I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it.
This is one of the big problems I have with recycling. When I was a kid in school (throughout the 90’s), we learned the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is last on the list.
The list is in order of increasing waste for a very good reason. We should first strive to reduce the amount of wasteful stuff we purchase, barring that we should try to reuse things around the house (plastic bags, containers, etc), and finally if we can’t do either we should recycle the stuff to try and recover the materials.
Nowadays I don’t hear about the 3 R’s anymore. It’s become all about people dumping everything in a box and making it somebody else’s problem, just as trash was in the first place.
> I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it.
Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw cans away, there’s noly do many cans you can find a use for.
I can’t find any specific production numbers but the internet tells me Kellogg’s sells for billions in snacks and pringles are a significant fraction of that. A Pringle can is a buck or two, meaning 6 figures Pringle cans being sold every year, if not 7.
That’s where the first R comes in. Only buy as many Pringles cans as you can reuse. People don’t want to do that either, though, because Pringles are addictive. That may be the root problem.
There’s no way they’ll sell Pringles in bags though; they’re way too delicate for anything but a purpose-built rigid container.
I don’t buy one per week. Maybe a few cans per year. I use them for storing sleeves of soda crackers (they fit perfectly even though the crackers are squares). They’re also good for storing snacks of various kinds, dry spaghetti noodles (or any pasta, really). Pretty much any dry goods that you don’t want crushed are a great fit!
When I was younger and poorer they made a decent speaker (amplifier? echo chamber?) in a pinch, if you taped an earbud into the open end, facing the bottom of the tube.
> Nowadays I don’t hear about the 3 R’s anymore. It’s become all about people dumping everything in a box and making it somebody else’s problem, just as trash was in the first place.
That's because companies don't want us to reduce or in many cases reuse, but recycle makes everyone feel good inside (even though in many cases even that doesn't happen, but we as consumers don't care).
Thank you for saying this. It's crucial that we recognize how consent is manufactured by corporate propaganda that goes way beyond the simplistic "buy our product!" messaging that folks normally think of.
Our reality is dictated by private companies to suit their bottom lines. We've got to be very careful to make sure we know what's good for us, what we want, and how to get it. Corporate propaganda inserts memetic man-in-the-middle attacks at every step in that line of reasoning.
The weird thing about plastic is that it is often too flimsy to easily reuse but will still survive for thousands of years in the environment.
I wonder if it would make sense to require these items to be more substantial and then make reuse financially unavoidable. So the only way to buy bottled water would be in a reusable container. You would either return it for a deposit or reuse it yourself.
They are more recyclable (reusable) now as the inside doesn’t have a sharp edge ring on the inside. Remember when I was a kid, reach your arm the full way in, you get scratched up pulling it out.
I have mason jars that my grandmother and then my mother used for pickling. The only waste is the rubber ring which needs to be replaced occasionally and THAT could be recycled. Many of these bottles have been used for 80+ years now. I have a few Ball jars which my GREAT grandmother used 100+ years ago.
Beer bottles in Canada are reused dozens of times and are recyclable (brown glass) when broken or worn out.
The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy.
Plastics are not currently infinitely recyclable as the polymer chains break down. A lot of plastic is simply not recyclable at all in most of North America [1]
We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close.
The United States is seemingly uniquely bad at this, thanks to - you guessed it - corporate greed. Container deposit laws work:
> The United States' overall beverage container recycling rate is approximately 33%, while states with container deposit laws have a 70% average rate of beverage container recycling.
but, of course, only ten states in the US have them:
A significant fraction of that 70% is collected by homeless individuals and others living below the poverty line, for whom recycling is a zero cost, zero training income source that can pay out the same day. If our (California) social safety nets were effective, I suspect the collection rate would be more in line with the national average.
On board with mandating recycling and encouraging use of infinitely recyclable materials in container manufacturing.
A couple nits to pick, though.
