But PP is one of the plastics that CAN be recycled, and IS recycled, often at a much higher rate than in the US.
One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful.
The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material.
The ideal solution is the bottle recycling machines (like Tomra) found in Northern Europe, that only accepts aluminium and plastic cans/bottles, which goes right back to making new cans/bottles. Well, the plastic bottle part is work in progress, but there are bottles made from 100% recycled materials now, and the key to that is to have a clean well-separated stream of recycled materials coming in.
Funny story: I saw a documentary from a local advanced recycling centre, where they mentioned that the bales of plastic that actually went to be reused in new products/bottles smelled really nice. Because a big portion of them was PP shampoo bottles.
> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there.
In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously.
However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process.
Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself).
People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,
In my local jurisdiction (a part of the US) the recycling bin is only allowed to be filled with cardboard and metal cans.
Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash.
Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump.
Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip your trash collection folks well, and they will make all kinds of stuff disappear) and they mentioned to me that because there is no demand for cardboard/metal recycling while they load it into two different trucks, they end up at the exact same dump.
This was confirmed not too much later when I went with my contractor to the dump to get rid of a ton of construction material, where I saw two dump trucks right next to each other, one filled with trash and one with recyclables.
So very little actually gets recycled in the United States. Most of it ends up in giant piles, buried...
I would say a significant portion of the burden, perhaps the majority, lies on food companies for using so many different types of packaging. Sorting discarded packaging into N bins is exactly the kind of overhead in day-to-day life that a lot of people simply don’t have time for and causes friction that makes it less likely to be adopted by the people who do.
Regulations that greatly limit the total number of packaging types may be of help here.
Bottle and can recycling machines are common in the United States as well, although only in places with bottle/can deposits.
Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.
The ideal solution is surely that the waste management industry figures out how to deal efficiently with two streams of waste, one perishable and the other not.
> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material.
The only genuine path to sustainability is reduction. There is no sustainable way to have disposable single-use packaging that you throw away when the bottle empties. Glass bottles with a deposit to incentivize bottle return, following which they are washed and refilled with new product (ideally locally, with fresh ketchup arriving to local distribution centers in bulk), is a much more reasonable approach.
There's a cost associated with bottle return as well. Consumers also may feel weird about buying used packaging.
What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.
If I saw more packaging like this in my local stores, even if slightly more expensive, I'd pick it up every time. I think the overall friction is more in the return process, and that's where the space for innovation really lies.
Or let people refill their bottles at the shop/mall like from a beer keg. But it probably would be a hassle to deal with for the seller, so it won't probably won't happen.
This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high.
Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.
It isn't anti-progress. It's identifying a lack of it. A step in the right direction would be developments that either definitely lead to more recycling in practice, or a reduction in materials used.
Yeah -- it's sort of like those people who complain about the plastic lining on compostable coffee cups making them pointless.
Like if a 100% plastic and a 1% plastic end up in a landfill or elsewhere the 1% coffee cup is just going to two orders of magnitude less damage than the pure plastic one, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good but OP does have a point about the oil lobby push but that is a separate but related issue.
Yup. recyclable != will be recycled. If recyclers don't know that the cap specifically is recycable, it won't be recycled. In fact, if only this brands cup is recycable, the chance of it being recycled is probably 0
On the topic of the interesting engineering puzzle...
I went to a university job fair in 2014 and Heinz had a booth there. I remember asking the recruiter what kind of positions they were recruiting for, and her only response was "We are looking for top talent. Are you top talent?" I was pretty thrown off by that, so pressed her with "Top talent in what? I know statistics and programming, do you need anyone who can do that?" Her only response was "well, do you think you're top talent?" I think I tried to ask a couple more times what they were actually looking for, but she just kept repeating the top talent line. I think I eventually said something like "I think I'm pretty good" before dropping off my résumé, grabbing a pickle-shaped lapel pin, and walking away.
Totally weird experience, and very different from the usual job fair recruiter. If it wasn't for the lapel pin that I still have, I wouldn't even be sure it was a real memory.
I sometimes wonder if my life would've been different if I had had the self-esteem and confidence to look her right in the eye and say "yes, I am top talent".
