Stormwalker Group
Published 5 Dec 2025Join Mario Gaudet, former Army Reservist and military brat, in Episode 3 of “Units of the CAF” as we delve into the legendary Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI).
Discover their early history, unique uniform quirks and cap badge story, plus their valor in WW1, WW2, the Cold War, and Afghanistan — featuring the most decorated soldiers from each era.
Sources:
•General PPCLI History: https://www.canada.ca/en/department-n…
•Sgt. George Harry Mullin VC (WW1): https://vcgca.org/our-people/profile/…
•Maj. John Keefer Mahony VC (WW2): https://veterans.gc.ca/en/remembrance…
•Sgt. Tommy Prince MM (Cold War/Korea): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_P…
•WO Patrick Tower SMV (Afghanistan): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick…
•Additional Regimental Details: https://ppcliassn.ca/ppcli-the-regime…#PPCLI #CanadianArmy #MilitaryHistory #CAF #WW1 #WW2 #KoreanWar #Afghanistan #VictoriaCross #Veterans #CanadianForces
April 27, 2026
UOTCAF – EP 003 – PPCLI (Patricias)
QotD: The false economy of reducing plastic packaging for food products
One morning in 1996, I sat with a class of fifth-graders in Manhattan as they gazed mournfully at a photo of a supermarket package of red apples. It was part of a slide presentation by the director of environmental education for the Environmental Action Coalition, the guest lecturer at that day’s science class.
“Look at the plastic, the Styrofoam or cardboard underneath,” she told the class. “Do you need this much wrapping when you buy things?”
“Noooo,” the fifth-graders replied.
It was all so obvious to them, the fifth-graders as well as their lecturer. She was barely out of college, but she thought that she knew more about selling produce than supermarket executives and packaging engineers who had spent their careers studying this question. She was sure that plastic wrap and Styrofoam were wasteful and harmful to the environment because she had never seriously considered the alternative or wondered why those products were introduced.
To merchants and shoppers in the late 1920s, there was nothing wasteful about the revolutionary packaging material introduced by DuPont. Cellophane seemed miraculous because it was not only moisture-proof but also transparent. “EYE IT before you BUY IT,” DuPont advertised, and shoppers welcomed this new feature enabling them to judge the quality of produce and meat before they paid up. Cellophane kept things fresh much longer, an advantage advertised to everyone from homemakers to soldiers. During World War II, a DuPont ad showed a German soldier looking on enviously as American prisoners of war opened packages of cigarettes from home that were wrapped in cellophane: “The prisoners who have better cigarettes than their guards.”
Soviet citizens in the 1980s were similarly envious of Westerners’ new plastic grocery bags, which sold for $5 apiece on the black market in Moscow. The bags were coveted partly as a status symbol (a hard-to-get imported product) and partly because they were so light and compact. In a shortage-plagued economy, Muscovites never knew when a scarce item would suddenly become available in a nearby store, so they wanted to have an empty bag with them, just in case.
American merchants and shoppers switched from paper to plastic packaging because it reduced waste. Plastic was cheaper because it required fewer resources to manufacture. It required less energy to transport because it was lighter. Plastic took up less space in landfills than paper, and it further reduced the volume of household trash because it preserved food longer. The typical household in Mexico City, for example, generated more garbage than an American household because it bought fewer packaged products and ended up discarding more food that had spoiled.
But activists eager to find some reason to oppose disposable products have ignored these advantages. They blame America’s throwaway society for polluting the oceans with plastic, though virtually all that pollution comes from either fishing vessels or from developing countries with primitive waste-management systems — mostly the Asian countries that were importing plastic recyclables from America. Instead of castigating American consumers, environmentalists should blame themselves for creating the recycling programs that sent plastic to countries where it was allowed to leak into rivers. The best way to protect marine life is to throw used plastic into the trash, not the recycling bin, so that it goes straight to a well-lined local landfill instead of ending up in the ocean.
And instead of campaigning to ban plastic grocery bags, green activists should be promoting their environmental advantages. Banning them results in higher carbon emissions because the substitutes are thicker and heavier, requiring more materials and energy to manufacture and transport, and these paper bags and tote bags typically aren’t reused often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint. Greens may feel virtuous lugging groceries home in a paper or tote bag, but the shoppers choosing plastic are actually doing more to combat global warming and reduce consumption of natural resources.
John Tierney, “Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society”, City Journal, 2020-09-13.
