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Squeezing Oranges is not Eco-friendly
SIR Jack ‘Two Juices’ Cunningham (interview, Feb. 20) believes that squeezing your own juice is ecologically friendly. Allow me to differ. Oranges are very expensive to ship. They are round, have skins and contain pulp and pips. Juice is cheap, costing about one-seventh as much to ship. That means seven lorries for Jack’s oranges to one lorry for my juice.
But it gets worse. For all his doubling up on high-tech equipment, Jack is not very good at juicing. At the very best, he extracts only 80 per cent of what an industrial plant will get from an orange. So that makes nine lorries for him and still only one for me.
Then Jack throws his partially juiced oranges into his rubbish (more lorries), while the private sector juice firm recycles the whole of the waste. Recovering orange oil is another option not open to Jack. Moreover, his wet orange peels create more than 60 times the poundage of waste as my lightweight container. Home squeezing is an inefficient use of agricultural land, fertilisers, pesticides, water, capital and labour, as well as of lorries, diesel and roads.
This illustrates why food manufacturers, packaging companies and retailers are the biggest real friends of the environment we have.
JOHN BLUNDELL
Institute of Economic Affairs
London SW1
