Prof. Igor Čatić: bans and orders

I have just finished reading a book written by D. Drndić, a professor of English at the University of Rijeka. And this completed the circle, because it made me think: one day the cyborgs will conclude that natural persons should be banned. But joking aside.

In synthesiological research it is not necessary to find when something occurred. It is important to notice the pattern. Therefore, I will start with the oldest prohibition I know, the one regarding alcohol in the United States. It is namely that alcohol is made mainly from organic polymers of plant origin. We know how this prohibition ended. Then followed the ban on smoking in a country that in the 1930s cleaned anything unclean, including tobacco, again a biopolymer. Now, a much larger number of countries, including Croatia, are cleaning their population from this unclean matters.

Nobody, however, has banned tobacco growing since excise taxes, taxes and all other levies are still much too dear for the budgets, and come in handy to all the manufacturers of various smoke-removal equipment. Let’s get this straight, I do not smoke and I never smoked, and as far as alcohol consumption is concerned I never drink more than a glass of red wine per day. But what is about vehicle pollution? Why has nobody banned this?

From the country that banned smoking in 1930s originated the idea of Codex Alimentarius (1.3 million articles) that was pulled through the FAO in 1962 by Fritz ter Meer (9000 articles). The goal: the food will have become weapon by 31 December 2009.

This is why cucumbers may have a deflection of 10 percent only, which means that, expressed in simple words, their deformation may be only 10 millimetres. Kumice (peasant women selling their products at outdoor market places) have to have refrigerator-showcases for cheese, and chickens must be provided with a space for intimacy.

I have not yet heard that anyone required or banned any inorganic non-polymer – metal. It is also metals that destroy the nature, if in no other way then as ammunition or by sinking of a large ship full of oil.

Indeed, I find it already intolerable to fill the pages of this diary with texts on polyethylene bags. I will just repeat some key ideas. Of all the bags - paper bags (organic polymer), cloth bags (organic polymer) and those polyethylene bags (manufactured by artificial synthesis) made of oil or natural gas (organic polymers), regarding the traces (or prints) that they leave in nature - the most favourable are the bags made of polyethylene recyclate.

And the degradable, often advertised as biodegradable bags, for example the compostable ones, require a special management system that is currently in Croatia in a difficult situation and has not resolved the management of 27,000 tons of polyethylene, nor about 12,000 tons of laminates, such as long-life milk packaging. And finally, how many of these bags are there? If, let’s say, every Croat uses on the average about 150 bags, this is about 3,000 tons. And Croatia consumes annually 300,000 tons of plastic.