- Do the police have calipers (calibrated ones, at that) to measure the film thickness? I've worked with films for most of my 20+ career and with my fingers can easily tell the difference between a 25 micron (1 mil) and a 50 micron (2 mil) film, and maybe on a good day, even a 37.5 micron film (1.5 mil), but my fingers are not capable of higher resolution. So do the police now have to carry around calipers on their gun belt?
- The seized bags are now evidence, and we all have seen enough cop shows to know what happens to evidence: it is put inside a PLASTIC BAG. Hopefully the evidence bags are greater than 40 microns thick or there could be some high drama in the courtroom.
- I wonder if all the evidence will make it back to the police station, or are cops going to start having a reputation for being the people with the best plastic bags?
- After the bag is brought back to the crime lab, I wonder how the analysis goes. Is it like CSI? (For those of you unfamiliar with the US TV show, imagine any old analytical lab but with good-looking geeks and dramatic lighting). "Hey I got something. I ran a tensile test according to ASTM D638 and got some really strong peaks, so I dissolved the bag in hot xylene and ran a high-temp GPC and sure enough, there is a lot of metallocene-catalyzed polymer in this material. This is not some local product; this is an import and it is loaded. I mean this stuff is so strong, it could get an elephant high...err, that didn't come out right. I mean, these bags are so strong that they could lift an elephant up high...I wish I could've done more analysis, but I've only had the samples for 5 minutes. Anyway, we gotta do something before more of this stuff hits the streets."
- I wonder how far the bag limits extend. Say for instance a drug dealer is caught and the weed is in thin-film bags. Do dealers get extra time in jail for that?
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Some Goofy Thoughts on Plastic Bags Being Seized
While plastic bag bans have been proliferating of late, I only read yesterday of action being taken against a shop: "The team seized around 45 kgs of polythene bags below 40 micron thickness...". The story did get my mind wandering. For instance,
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crime
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