– You have to be specific when advocating for reuse. Some like to keep using—for long periods of time—bottles made from cheap thin disposable plastic. That plastic, when repeatedly emptied, may quickly accumulate tiny cracks and leech chemicals, which in case of P(V)C may well be BPA. How harmful this could be depends on country’s regulations.
– Pure aluminum containers are rare, if exist. Aluminum cans & bottles contain plastic inside.
I personally advocate for glass, and if glass is not an option—recycle, don’t reuse disposable plastic or aluminum containers more than a couple of times for the sake of your and your descendants’ health.
PVC and BPA are not common in disposable thin plastic bottles nowadays. Reusing them is much more efficient than a metal water bottle (that also Typically has a plastic liner and other plastic parts, if your Amistics for some reason doesnt allow plastic) in terms of embodied energy and total mass of material.
I like mason jars because they actually do last a long time and are pretty cheap, but don’t hate on reusing cheap plastic bottles!
It gives me the creeps every time I see someone heating up their lunch in an old plastic container. Old dairy containers with snap lids are very common. It must be leaching so much garbage into the food. I can’t tell if that’s phobia due to bad science or these people are actually gradually poisoning themselves.
Since I’m literally talking about institutional reuse of glassware and institutional recycling of aluminum, and advocating not using plastic at all; I’m not sure what nit you are picking with me.
I always found it fascinating that in the 70's and 80's everybody moved away from glass and paper to plastic. I mean literally anything that could be converted to plastic from paper or glass was.
Do you think we'll ever revert back to just paper and glass again?
We are making some good strides with paper straws and the like, and mandating people bring reusable bags to the grocery stores - but I still see many of the stores I shop at still use plastic bags.
Most countries around the world do this by default.
For example, those big jugs of water that get delivered. In most places they are clean and reused. Where I'm living right now, in Turkey, those big bottles are made out of glass and it just gets replaced with a previously used glass jug.
Same with the beer, all the bottles are collected, cleaned, and reused.
I know a lot of people are conditioned to not drink tap water, however, we need a world where tap water is not only clean enough to drink but also seen as the definitive clean water that you would want to drink.
I live in the UK and never buy water. All mine comes through the tap. There is no lorry delivering water for me although the water supply does have lots of big pumps and processes that mean it isn't arriving in my house by gravity alone and it does have a carbon footprint.
If you are living 50 miles out in the desert then you are going to need a lorry to fill up a big tank rather than bring lots of little glass or plastic bottles. Otherwise, tap water rules and needs to be kept clean. Drinking bought bottled water should be discouraged.
Exactly, we take the “reuse” and repurpose parts of three R’s very seriously in Turkey. Our flower pots are usually used empty cheese containers and all the plastic bottles are reused for containment of homemade stuff, tomato paste/olives etc...
One of the key issues with using bottles is the cost, weight and the fact that there is a lot of breakage. The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times.
One key invention which could really help here is flexible glass packaging. Interestingly, one of the lost technologies from the Roman era is flexible glass:
The story of flexible glass had contemporary doubters. My guess is it’s likely apocryphal but created as a fable with political and economic undertones.
> The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times.
I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut down because a vendor in a different country offered such good pricing for a while that nobody could/wanted to compete, but has since greatly raised they prices.
Weight does matter quite a bit when shipping something literally halfway around the world, but we don't have to ship it around the world. We need to get our own capacity to recycle locally built up again.
one of the reasons the cost and weight of glass is such a problem is because the supply chains have consolidated around huge centralized bottling plants that require the transport of individually-packaged goods clear across the country.
bottling isn't a specialized task, it can be done anywhere. If companies were forced to pay the true cost of their plastic packaging, we might see a return to a system where bottling plants were set up locally, provided local jobs in smaller communities, and customers could return their used glass bottles directly to the local bottling plant for sterilization and re-use.
All food containers must be recyclable or compostable. This should be a rule across the globe.
We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.
I thought the Romans were known to outright despise glass, although that was in architectural contexts. Flexible glass sounds very unlike them given references to pottery and wineskins instead.