I also wonder if Heinz is actually hiring and retaining "top talent". When I look at their ketchup bottle design innovations over the years, I wonder if maybe they really are!
Has anyone here ever interviewed there or worked there? Are you in fact top talent? Were you surrounded by top talent? Is a packaged food company secretly where all the really smart people go for jobs? That article about the Unilever ice cream factory the other day makes me think there's more to it than meets the eye.
The screening technique is straightforward and not surprising: They have to filter a few people from possibly hundreds of resumes. They need a way to narrow it down rapidly, even if imperfectly. They don't want to invest time in your resume if even you don't think you qualify.
There's a false negative problem, as in all interviews: interviewing well is a different skill than engineering bottle caps. Still, confident, talented people who are on their toes and accustomed to pressure may respond convincingly. So will con artists and the self-deluding types like megalomaniacs, so there's also a false positive problem ...
The bottle is PET and is easily and commonly recycled, if it actually makes it to the recycling facility. About 30% of PET sold in the US actually gets recycled. It's the clear soda bottle plastic.
The cap was previously 99% PP and 1% Silicone and was not recyclable at all.
The cap is now 100% PP and therefore recyclable in theory, but in practice there are limited facilities that can recycle PP.
but the 30% is the tip of the spear of a scam so fuck them because plastic recycling is a joke and they've put the burden and blame on us for failing when they never had the science or the tools to do it at scale and won't any time soon. that you're so easily sucked into their scam with selective statistics is sad but don't spread your imaginary industry to others. got an STD, keep it to yourself. this is no different.
Do we honestly with a straight face tell ourselves that consumers are going to remove this cap before recycling and place them in the right bins or there is a recycling facility somewhere with workers removing caps from ketchup bottles? It’s a ludicrous greenwashing idea from the get go.
I love the idea of recycling but I just don’t do it anymore when I realized my city’s single stream recycling was likely just ending up being shipped to Asia with fossil fuels and dumped in the ocean eventually and adding to the Pacific plastic gyre. Burying it in a landfill seems highly more optimal than that.
This is a weird take? It's not Heinz' job to solve every issue in the recycling supply chain. If more of their products can be recycled; more of their products will be recycled. That's still progress.
Anyone with a modicum of product and process exp. knows progress > perfection.
Very nice. I live alone and often I'm baffled by the sheer amount of garbage that my urban lifestyle generates. I was not alive in the 80's but I was told that people used to use more environment-friendly packaging like glass bottles. Sometimes I wonder why this massive change to everything-should-be-packed-in-plastic happened.
Its cheaper and easier to ensure sanitary products.
We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be recycled is better or worse than a plastic container.
Should plastic containers shedding millions of nano particles be considered sanitary?
The only reason it’s used is that the externalities aren’t properly taxed (or not banned IMO).
Maybe we should not use things that are “easier” when they’re contributing to a massive amount of pollution. I mean there was an article posted here about finding microplastics in a human fetus.
Yet we still continue to use it.
Glass is recycled infinitely more easily and more widely. Pasabahce sells upcycled and recycled products here, and mark them clearly. Also, we have glass collection bins which has different compartments for clear and colored glass. These are periodically emptied.
Even if they are not recycled, a glass jar is used for more than five years in an household, only by replacing the caps in the process. If we don't need the jars, we give them away to people who need them, adding more usable glass to sneakernet of jars.
Glass is finicky in some forms, and expensive to make it durable during production and transport, but rarely, if ever, ends up in a trash bin.
You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container.
And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.
In the 80s in the UK we had milk delivered every morning in glass bottles by a huge fleet of electric vehicles. The empty bottles were left out, collected by the milkman, sterilised and reused.
When my parents were kids in Asia they used to get all their club soda delivered in cartons in glass bottles that had a little glass ball in it to hold in the carbonation. You then pushed the glass ball down to open it up. They would then sterilize and reuse those and the glass ball would self seal once carbonated again.
What a really nice, fully reusable bottle with no waste at all.
And fizzy pop! I dare say every town had one. In Sunderland we had Sykes. They’d come round once a week; you left your old bottles out front and they’d be swapped out for new.
