The global oil crisis is turning into an everything crisis | CNN Business
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One month into the war in Iran, a growing shortage of crude oil is threatening to morph into something worse: a shortage of nearly everything.
  • Tim@lemmy.snowgoons.roEnglish
    14 hours

    If this helps Asia get off its addiction to wrapping absolutely everything in about 5 layers of plastic, there may be an upside here.

    (For the uninitiated: if you buy a packet of biscuits in Europe, you’ll get a cardboard box, maybe one interior wrap of plastic, and the biscuits. The same packet of biscuits in China will see every two biscuits wrapped in its own sealed plastic bag. Each of those will have a small plastic bag of “oxygen remover” for God knows what reason. The bags will all then be carefully nestled into a thick plastic tray. The whole lot will then get another layer of plastic wrapped around it. Everything is like this there (and most of South East Asia in my experience) - it’s genuinely nuts.)

    • Pycorax@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      12 hours

      It’s the humidity in tropical regions. If it’s not sealed properly, your biscuits will absorb the moisture in the air and turn soft. They’re not oxygen removers, they’re water vapour removers and it’s there for a reason. It’s not because we hate the environment or we’re nuts. Hell, English as far as I know doesn’t even have a word in common usage for it. In Hokkien we have a word “lau hong” which literally means to lose air as in lose the crispness of the biscuit.

      Hell, there’s also so many ants here that when I was in Finland, I was shocked that people leave biscuits as is without putting them into containers. If you do it in South East Asia, your biscuits would have become an ant colony in hours.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.caEnglish
        5 hours

        English as far as I know doesn’t even have a word in common usage for it.

        Staling. One L.

        In reality, it’s “gone soggy from humidity”. The plastic layer ‘preserves crispness’.

      • livligkinkajou@slrpnk.netEnglish
        11 hours

        I’m not sure if that is accurate, as Brazil is also a high humidity tropical country, which does not have all those plastic layers in their products and their plastic is way slimmer than those I’ve seen used in Asia.

        As far as I am aware, they also have one of the biggest and most diverse ant populations, yet their biscuits are as crispy as any without all the extra plastic

      • Tim@lemmy.snowgoons.roEnglish
        12 hours

        They’re labelled “oxygen removers”, so I rather assume that’s what they’re for. Dessicant is something else entirely.

        I own a property & live part of the year in Thailand, and have worked in China for a decade - I don’t need grandma to teach me to suck ants. Amazingly, in all that time I’ve discovered that a single layer of plastic and a bag clip is, in fact, entirely adequate to keep both humidity and ants out of food.

  • arin@lemmy.worldEnglish
    12 hours

    Iran ironically helping us get off the oil and plastic koolaid.

  • RidcullyTheBrown@lemmy.worldEnglish
    17 hours

    This isn’t surprising, 20% of the world’s supply of literally anything would have profound impacts with how tightly coupled the world supply chain is. When that resource is a basic need such as petrol, things tend to become dramatic quite quicly

  • tomatolung@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15 hours

    That strain is now spreading into every corner of the consumer market as prices rise for materials like plastic, rubber and polyester. The impact is so far most evident in Asia, which accounts for more than half of the world’s manufacturing and is heavily reliant on imports for oil and other commodities.

    In South Korea, where people have been panic-buying trash bags, the government has encouraged event organizers to minimize use of disposable items. Taiwan has started a hotline for manufacturers that have run out of plastic, while its rice farmers told local media they may hike prices because they can’t get vacuum-sealed bags.

    In Japan, the oil crisis has sparked fears that patients with chronic kidney failure won’t be able to get treatment due to a lack of plastic medical tubes used in hemodialysis. Malaysian glove manufacturers say a dearth of a petroleum byproduct needed to make rubber latex is threatening global supplies of medical gloves.

  • Vex_Detrause@lemmy.caEnglish
    6 hours

    I’m totally judging that article by the AI image they used. Negative view even before I open the link.

    • xthexder@l.sw0.comEnglish
      5 hours

      All 4 images in the article are real photographs credited to a specific photographer with a date…

      • Vex_Detrause@lemmy.caEnglish
        4 hours

        The ones with tricycles. Or maybe they edit out all identifiable brands. But it still feels off.