Those are really good points. A good approach to incentivize everyone to do the right thing is to make it the least expensive option. That either requires some lucky tech breakthrough (super unlikely) or a strong government.
A recyclability tax, where the producer pays a tax that corresponds to how much it will cost to recycle their product. Maybe collect data of how much of their product is actually recycled. That would force producers to consider reuse, recycling, etc.
Banning disposable packaging. Want potato chips? Bring a special reusable (and relatively expensive) bag to the dispenser, have it unload some chips and do whatever trick is necessary to keep the chips dehydrated and crisp.
You can also only ban disposable packaging that could have negative environmental effect. Maybe something made out of some fungi or hay or something could just be treated like compost waste.
Your "chips model" works perfectly well for thousands of products. Want detergent? Bring a bottle to a machine that fills it up rather than taking home a brand new plastic bottle every time. Ditto for fruits and vegetables. Biscuits. Candy. Anything that doesn't need a plastic bag for health and safety reasons.
We have something like what you propose in germany [1]. Basically it causes the producers of packaging to end up paying for the disposal of the corresponding trash. This creates an incentitive for producers to make the packaging less wasteful.
The beer bottle consortium in Ontario is a good model, the beer bottles have been shared among all the brewers for decades and returned for deposit to common locations. This monopoly has a few issues of course but it's a good template.
One thing to consider is that plenty of packaged foods seal their bags with pure nitrogen to keep the humidity under control and eliminate oxygen ageing the food in storage. It's the same reason why a bag of chips can have some quite lengthy expiration date and still taste fresh when you open them but leave them sitting in your cupboards for a while and now they're noticeably less fresh. Having some sort of chip dispenser (or cereal, goldfish, whatever) would make that quite a bit harder to deal with.
That means you need to end both single-use containers and selling stuff in containers entirely.
There’s only do much of one type of reusable container you even can have a use for, and that’s assuming you do even have a use for them in the first place: I don’t make jam at home, I buy it, I don’t have a use for a new jam jar a month, and every jam-making friend has more jars than they could ever use (seriously, I used to stock jars for my parents until they stopped canning, then tried giving my stock away, about a third of which found I interest, the rest went to recycling).
> That means you need to end...selling stuff in containers entirely.
If we energy-cost-accounted for all externalities, then I wonder how returning the containers to the factory to automatically sanitize and re-use compares to recycling. Land filling is not an option: say you're in a closed loop environment like on a generation ship trip to Proxima Centauri b, and the concept of a land fill as we know it is obscenely wasteful.
Container waste needs to be considered with its inversely correlated counterpart, content waste and contamination damage. A single food poisoning case has far more impact than just tossing a non-biodegradable container in a landfill. Especially if they die - every investment in them from vaccinations to education becomes for naught in the future.
In the case of processed foods like Pringles, I would suggest focusing on the first R, reduce. Not only good for the environment, but good for your health too.
Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle, Composting, Energy from waste, Incineration, Landfill - that was the basics of the Waste Hierarchy when I worked on the Waste Strategy for England back in the late 1990s. I don't know if the order has shifted much over the past couple of decades.
The EU Packaging Directive seems to be getting more robust - I remember the first Directive was a bit weak and too open to national interpretation so it's good to see they seem to have introduced hard recycling targets and put a lot more emphasis on the need for producer responsibility schemes for packaging - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15958382...
Reduce is a consumer focused, it's a failing strategy. Reducing to 1% of what we currently throw away would still destroy the planet. Making reuse the centre point forces reduce to also happen, if your product has to ship in reusable containers, they are going to be smaller anyway. Products that don't need containers will stop using them again.
Paper can be used for some of these. E.g. sugar and flour are usually sold in plain paper (not even cardboard) packaging[1] in Germany and, from a cursory check, in some other European countries. It doesn't work for everything because it's not airtight.
I bring mason jars and reusable produce bags to the store to buy coffee, rice, green beans and other solids. The store even ran a promotion to give away the produce bags, so a lot of people in the neighborhood have them. I agree, this might not work too well for meat, but as they say, "perfect is the enemy of good enough".
