Paper Monitor
A service highlighting the riches of the daily press.
Time to don your body-warmer and stonewash jeans, and stoke up the flux capacitor – Paper Monitor is going back in time. Nothing quiet as ambitious as Marty McFly's journey to the 1950s – today's destination is early 2007; January to be sure, when a national newspaper of tabloid proportions launched upon its unsuspecting public a campaign against excess packaging. And so it seems to be happening again.
"One of the greatest contributors to [the sheer amount of waste generated in modern Britain] is the crazy amount of unnecessary packaging used by supermarkets and manufacturers."
Brrrrrrrrr. Already Paper Monitor is catching a chill and wondering whether it can stick to its three-week-old New Year's resolutions.
But hold on Doc, before we start carbon off-setting our plutonium-powered time machine, could there be a more logical explanation to this apparent time warp? Didn't the Independent run the original campaign? This latest call to ditch the cellophane looks and reads like the Indy's, but above that front page headline reading "NOW IT'S WAR ON PACKAGING" isn't that a Daily Mail masthead?
Ahh, this is what is known as a "homage", and here it is in black and white, the Mail 'fessing up: "In launching our campaign, we duly wish to acknowledge the example set by that paragon of original journalism, the Independent newspaper, which ran its own war on packaging..."
Hold on, was that last bit a dream?
Marty, Marty...