In NZ - ditto growing up had the milk delivery service. Now it was a long distance memory until we moved to a smaller town/city. To our surprise one of the independent milk companies had a delivery service and up until a few months ago there was a glass bottle based delivery service of proper milk (the kind with thick fat/cream on the top..). Absolutely magic.
Alas cost of living took hold and they stopped the service, so sadly off to the store for the milk now. They didn't even put up an option of 'we can't afford to keep this going, so how much would you pay extra for it'
I bet they would have been surprised what people would illogically pay to have their milk and eggs delivered...
I remember how birds learned that the silver-top milk had a thick lay of cream so if you didn't fetch it in pronto, you'd find all your bottles would have the tops pecked through.
I was born in the 50's. Growing up, the worst thing about the garbage generated at home was that it had to go into leftover paper bags from the grocery store because plastic garbage bags didn't exist. And those bags went into metal garbage cans outside the house, because plastic garbage cans didn't exist, and those garbage cans were always dented, rusty, and with lids that quickly stopped sealing properly. What a mess.
In my country growing up, there were always random health issues popping up because the reused packaging or storage without packaging was not always hygienic.
In the beginning of 90s, when plastic packaging became popular, it was a huge change as we did not have to worry about many health issues ( food poisoning etc).
Plastic is a superior packaging material. It delivers superb cleanlines and posibility to use packaging gas(Nitrogen) in automated lines. Cleanliness is essential for shelf life, and many products have it now unheard compared to 80s paper packaging - only due to package. Amount of food spoilage prevented by plastic packaging is enormous, it is very sad to see this no plastic hysteria. Like seing dark ages returning.
I agree with you. Plastic is one of those weird issues where it gets much more prominence than it deserves. Plastic reduces food waste and items damaged in shipping. If you don't litter and have a good landfill system, there is nothing to worry about.
Your lifestyle does not generate garbage. Companies that sell non recyclables and non compostsbles generate garbage. Why hasnt cocacola replaced their plastics with something compostable? There are new inventions for replacing plastics out each day, I wonder where those inventions end up.
If coca cola's your example, then I'm going to affirm that yes, it is the lifestyle that generates garbage. People don't _need_ soda. But they want it at a low price that's cheaper than Pepsi. You know what that means? Coke's going to be shipping in the cheapest container possible to keep the price edge - which is plastic.
If soda drinkers cared about plastic consumption, they would switch to anything that has glass containers and spend more - or just cut the habit due to the waste generated. But that's not happening.
Sure, there can be political will to force Coke to switch to something else - bypassing the need for the customer to do anything - but that would result in higher prices which makes people mad. Good luck asking a politician to do something that will upset their constituents
I remember growing up in India and plastic was introduced to "save the trees". It took us decades for us to fully grasp the environmental devastation it caused.
Growing up in the United States, I remember plastic being introduced for the same reason. For example, there was a huge push to get people to accept plastic shopping bags rather than paper ones. There were news stories talking about how it not only saved trees, but also used less fuel because the paper bags are bulky, heavy, and expensive to ship from the manufacturer.
Plastic is essentially a byproduct of fuel production. My understand is that a lot of companies will pay others to take that plastic off their hands. Not only is it cheaper to use plastic than glass, it's positively subsidised.
A realtor friend found a lucrative side business in plastic recycling during the Great Recession. She still makes around $100k a year off of it.
I wish I knew how it worked but her and her business partner don’t talk about it much. Probably for good reason. Pretty sure they take plastic off people hands and sell it to someone who uses it, paid to take it away and then paid again by a buyer.
With ketchup (and mustard, mayo, etc.), squeezable bottles are way more convenient. Gone are the days of wanting to get X amount of ketchup out of the bottle but ending up with either 0X or 10X.
Aside from the ketchup dispensing utility, you also escape tedious discussions about the best way to get ketchup out of a glass bottle. Do you tap the side? Shake the bottle? Angle it? Smack the bottom? Just sit there patiently? Warm it up? Stick a knife in it? You can be pretty sure that if you use any of these methods, someone is going to tell you about one of the others.
Glass is in no way environmentally friendly. It takes a huge amount of energy to produce glass, and a singel glass bottle requires a lot of it. PET bottle recycling is the closest we got to a functional plastic recycling system.
