Woolies
Ooshies is Woolie’s latest rope-a-kid promotion. Little tiny plastic figurines for kids.
A reasonable assessment is that the current Ooshies promotion may put roughly 50 million old Woolworths shopping bags’ worth of plastic back into circulation.
That’s up to 6 months worth of shopping bags that actually work.
Nice work, hypocrites!
Woolworths says its new Ooshies are made from 97% recycled material.
The interesting bit is what they don’t say.
Ooshies are soft, rubbery little things. If they’re flexible PVC, which Ooshies have been made from before, then they presumably contain PVC, plasticiser, stabilisers, pigments and possibly fillers.
So what exactly is 97% recycled?
Is it recycled PVC resin? Recycled compounded PVC, plasticiser and all? Post-consumer material? Factory scrap? And is the percentage by mass of the finished Ooshie?
A very precise number, with remarkably little information about what the number actually measures.
I don’t think there’s enough recycled thermoplastic elastomer (TPE) in the world to use that channel. Plus TPEs occur in many incompatible chemistries and they are often attached to other materials in finished products. That makes large-scale collection, sorting and recovery difficult.
It’s worth noting that PVC with a lot of plasticizer isn’t exactly non toxic.
I smell a rat.
offshore westerly 