There are more and more stores that sell dry food without packaging. The customers have to bring their packaging (jars, etc..) required to take the goods home.
Sure, here in Vermont we have lots of dry good options (cereal, dry tea, spices, etc) that are bulk into reusable containers. Pringles aren't conducive to that but I'd certainly scoop tortilla chips, goldfish, etc if I could.
To this day, the majority of wide mouth glass jars you see at the grocery store have the same diameter and thread pitch of one of the mason jar lid sizes. Which means you can find a clean replacement lid for most of them, and use it to store other food or non food items.
Classico pasta sauces literally come in a tall Mason jar, with volume marks on the side.
> The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy.
I've heard people say that the environmental cost of producing the clean water necessary to wash bottles for reuse is also harmful. I'd really like to see a side-by-side comparison of the environmental cost of the different available "obvious" options.
> We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close.
I entirely agree. I think manufacturers who produce in bulk products intended for consumers should be required to pay for regular environmental assessments, and then pay the total cost for responsible disposal or recycling of their entire product - including the packaging as well as the item itself when it reaches the end of its useful life. Then environmental harm would be priced into every consumer product.
There's a Classico pasta sauce line that uses jars molded with Atlas Mason on them and fit Mason jar lids but are not designed to be reused for canning. Just for marketing.
I've found a way to upcycle those, they make excellent drinking glasses. My home is an old farmhouse in a semi-rural area, so it fits the aesthetic perfectly. I grew up poor, with my family reusing Mason and Bell jars as drinking glasses between canning seasons, so I'm comfortable with it. With the opening narrower than the body, they also prevent ice cubes from invading our mouths when we consume iced drinks.
As an added bonus they seem to be far more durable than our regular glasses and tumblers; we end up breaking one of those every couple of months. They have been almost completely replaced by "free" pasta jars at this point and we have yet to break any of those.
That’s only a problem for very very few people aka the shareholders. Everyone else wins.
It’s the standard modus operandi for most companies by now. Internalized profits, externalized costs. And there are very few products for which full lifecycle costs are included in the price.
as far as reuse is concerned, removing the foil lining it takes away the value of the can for anything such as a 2.4 GHz waveguide. when you get an old school pringles can together with some sma co-ax and a custom flashed router the signal gain is tremendous but unidirectional
I saw a report on the news that garden centers were offering to collect used plastic plant pots. I thought "Great idea, just rinse out the pots, peel off the labels and put them back into use for new plants."
The report went on to show all of the returned pots being crushed and turned into pellets.
I’m picturing a bulk Pringles tube at the grocery store, soaring up to the ceiling. Then you place your reusable glass Pringles tube under it, pull a lever, and a fresh stack of Pringles drops into your container. I like it!
Can they not just be broken down into simpler hydrocarbons and reformulated? Cannot most plastics be melted into simpler products ala preciousplastic.com ?
What makes colored glass more able to be recycled than clear glass? I'm curious, my intuition says it would be the opposite as I assume colored glass has other stuff in the glass to make it colored.
As I understand it, it's hard to keep coloured glass and other impurities out of the clear glass recycling stream, so the clear glass isn't clear any more. Coloured glass is just mixed together, which is why it's brown.
The crux of your line of thinking lies in the definition of "costs of recycling". If something like the idea of a cost of recycling was represented in the cost to the consumer, how would you translate the same idea to a developing country? They have to pay an artificially increased price (compared what the population of "developed" countries paid for) for something we didn't have to pay for until now? That sounds kind of unfair.
edit:
Just to make clear, I'm not arguing against a concept as "cost of recycling"; my point is that the whole argument is more complicated than just comparing realistic solutions for the US or europe.
100% recycling would be a disaster since recycling almost everything other than aluminum has a larger carbon footprint than making new. Additionally it would do almost nothing for plastic pollution since microplastics come from textile manufacturing, paint, tires, and other airborne particles from dense human population zones. Macroplastics largely come from dumping that's already banned under laws we don't bother enforcing.