The difference is that glass bottles were consigned and re-used. Also energy use does not tell the whole story and one should consider the impact of plastic that is not recycled or worse, left adrift in the sea or in our rivers.
You make a good point and it can be interesting to know how many use of a bottle are required until it becomes more energy-efficient compared to disposable plastic, etc.
The shift to the all plastic packaging paradigm was made when companies found out that they could simply let the consumers deal with the packaging once the product was consumed instead of having to get it back from their hands and process it. Hence the modern plastic dystopia.
Ale-8-One[0] sold their feature soda/pop/coke/soft drink in some areas in returnable bottles at least as late as 2010. Word was that if their bottle washing and sanitizing machine died, they'd have to stop that. It turns out nobody's making parts for those machines any more.
I know they were still accepting returns back in 2020 (I was looking forwards buying some on a road trip and returning it as we came back through KY), but their new website redesign doesn't seem to mention it anymore.
EDIT: The bottles for sale on the website are specifically "non-returnable", not sure if that implies no more returns, or only store-purchased bottles are returnable.
I've mostly switched to pressure cooker, bulk foods (25 lb bags of rice, beans, porridge), and the local produce stand (BYOB). Both my food and packaging waste is now minimal.
Most of my plastic waste is from prescriptions. OMG so wasteful. Wax paper bags would be just fine.
There are concerns that breathing in and ingesting microplastics from clothing, car tires, and packaging is causing some of the health epidemics we see in the last decades. Like rising rates of obesity, cancer, mental disorders (autism, ADHD, gender dysphoria) and decreasing sperm count and quality. But no definitive evidence exists yet. If this turns out to be true, there is a case against plastic even if it is economically superior to the alternatives.
Convenience. In the 80s, people were starting to get over worked and so conveniences like plastic packaging, microwave meals, lunchables, plastic bottles, etc started popping up. Easy, just grab one. When you’re done, just throw it away! Except, then there was a garbage problem - so they campaigned for recycling! Then reality of recycling hit and so they say - separate and clean it first. Meanwhile people like you are wondering how we got to this madness. Convenience. And some really good marketing. Only about 9% of plastic has been recycled.
The Kodak Fling had to be renamed Funsaver because people were taking out the film and throwing away the cameras. That interfered with their plan to refill the used cameras.
> I wonder why this massive change to everything-should-be-packed-in-plastic happened
I don't get why people keep pretending plastic being widely used today is due to some conspiracy instead of it's just better at its main function, even without factoring in cost.
Compared to glass container, plastic ones are much lighter, harder to break, flexible, malleable, .. the list goes on.
In the 1980s, the use of glass containers was more out of necessity than preference. People didn't opt for heavy glass containers to be environmentally friendly; they simply lacked alternatives.
The appeal of single-use (plastic) containers lies in their convenience. Although they are undoubtedly more wasteful, their ease of use cannot be denied. People favor them for this convenience, with their wasteful nature being an unfortunate byproduct. If we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth, progress in environmentalism will never be done.
> Compared to glass container, plastic ones are much lighter, harder to break, flexible, malleable, .. the list goes on.
Yes but they also have the huge waste issue and society isn't doing enough to deal with it. The drawbacks are also huge, the cost just isn't an issue for the companies putting the plastic out into the world. It's more cost effective because we allow it to be, because we subsidise the oil industry, because we don't tax plastic waste highly enough etc etc.
> The appeal of single-use (plastic) containers lies in their convenience. Although they are undoubtedly more wasteful, their ease of use cannot be denied. People favor them for this convenience, with their wasteful nature being an unfortunate byproduct. If we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth, progress in environmentalism will never be done.
Yes, they are much more convenient in multiple ways (ease of transportation due to weight, flexible and malleable to take any shape or form, etc.) but there's no pricing of the externalities, if plastics would cost as much needed to take care of their disposal in environmentally friendly ways this convenience would have a much higher cost, naturally diminishing its uses.
While the side-effects of using plastics are not priced into the material it won't ever be solved.
I prefer glass bottles to plastic ones and I always buy soda in glass bottles if they are available(and this means almost always since they are available in the supermarket close to my home).
