition", which I had been alluding to, considers only cellulose fibers derived from wood pulp as "true" paper.
Papyrus, the ancient Egyptian writing surface, is not considered paper because the raw material is not processed to remove most non-cellulose contents. Other non-paper writing surfaces throughout history include: vellum/parchment (made from prepared animal skins), clay, animal bones, bamboo and wooden slips, silk, leaves, bark, and I'm sure dozens of others.
> In my wallet I currently have a couple hundred in US currency from years 2003 to 2014
Confusingly enough the year on US Bank Notes is not when they were printed. For example, the current series is "2017A", which started being printed in 2019.
> "it would take 4000 double folds, forwards and backwards, to tear a banknote". Is this insufficient for UK uses?
When I was in the US I've often was given heavy worn out banknotes sometimes with tears. Haven't seen so many badly damaged pounds so may be dollars can benefit from more durable material too.
The issue is that the one-dollar bill is still being printed. Decades of inflation has made dollar bills much more common, which means they come out of pockets more, which means they wear faster. I expect once the penny finally goes out of use, dollar bills will as well, and you'll see a lot more dollar coins.
I feel like the US would just switch to more durable polymer bills than try the dollar coin thing again. I only ever get them in vending machines. They are much heavier than a bill so transport costs are higher and many people don't like carrying coins around anyway. Plus, at the point where a dollar bill costs too much to produce, we'd be in a near cashless society so small denominations wouldn't make much sense.
Our cat goes nuts for some plastic bags - licking and licking them like they’re the best thing ever.
Granted he’s a little weirdo, but I looked into in on the off chance there was something wrong with him or the plastics could be harmful, but the only thing I could come up with was that some bags have more tallow in them than others and that was what he was reacting to.
So, therefore, tallow in plastic = tasty for cats.
I think they mean feed stock animal fats not whales. When you eat that hamburger there’s a ton of left over animal fats. Given the animal is dead, the worst you could do is not use its remains in the most productive way possible. Otherwise why did it die?
I didn’t say anything about it’s preference. I said what we should do about it’s death. Finally profit is a way of measuring marginal utility in a market based decision system. There’s nothing moral or immoral about it. That’s not to say usury is amoral, but profit it.
Another interesting additive in many plastics is glass fibres or beads, they are often used to strengthen the plastic and give it slightly different mechanical properties. The downside of the glass fillers is that they erode the tools much more quickly (glass is very abrasive), kind of the opposite of Tallow which helps to keep the plastic flowing over the surfaces better.
On glass filled parts you will often see a small ring around the "gate" (gates are where the plastic is injected). The gate is under enormous pressure and has a very high flow rate through it, so it tends to erode significantly more quickly. To counter that the gate is often an inserted part that can be changed out easily when servicing the tool, or made from a higher toughened grade of steel. Hence a small ring, a witness mark of where the join is.
Which is why it's only used in certain parts that would benefit from having glass filling, like tools for instance. You also pay for it anyways; I would be surprised if any of the consumer grade Ryobis from Home Depot had glass fiber reinforced polymer cases, while a Hilti almost surely does if not metallic.
The phrase "There are alternative options such as non-animal fats and hydrocarbon waxes, but these might increase the cost of production, reduce efficiency, affect recyclability and finally negatively affect the environment."....
....is such a semi-randomly grab-bagged set of statements similar to a set of nigh-unverifiable closing statements made as a desperate last-ditch attempt at proving a point in a debate that I feel it significantly weakens the article's stance, not strengthens it.
For example, with people with religious and moral objections to using animal products along governmentally-supervised transactional lines, whataboutism involving other parts of the supply chain/where animal products are used don't really serve to prove the point -- again. In turn, if we were to use this bit of what I'd consider to be somewhat faulty logic, the bank notes could be used as leverage in the future as the example in a list of products that uses animal products, just as other items in that list are being used as leverage today.
As for my position -- sometimes I eat meat, sometimes I don't, but I'd like to please avoid flesh in my money, however miniscule.
Anything from a corporation saying “fearful” (for your wallet) things like “may cost more to produce(costing you more)” or reduce efficiency (costing you more) etc…
Is just reworded excuses as to the corporation’s choosing profit. For they will never say “profit us less.”
This is assuming we treat profit as immutable. Which is, I suppose, “rule one” in business, no?
And in most cases - hey that’s fine. I disagree but it’s ok.
One area where I will always push back is on services that are required for life. Food. Shelter. Power (electric, etc) … healthcare.
If the service is critical, profit should be considered last, if at all. (As I write this, my elec provider has doubled its generation rate this month… yet making tons of profit for its shareholders…)
> As history shows us, agriculture for profit is far cheaper and more effective than collective farms.
I doubt the accuracy of this statement. But I'll make a largely-unsubstantiated claim of my own, nonetheless: for-profit agriculture has substantially increased the cost of for-profit healthcare by focusing on high-profit foods that are highly processed and addictive instead of foods that are actually good for us to consume.
Spend 5 minutes researching it with google what happens with collective farms.
> for-profit agriculture has substantially increased the cost of for-profit healthcare by focusing on high-profit foods that are highly processed and addictive instead of foods that are actually good for us to consume
People vote with their dollars what they want to eat.
Besides, if you do google the history of collective farms, the result in every case was famine, not breaking out in health.
> If you raise the cost of doing business for a corporation, the cost of their products and services is going to rise accordingly.
It doesn't always have to. Some companies make so much profit that they could easily choose to absorb an increase in the costs of doing business without raising the costs of the products/services. They'd continue to make massive amounts of profit, just slightly less than they were making before and in some cases I think we should expect companies to do exactly that.
For obvious reasons, the use of beef tallow has been particularly offensive to some Hindus. Some have even banned the new banknotes from temples: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/newsbeat-38195265
I'm the only one that is horrified by tallow? Why do they have to stick animal parts in everything? fsck animal products. Just hunting them, raising them in deplorable conditions, eating them, wearing them and causing global pandemics with them is not good enough? I'd only accept the use of tallow if it was derived entirely from non-virgin human fat, humans that died naturally, of course, and were allowed to sit in hot and humid conditions until fully rancid but before desiccation. Maybe now you know how I feel.
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