"Recycle everything" is a mantra for people who care more about feeling good about themselves than the actual mathematics of our environment.
>We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%
There's literally no way to do this. Any costs you try to pass on will just be passed to the customer, and there's no legal way to prevent that from happening. And no, the customer won't care about a 5c recycling tariff, which is about the most you could charge for this without getting sued to oblivion.
> We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable
Proclamations like this are strong evidence of economic illiteracy. Forcing everything to be recyclable isn’t optimal for society or for the environment.
Care to elaborate? I'd quite like making Coca Cola, Pepsi, Keurig, etc. pay to recycle or repurpose all the plastic they produce. Especially now that the US is no longer shipping plastics to Asia. I'm fairly certain both my recycling truck and trash trucks deposit their cargo in the same place: the landfill.
I think the parent means that manufacturers need to either switch to sustainable materials or pay a premium to use plastics.
tl;dr you can recycle vintage goods as well into your daily life, start at home.
my entire kitchen is vintage glass, some of it lower in cost than buying new, that I snagged off ebay. In my case Anchor Hocking bubble glass. Combine with Corning Ware storage pieces for the kitchen you can "reuse" at home by buying what was made decades ago. Heck, my toaster is a 50s era Toastmaster.
Getting soft drinks out of plastic containers and the ever famous k-cups would go a long was as well. I do my best to only use cans and glass for for my food purchases. produce aisle is still stuck with plastic bags but I would love to see biodegradable paper bags or open top containers to stack goods in.
The soap/detergent aisles really need to go down the route of selling concentrated goods but this will require some incentive on manufacturer's part to sell them cheaper by end result.
The thing is they don’t need that plastic lid. They say without it the food would be spoiled but if you have a big bag of crisps, you open them and eat them or they go off - this is no different.
Kellogg’s seem to believe they have invented a type of crisp that can only be eaten over a period of time.
Pringles hold up well in lunchboxes, and the can could go a week per child even if they prefer one flavor. I think people underestimate the packing density of Pringle’s. There is a lot of (mashed) potato in that can.
It's the Pringles brand, though: "once you pop you just can't stop" or something like that. They've built this story around the sound of the lid popping off.
They need some kind of closure on the tube to keep the chips and crumbs in and the dust out in the cupboard. (The foil/paper closure works until first opened but not after.)
The article alludes to removing the plastic components altogether if possible in place of the plastic, so yes, the Stax container is easier to recycle, but still not ideal.
Household waste in the US is usually quietly landfilled, unless a private contractor can make money recycling it. (The bluebox separation training is helpful though for a future date.)
Doesn't really matter. If you're a required crew member in a small plane, gotta keep it comfy, though most planes with 2 pilots would be big enough for a lav.
The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil.
But IMHO manufacturers should be on the hook for the lifecycle of their products. Either through taxes, or some kind of market-driven bidding mechanism, they should have financial penalties (or even rewards), based on product environmental impact.
The whole recycling movement seems to me to be a way for companies to palm off this responsibility onto the public, and then win 'green publicity' when they deign to make their products slightly more amenable to the (usually public-funded/volunteer/coerced/etc) recycling system.
> The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil.
This is incredibly uninformed and misleading. Burying it will not solve any problems, a PET bootle takes something like 450 years to fully breakdown, on top of that the particles released as it breaks down will be washed away into the subsoil and end up in ground water, then rivers, water supply, and eventually then back into the oceans.
Most plastics also have a hazardous health side effect they act as hormone disruptors, effectively mimicking estrogen. Having any additional plastic purposefully break down and leak in even greater concentrations, into our water supply, sounds like a remarkably poor idea.
But my point is less to do with how to treat waste, than the fact that the most important first step is to actually collect it. In much of the world, collection is not happening properly, which is why we see so much plastic waste washed into rivers and oceans.
Of course if we create less waste to start with, that also helps, but that will only happen if manufacturers are pressured where it matters, the bottom line.
Readit News
This is one of the big problems I have with recycling. When I was a kid in school (throughout the 90’s), we learned the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is last on the list.