> I don't get why people keep pretending plastic being widely used today is due to some conspiracy instead of it's just better at its main function, even without factoring in cost.
I don't know how you read parents comment and concluded that they're talking about some conspiracy. They seem to genuinely ask a question that I'm sure they're not the only one thinking about.
> In 80's people use more glass containers because they didn't have choices, not because they love to carry heavy glass containers around to help the environment.
Again, don't think they said that people used glass containers back then to help the environment, just that for whatever reason they used those containers, it was less harmful to the environment. Not because that was the reason, that was just a side-effect of glass being the only choice. Then they ask the community what the reasons could be for everything being wrapped in plastic now.
As it reads right now, your comment doesn't seem to assume good faith of parent comment, but instead you're arguing against some position that isn't even talked about.
At many grocery stores I go to, there are no glass bottles of ketchup available. The few that do have them, the glass bottles are significantly smaller than the plastic while also being more expensive. They also don't have the reduced sugar or no HFCS choices in glass bottles. None of the generic brands sell in glass bottles around me.
Even then, in the end I'd still end up buying it in plastic. The plastic squeeze bottles are just way more convenient. I'd probably be fine buying it in bulk and fill my own squeeze bottles to reduce plastic consumption, but buying smaller and radically more expensive glass bottles isn't really a winning choice in my book.
not where I live - Heinz and the major local brand here (Idun, I think?) tend to sell only in plastic bottles.
I can sometimes find fancy ketchup in glass bottles, but considering that I only buy ketchup once or twice a year, I just can't remember. The glass bottle available isn't the Mutti ketchup that I bought years ago, so I'm just buying Heinz.
I go through a 64 gallon trash bin a week. By my back of the envelope calculation thats about 1.3 chevy tahoes worth of trash a year, and that's just me one American out of 400 million so all told we are dealing with maybe half a billion chevy tahoes of trash a year we need to do something with or put someplace if most Americans consume like I do.
64 gallons is 250 litres. We're four and we use about one 30 litres (8 gallons) bag for "rest" trash per week (everything not recyclable, including diapers which take a lot of space, so hopefully soon we can at least halve that trash volume) one 30 litres bag for recyclable plastic/metal every two weeks and maybe one 30 litres bag for compostable stuff (mostly just vegetable and fruit peels from cooking) every two weeks or so.
That's about 60 litres or 15 gallons per week for a normal-sized family. I can see some of my neighbours having somewhat larger bags, some with smaller bags, but I feel like we are mostly average for our area (in Belgium).
In fact, a quick search tells me that Belgians have produced on average 683 kg of trash per year in 2022, which comes to 13 kg per week per person and seems rather consistent with my numbers.
Chiming in to also state how absurd this sounds to me.
I live in a household with 3 adults generating trash, we don't even fill up a 190L bin every 2 weeks in between pickups, usually when I roll the bin to the street it will be about 1/3 to 2/3 filled. We have a compost bin about the same size which also gets about 1/3 to 2/3 filled every 2 weeks.
Apart from that our recycling bins (about 60L for the paper/plastic ones, 20L for glass and metal) gets filled in about 4-6 weeks which I then take to the recycling station.
In summary as 3 adults we generate in the absolute top end about 117 gallons of non-compostable trash a month (those are very rare instances), so about 30 gallons a week for 3 adults even when adding up all the recycling we do.
And my household of two produces 20l of regular non-recyclable trash every month, 40l of plastic trash every month, maybe a couple of kilos of organic waste per week. But we buy a lot of organic and glass where possible.
That's an insane amount of generated trash. My husband and I combined might fill our 13 gallon kitchen trash can once every four days. Is your lifestyle primarily eating out/prepackaged foods?
> Transportation costs dominate the cost of most consumables
That was surprising to me and, uh, no, they don't, unless you're considering building materials (i.e. rocks).
It's not easy to find numbers, but for milk in Germany, it appears to be around 10%, about the same as packaging. Milk should be worse than many other products because it's cheap and heavy, on the other hand it's rarely shipped over great distances. [1]
Another report [2] considers transportation costs relative to the value of the goods transported, which isn't exactly the same as "how much of the consumer price is transportation", but surely related, and has 2.7% for foodstuffs (and 55% for rocks).
