this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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Single-use plastic packaging! All packaging now comes in a set of standard ISO sizes and satisfying some engineering constraints and requirements. You get a Coke from a convenience store - it comes as a 0.5L glass bottle. You finish with it, put it on a rack inside the store with all the other empty 0.5L bottles to be taken back to the factory to be washed and inspected for chips and reused. It could be filled with Pepsi next time! Just slap on a new paper label.
I wouldn't call it a silly issue myself. I'd ban all plastic packaging unless proven to have no alternative. I'm also infiuriated with countries for making easily recyclable materials actively hard to recycle: speaking of glass. They make it so you have to take it to a recycling point, which can be sparse depending on your idea. Glass and metals are amazing for recycling. But no, make everything plastic and actively push people away from purchasing glass by making them have to go out of their way to recycle it. Plastic bottles frequently aren't even better. I had multiple plastic sauce bottles break akin to glass and leak out.
Yes! Which is why my idea is to have a collection point at every point of sale. And the first aim will be to reuse the packaging, not even recycle it (melt it down)! This is why ISO standardization is necessary - you don't want to keep track of Coke bottles and Pepsi bottles, they need to be identical. The same truck that delivers a pallet of bottles from the factory to your store will take the pallet of empties out.
I cannot agree on the reuse. The amount of CO2 emited from the extra transportation and water wasted on cleaning, plus the possibility of lower sanitary quality all add into it making less sense than recycling, but perhaps I'm wrong and those are of lesser negative value than the process of recycling.
The numbers I heard is that reusing a bottle is less energy intensive than melting it down. It's sanitary if you sterilize it properly by heating to >100Β°C, which is still much less energy than heating it to 1723Β°C to melt. As for water, I try to think on a 100 year time scale, where water is a renewable resource, but plastic is not.
It's true that the energy savings will be wasted if you end up trucking the pallet of glass soda bottles all the way across America! But you shouldn't be trucking bottles that far anyway - you should be sending rail tanker cars full of syrup to a bottling plant in each state and use local water to mix it.
Here in Finland we have a really extensive and efficient plastic bottle and aluminum can recycling system. Every bottle and can has a deposit (0.40 β¬ for large bottles, 0.20 β¬ for small bottles, 0.15 β¬ for cans) and you can cash them by returning them at any store. Just toss them in a machine.
There's even some hypermarkets where you can just pour in a giant bag full of bottles or cans and the machine sorts and prices the things automatically.
It's super annoying we still can't really do the same for rest of the single use plastic, but at least trash sorting and recycling what can be recycled is a thing everywhere. We have a lot of projects that aim to reduce those. Probably the coolest recent thing was that someone came up with all-carton coffee cups. (I hope they catch on so we can get rid of the cups that have the Sad Turtle Warning. I don't want turtles to be sad, they're awesome.)
Ugh. Damnit Finland. Why do you have to be so SENSIBLE??
That's great! Our supermarkets have bottle deposit machines too, and even at only $0.05 deposit per bottle they are widely used. However, the poor people using them mostly obtain the bottles by rifling through apartment complex recycling bins on garbage day (all residents are already required to separate plastic from garbage).
Moreover I don't believe plastic is actually recycled. My city has started burning 90% of its incoming plastic stream and still calls it "recycling"! That's still fossil carbon coming out of the ground and ending up in the atmosphere, you doofuses! The minor fraction of plastic that IS recycled is either downcycled into lower quality items like plastic planks for outdoor decks, or mixed with at least 50% virgin plastic material if making new plastic bottles. There is currently no way to 100% recycle plastic into the same type of item AFAIK, because the polymer molecules chemically degrade.
When I think about recycling I want to think in terms of "is this kind of lifestyle sustainable for 100 years? for 1000 years?" Taking fossil carbon out of the ground is not sustainable. Aluminum and glass are recyclable 100%! Can we do even better with reuse?
There is a store near me that sells illegally-imported African coke. It comes in a bottle that looks beat up to shit, but that's because the bottle was probably used hundreds of times, since in the African country they actually reuse the bottle. It's still perfectly fit for purpose though! We just need to relax our expectations for how "pristine" we want our product packaging to look.
I heard a great talk with Sian Sutherland on plastic reduction recently, specifically around brand agnostic standardized metal bottles: https://youtu.be/jTs6KejhSg4?feature=shared
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/jTs6KejhSg4?feature=shared
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Single use plastic in general. I skipped bagging my veggies at the grocer today because it felt wasteful.
While we're on the subject of plastic packaging:
I want the recent Dutch law on single use plastics to be significantly rewritten.
So they passed a law, requiring sellers to charge people for single use plastic containers. Sounds cool, right? Well, the law has some problems:
So effectively, they'll set the surcharges to be as low as they can, and don't bother allowing anyone to use alternatives. If you go to a snack bar, ask for a serving of fries, and offer your own bowl to put them in, the seller can just tell you "NOPE"
So I think the law should be retooled to cover these issues. The prices should be set from above, the money should go to the state, and the seller must honour customers' requests for using their own packaging alternatives.
Preposterous! How are we expected to reduce our consumption of single use containers if we are not allowed to use anything else?
I've had great success bringing my own sealable glass bowls when I want to get takeout and they eyeball out the regular size portion for me. But here currently it's only possible on an ad-hoc basis, by asking as a favor as a regular, since it's just not part of custom. It would be great if bring-your-own-container was protected and encouraged by law!
My city passed a plastic bag ban recently and I was skeptical about it at first but it actually has been a great help. Not even so much in banning the bags themselves, but in changing the culture and expectations. Now it feels perfectly normal to bring in your own canvas bags to shop because everyone does it, whereby before you'd look like a weirdo for doing it.
Everything should be glass or aluminum. Preferably aluminum since you don't really have to worry about mixtures and cleaning it, you just melt it down and reshape it. With glass, you have to separate out the different types, and it still breaks down each recycle, I believe, since they mix silica with other compounds to make different kinds of glass.
I honestly don't understand stand why plastic beverage bottles are still a thing. Cans work perfectly. And if you insist on bottles, they can make aluminum cans too.
you should check how much energy is needed to melt and reshape aluminium..Thick PET boxes plus cleaning them uses far less energy
Aluminium cans need a plastic lining to prevent corrosive drinks from eating through them and/or to prevent the aluminium from leeching into your drink.
Some countries (at least Australia, USA, and many European countries) have deposits on bottles and cans where you pay a deposit of somewhere between 5 and 40 cents (depending on country) when you buy the drink, and get the deposit back when you return it to a store or recycling center for recycling. Reusing instead of recycling would be the next logical step there.
There are actually some companies in the USA that reuse bottles, Straus Family Creamery being one of the more well-known ones at least in my area. They charge a $3 deposit per milk bottle. When you return the bottle to the store, you get your $3 back and the store returns it to Straus. They put the returned bottles in crates and the delivery drivers pick up the old bottles when they drop off the new ones.