The list is in order of increasing waste for a very good reason. We should first strive to reduce the amount of wasteful stuff we purchase, barring that we should try to reuse things around the house (plastic bags, containers, etc), and finally if we can’t do either we should recycle the stuff to try and recover the materials.
Nowadays I don’t hear about the 3 R’s anymore. It’s become all about people dumping everything in a box and making it somebody else’s problem, just as trash was in the first place.
Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw cans away, there’s noly do many cans you can find a use for.
I can’t find any specific production numbers but the internet tells me Kellogg’s sells for billions in snacks and pringles are a significant fraction of that. A Pringle can is a buck or two, meaning 6 figures Pringle cans being sold every year, if not 7.
There’s no way they’ll sell Pringles in bags though; they’re way too delicate for anything but a purpose-built rigid container.
The article states "three million cans are made across Europe every day". That's 10 figures annually in Europe alone.
That's because companies don't want us to reduce or in many cases reuse, but recycle makes everyone feel good inside (even though in many cases even that doesn't happen, but we as consumers don't care).
Thank you for saying this. It's crucial that we recognize how consent is manufactured by corporate propaganda that goes way beyond the simplistic "buy our product!" messaging that folks normally think of.
Our reality is dictated by private companies to suit their bottom lines. We've got to be very careful to make sure we know what's good for us, what we want, and how to get it. Corporate propaganda inserts memetic man-in-the-middle attacks at every step in that line of reasoning.
I wonder if it would make sense to require these items to be more substantial and then make reuse financially unavoidable. So the only way to buy bottled water would be in a reusable container. You would either return it for a deposit or reuse it yourself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna
I have mason jars that my grandmother and then my mother used for pickling. The only waste is the rubber ring which needs to be replaced occasionally and THAT could be recycled. Many of these bottles have been used for 80+ years now. I have a few Ball jars which my GREAT grandmother used 100+ years ago.
Beer bottles in Canada are reused dozens of times and are recyclable (brown glass) when broken or worn out.
The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy.
Plastics are not currently infinitely recyclable as the polymer chains break down. A lot of plastic is simply not recyclable at all in most of North America [1]
We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close.
[1] https://apps.npr.org/plastics-recycling/
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...
The United States is seemingly uniquely bad at this, thanks to - you guessed it - corporate greed. Container deposit laws work:
> The United States' overall beverage container recycling rate is approximately 33%, while states with container deposit laws have a 70% average rate of beverage container recycling.
but, of course, only ten states in the US have them:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislatio...
A couple nits to pick, though.
– You have to be specific when advocating for reuse. Some like to keep using—for long periods of time—bottles made from cheap thin disposable plastic. That plastic, when repeatedly emptied, may quickly accumulate tiny cracks and leech chemicals, which in case of P(V)C may well be BPA. How harmful this could be depends on country’s regulations.
– Pure aluminum containers are rare, if exist. Aluminum cans & bottles contain plastic inside.
I personally advocate for glass, and if glass is not an option—recycle, don’t reuse disposable plastic or aluminum containers more than a couple of times for the sake of your and your descendants’ health.
I like mason jars because they actually do last a long time and are pretty cheap, but don’t hate on reusing cheap plastic bottles!
Do you think we'll ever revert back to just paper and glass again?
We are making some good strides with paper straws and the like, and mandating people bring reusable bags to the grocery stores - but I still see many of the stores I shop at still use plastic bags.
I use the same plastic bottle for months when going to the gym. Should I stop doing this?
For example, those big jugs of water that get delivered. In most places they are clean and reused. Where I'm living right now, in Turkey, those big bottles are made out of glass and it just gets replaced with a previously used glass jug.
Same with the beer, all the bottles are collected, cleaned, and reused.
I live in the UK and never buy water. All mine comes through the tap. There is no lorry delivering water for me although the water supply does have lots of big pumps and processes that mean it isn't arriving in my house by gravity alone and it does have a carbon footprint.