I mean, I'm sure it varies widely for different kinds of consumables, but overall, transporting stuff is cheap. I think even in terms of CO2, which is certainly underrepresented in cost currently, production dominates transport for most goods in a grocery store, apart from produce shipped by air.
Which sort of highlights local vs national production and shipping.
The local milkman of the 50s, did better with glass collecting and delivering milk. The national enterprise benefits, as you say, from weight reduction.
Transport cost is one factor, but even in countries where glass bottles are sold alongside plastic ones they are unpopular to the end user themselves because of their inconvenience.
The common 2kg×6 PET bottles format is too heavy for glass bottles, so you end up paying more for heavier 1.5kgx6 bottles that are going to last you less.
Glass bottles have to be reprocessed later. Forever pollutants offer more benefits for the industry.
Short term benefit and profit margin dominate the calculation of if life environments deserve to continue unpolluted or they deserve to be destroyed in the name of compound interest.
Until someone develops some sort of multi-spectral imaging that can reliably sort plastic based on it's composition there's little hope of recycling plastic. And then you still need different enzymes that can break down different compositions.
It's sad, but realistically almost all plastic one disposes of needs to go in the trash can rather than recycling.
>Until someone develops some sort of multi-spectral imaging that can reliably sort plastic based on it's composition
Funny you phrase it like that, because that's exactly what the STEINERT UniSort does. Plastic waste is finely shredded, dumped onto a conveyor belt, imaged, then passed over air puff sorters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3QHa9oQshw
Is it worth it? Of course not. Far cheaper and easier just to burn it. But for EU nations that are really dedicated to recycling, it can be done.
Conventional multispectral and hyperspectral can't keep up (and integrate well) into existing sorting lines. They induce a slow-down in conveyer belt speeds or you have to install splitters and buy multiple $100K cameras.
(we're working to solve this problem though in the classic VC backed way - DM for more information!)
I would argue burning it (and maybe capture the generated CO2) is the only recycling making any sense with the plastic garbage we have. And then stop using it for everything and start classifying/labeling the plastics where we neee them, so they can be sorted automatically later so then you can recycle them.
Here in germany some sort of plastic recycling actually works, because there is a deposit fee on all plastic bottles - you bring them back to the supermarket to get it back - and then there is one source of the same plastic, that does get used for new products.
I fully expect that what's really happening here is that it's slightly cheaper to manufacture the caps as a single mold, rather than needing to combine two parts.
Cost savings often benefit sustainability. You probably heard the "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order" thing. The "reduce" part also reduces costs.
Here it looks like there is one less part (the silicone ring), which I believe makes it cheaper to build, cuts on supplies (no more need for silicone), and improves recyclability, which is good for the image and maybe some regulations. I don't know how good it is at delivering ketchup, but if it is as good or better, then we all win. Granted, it is still disposable plastic, but I don't see why that design would be unsuitable for a reusable bottle.
I don't think so. There's a huge push for recycling in EU. Every recyclable item either says to be put in the correct recycle bin, or has information about reusing with concentrated refills or by repurposing.
Maybe the same push is not present in the US, but creating a new cap for European market makes sense. Also using the better cap across the whole world to save costs makes sense again.
My grandad worked for Heinz in the big 57 factory. When I was a student he used to get me loads of cans of food, all without labels, you had to just know the little codes stamped on top to know if it was sponge pudding or chicken soup. I don't think they stamp the codes in the metal any more.
It does mean this cap is practically impossible to clean, and provides a lot of surface area and crevices for mould to grow or plasticizers to leak from the packaging into the product.
All engineering is a tradeoff, and I would be interested to see how those factors were considered when doing the redesign.
Who is everyone? I prefer a glass jar with a spoon.
Even if the majority of people hate it, so what. They hate turning off lights and monitoring electricity usage and driving under the speed limit and wiping their ass.
Readit News
So now the relatively small amount of mass in the cap is just as recyclable as the bottle itself -- neither are actually going to be recycled.
