Thinking outside the box is a bra plan

SCRABSTER harbour’s redevelopment to take advantage of green energy opportunities is moving on day by day. But the loss of popular local resident Sammy the seal during loud pile-driving operations has not gone unnoticed among harbour users.

The harbour has certainly moved with the times and has a range of uses: fish landings, a ferry terminal, nuclear waste shipments (maybe Sammy fell foul of a sniper?), timber transport, oil vessels, cruise liners...

Anyone taking a drive to the port for the local hobby of having a nosey will be hard-pressed to find enough room to ride round and look at everything that is going on.

Marine renewable energy is very much a hot topic in Scotland, and Caithness should be in a good position to take advantage of this, both at Scrabster and other ports like Gills and Wick.

If the county doesn’t manage to exploit this opportunity then there should definitely be several heads rolling.

The ability to think outside the box is not a characteristic that we have in abundance in the county and new, alternative ideas are often ridiculed rather than supported.

Wind farms are a good example of being stuck in an argument rather than using an opportunity. Whether or not you agree with wind energy, there is no doubt that local wind farms are a cash opportunity for us to do more in the county, but in several years the debate has barely moved on from an ill-tempered squabble about why wind is not the same as nuclear power (no kidding!).

Campaigners have every right to object to wind farms but it doesn’t mean we can’t talk positively about how to use the money that is being generated by our existing turbines.

A recent news story from Japan shows how an upsetting environmental problem can be turned into a positive energy opportunity.

Japanese women were worried about disposing of their old bras in council-standard transparent bin bags as they feared perverts might steal them, according to the Japan Times.

In response to these fears, and concern about sending more waste to landfill that won’t degrade, Triumph International (a bra company) is now accepting old bras in its shops and turning them into fuel.

Apparently bras are one of the worst types of garment to recycle. They are not easy to sell second hand, and they are made of a mixture of wire and man-made fibres. Some newer bras also contain gel. Turning them into refuse paper and plastic fuel (RPF) is the way forward, apparently.

Triumph has collected more than 200,000 bras and turned them into over 14 tonnes of RPF since 2009, and other firms have since followed suit.

AS the nichts have drawn in I find myself watching more TV and am weirdly fascinated by the tactics employed by companies advertising their products.

Flicking through different programmes yields a plethora of adverts aimed at different markets.

People who watch fashion programmes like Gok’s Fashion Fix are treated to nonsense claims about skin creams that make you younger and mail order outlets that will deliver the next day even if you order at one minute to nine in the evening – or is that except for viewers in big chunks of Scotland?

X-Factor commercial breaks yield adverts for albums (as they were called in my day). But in the old days, when I was a lass, real bands wouldn’t have had the money to have primetime TV adverts.

A row about L’Oréal wrinkle cream advertising has erupted in Sweden after a consumer watchdog found its adverts contained “misleading information”, and said the cosmetic firm should be fined. In 2010, the watchdog defeated L’Oréal in a case brought before the Swedish court. The ruling was along the lines that L’Oréal should not be allowed to claim its potions can reduce or remove wrinkles if they can’t scientifically prove that the creams actually do so.

More shocking to me than a cosmetic company continuing to make these claims after a court ruling, is that women with wrinkles continue to believe that they can make themselves look like an airbrushed 16-year-old – and are quite happy to pay through the nose for the privilege of this delusion.

Surely it’s obvious that most cosmetic preparations don’t do what their manufacturers’ claim?

As someone who regularly dyes her hair it’s great to see manufacturers pretending that ammonia and peroxide applications can be counteracted by a bit of conditioner. No your hair certainly won’t look like straw after applying these powerful chemicals. These “gentle” colourants will make your hair look just as glossy and lush as the 20-year-old woman with man-made-fibre-style hair on the box.

The funniest advert I have seen in a long time is the current BT Vision ad, which depicts something like sheets of toilet paper or nappy liners floating outside a house, coming in the window, and landing on the TV. This is supposed to represent fantastic TV being streamed into your living room from your home hub.

Loo roll and nappy liners might as well come in the window and land on the TV if I was waiting for BT to stream movies to my home.

I can’t even get terrestrial broadband through my phone line; in fact, I can barely hear people speaking if I use my expensive land line. This is no fault of the local BT staff, it’s the lack of investment in remote, rural areas by BT decision-makers, which in my opinion lacks “vision”.

However, it’s not just ruthless advertisers who are up to no good with product claims. The EU recently issued a press release stressing that despite some media reports, it has not banned children from blowing up balloons.

This story stemmed from the new European Toy Safety Directive, which some naughty hacks said would ban children under eight from inflating balloons without adult supervision. This was supposedly because of the danger that young children could chew or swallow the balloon.

The EU clarified that the new warning for balloons is: “Warning! Children under eight years can choke or suffocate on uninflated or broken balloons. Adult supervision required. Keep uninflated balloons from children. Discard broken balloons at once.”

Just another thing for parents to either worry about or completely disregard, depending on your state of mind at the time.

Corrina Thomson is on Facebook and Twitter @corrinathomson