If you are living 50 miles out in the desert then you are going to need a lorry to fill up a big tank rather than bring lots of little glass or plastic bottles. Otherwise, tap water rules and needs to be kept clean. Drinking bought bottled water should be discouraged.
We do not recycle although.
One key invention which could really help here is flexible glass packaging. Interestingly, one of the lost technologies from the Roman era is flexible glass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass
Corning does have flexible glass, but used primarily for interiors and not for packaging: https://www.corning.com/in/en/innovation/corning-emerging-in...
I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut down because a vendor in a different country offered such good pricing for a while that nobody could/wanted to compete, but has since greatly raised they prices.
Weight does matter quite a bit when shipping something literally halfway around the world, but we don't have to ship it around the world. We need to get our own capacity to recycle locally built up again.
bottling isn't a specialized task, it can be done anywhere. If companies were forced to pay the true cost of their plastic packaging, we might see a return to a system where bottling plants were set up locally, provided local jobs in smaller communities, and customers could return their used glass bottles directly to the local bottling plant for sterilization and re-use.
All food containers must be recyclable or compostable. This should be a rule across the globe.
We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.
A recyclability tax, where the producer pays a tax that corresponds to how much it will cost to recycle their product. Maybe collect data of how much of their product is actually recycled. That would force producers to consider reuse, recycling, etc.
Banning disposable packaging. Want potato chips? Bring a special reusable (and relatively expensive) bag to the dispenser, have it unload some chips and do whatever trick is necessary to keep the chips dehydrated and crisp.
You can also only ban disposable packaging that could have negative environmental effect. Maybe something made out of some fungi or hay or something could just be treated like compost waste.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual...
That means you need to end both single-use containers and selling stuff in containers entirely.
There’s only do much of one type of reusable container you even can have a use for, and that’s assuming you do even have a use for them in the first place: I don’t make jam at home, I buy it, I don’t have a use for a new jam jar a month, and every jam-making friend has more jars than they could ever use (seriously, I used to stock jars for my parents until they stopped canning, then tried giving my stock away, about a third of which found I interest, the rest went to recycling).
If we energy-cost-accounted for all externalities, then I wonder how returning the containers to the factory to automatically sanitize and re-use compares to recycling. Land filling is not an option: say you're in a closed loop environment like on a generation ship trip to Proxima Centauri b, and the concept of a land fill as we know it is obscenely wasteful.
The EU Packaging Directive seems to be getting more robust - I remember the first Directive was a bit weak and too open to national interpretation so it's good to see they seem to have introduced hard recycling targets and put a lot more emphasis on the need for producer responsibility schemes for packaging - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15958382...
Do you have examples of successful packaging reuse for solid dry food such as Pringles? Or cereal? Or sugar? Or chocolate?
(And that's before even getting into packaging of meat, fish, etc.)
[1] https://www.amazon.de/S%C3%BCdzucker-Feinzucker-10er-Pack-10...
Classico pasta sauces literally come in a tall Mason jar, with volume marks on the side.
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/20/plastic-bags-have-l...
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/09/20/how-to-recycle-pl...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/10/plastics...
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/government-...
I've heard people say that the environmental cost of producing the clean water necessary to wash bottles for reuse is also harmful. I'd really like to see a side-by-side comparison of the environmental cost of the different available "obvious" options.
> We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close.
I entirely agree. I think manufacturers who produce in bulk products intended for consumers should be required to pay for regular environmental assessments, and then pay the total cost for responsible disposal or recycling of their entire product - including the packaging as well as the item itself when it reaches the end of its useful life. Then environmental harm would be priced into every consumer product.
If this is true, wouldn't it be more environmentally friendly to use disposable plates, bowls, and utensils? That doesn't seem right.
Clean energy is already our most important goal from a "survival of the species" point of view.
A college prof did an analysis of plastic versus biodegradable “plastic”.
The biodegradable plastic took far more energy and released much more CO2 than just regular plastic.
it only requires getting everyone on the planet to accept that things cost 10x what they do now.
which is a hard pill to swallow when you are living paycheck to paycheck, which is most of the world's population.
As an added bonus they seem to be far more durable than our regular glasses and tumblers; we end up breaking one of those every couple of months. They have been almost completely replaced by "free" pasta jars at this point and we have yet to break any of those.
It’s the standard modus operandi for most companies by now. Internalized profits, externalized costs. And there are very few products for which full lifecycle costs are included in the price.
e.g. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out...
The report went on to show all of the returned pots being crushed and turned into pellets.
I think I screamed into a cushion.
Can they not just be broken down into simpler hydrocarbons and reformulated? Cannot most plastics be melted into simpler products ala preciousplastic.com ?
I would love to hear from someone who knows more.
edit: Just to make clear, I'm not arguing against a concept as "cost of recycling"; my point is that the whole argument is more complicated than just comparing realistic solutions for the US or europe.
"Recycle everything" is a mantra for people who care more about feeling good about themselves than the actual mathematics of our environment.
There's literally no way to do this. Any costs you try to pass on will just be passed to the customer, and there's no legal way to prevent that from happening. And no, the customer won't care about a 5c recycling tariff, which is about the most you could charge for this without getting sued to oblivion.
Proclamations like this are strong evidence of economic illiteracy. Forcing everything to be recyclable isn’t optimal for society or for the environment.
I think the parent means that manufacturers need to either switch to sustainable materials or pay a premium to use plastics.
my entire kitchen is vintage glass, some of it lower in cost than buying new, that I snagged off ebay. In my case Anchor Hocking bubble glass. Combine with Corning Ware storage pieces for the kitchen you can "reuse" at home by buying what was made decades ago. Heck, my toaster is a 50s era Toastmaster.
Getting soft drinks out of plastic containers and the ever famous k-cups would go a long was as well. I do my best to only use cans and glass for for my food purchases. produce aisle is still stuck with plastic bags but I would love to see biodegradable paper bags or open top containers to stack goods in.
The soap/detergent aisles really need to go down the route of selling concentrated goods but this will require some incentive on manufacturer's part to sell them cheaper by end result.
Kellogg’s seem to believe they have invented a type of crisp that can only be eaten over a period of time.
Chip bags can be clipped closed for this.
* I'm currently testing used tetrapak as shingle siding for dog houses!
[1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/05960055...
If the plastic lid was screw-on, it would be ideal for a relief tube when flying, but it's just press-fit.
reduce > reuse > recycle
You can learn more here:
https://www.epa.gov/recycle
Automotive vehicles are the only thing with high rates of recycling - the rate is almost 100% for the metal.
https://www.worldautosteel.org/life-cycle-thinking/recycling...
Household waste in the US is usually quietly landfilled, unless a private contractor can make money recycling it. (The bluebox separation training is helpful though for a future date.)
But IMHO manufacturers should be on the hook for the lifecycle of their products. Either through taxes, or some kind of market-driven bidding mechanism, they should have financial penalties (or even rewards), based on product environmental impact.
The whole recycling movement seems to me to be a way for companies to palm off this responsibility onto the public, and then win 'green publicity' when they deign to make their products slightly more amenable to the (usually public-funded/volunteer/coerced/etc) recycling system.
This is incredibly uninformed and misleading. Burying it will not solve any problems, a PET bootle takes something like 450 years to fully breakdown, on top of that the particles released as it breaks down will be washed away into the subsoil and end up in ground water, then rivers, water supply, and eventually then back into the oceans.
Most plastics also have a hazardous health side effect they act as hormone disruptors, effectively mimicking estrogen. Having any additional plastic purposefully break down and leak in even greater concentrations, into our water supply, sounds like a remarkably poor idea.
But my point is less to do with how to treat waste, than the fact that the most important first step is to actually collect it. In much of the world, collection is not happening properly, which is why we see so much plastic waste washed into rivers and oceans.
Of course if we create less waste to start with, that also helps, but that will only happen if manufacturers are pressured where it matters, the bottom line.