There's nothing to see here but marketing. And a an interesting engineering puzzle solved, sure.
"How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled"
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful.
The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material.
The ideal solution is the bottle recycling machines (like Tomra) found in Northern Europe, that only accepts aluminium and plastic cans/bottles, which goes right back to making new cans/bottles. Well, the plastic bottle part is work in progress, but there are bottles made from 100% recycled materials now, and the key to that is to have a clean well-separated stream of recycled materials coming in.
Funny story: I saw a documentary from a local advanced recycling centre, where they mentioned that the bales of plastic that actually went to be reused in new products/bottles smelled really nice. Because a big portion of them was PP shampoo bottles.
In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously.
However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process.
Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself).
People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,
Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash.
Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump.
Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip your trash collection folks well, and they will make all kinds of stuff disappear) and they mentioned to me that because there is no demand for cardboard/metal recycling while they load it into two different trucks, they end up at the exact same dump.
This was confirmed not too much later when I went with my contractor to the dump to get rid of a ton of construction material, where I saw two dump trucks right next to each other, one filled with trash and one with recyclables.
So very little actually gets recycled in the United States. Most of it ends up in giant piles, buried...
Regulations that greatly limit the total number of packaging types may be of help here.
Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.
The ideal solution is surely that the waste management industry figures out how to deal efficiently with two streams of waste, one perishable and the other not.
Yep, its all our fault.
What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.
I think a multi-pronged approach that includes but is not limited to reduction will be necessary.
I wonder if even 1% of the charge is paid out to consumers
Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.
This is what the bargaining stage of grief looks like.
We - all of us - want to believe that life can continue on as it has if we just take the right special steps in our kitchen.
In fact, the rituals of modern consumers straining to be “sustainable” is reminiscent of a rain dance - and about as effective.
It’s just cost savings that can be greenwashed.
Like if a 100% plastic and a 1% plastic end up in a landfill or elsewhere the 1% coffee cup is just going to two orders of magnitude less damage than the pure plastic one, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good but OP does have a point about the oil lobby push but that is a separate but related issue.
You know what, you're right. Here, one second...
Ok, I scooted a half foot in the direction of the peak of Everest.
Man, it's exhausting living a life of adventure like I do. At this point, I wager I must be half Sherpa.
I expected to at least see photos of the cap and the one it's replacing.
I went to a university job fair in 2014 and Heinz had a booth there. I remember asking the recruiter what kind of positions they were recruiting for, and her only response was "We are looking for top talent. Are you top talent?" I was pretty thrown off by that, so pressed her with "Top talent in what? I know statistics and programming, do you need anyone who can do that?" Her only response was "well, do you think you're top talent?" I think I tried to ask a couple more times what they were actually looking for, but she just kept repeating the top talent line. I think I eventually said something like "I think I'm pretty good" before dropping off my résumé, grabbing a pickle-shaped lapel pin, and walking away.
Totally weird experience, and very different from the usual job fair recruiter. If it wasn't for the lapel pin that I still have, I wouldn't even be sure it was a real memory.
I sometimes wonder if my life would've been different if I had had the self-esteem and confidence to look her right in the eye and say "yes, I am top talent".
I also wonder if Heinz is actually hiring and retaining "top talent". When I look at their ketchup bottle design innovations over the years, I wonder if maybe they really are!
Has anyone here ever interviewed there or worked there? Are you in fact top talent? Were you surrounded by top talent? Is a packaged food company secretly where all the really smart people go for jobs? That article about the Unilever ice cream factory the other day makes me think there's more to it than meets the eye.
There's a false negative problem, as in all interviews: interviewing well is a different skill than engineering bottle caps. Still, confident, talented people who are on their toes and accustomed to pressure may respond convincingly. So will con artists and the self-deluding types like megalomaniacs, so there's also a false positive problem ...
The bottle is PET and is easily and commonly recycled, if it actually makes it to the recycling facility. About 30% of PET sold in the US actually gets recycled. It's the clear soda bottle plastic.
The cap was previously 99% PP and 1% Silicone and was not recyclable at all.
The cap is now 100% PP and therefore recyclable in theory, but in practice there are limited facilities that can recycle PP.
And if you can't even recycle it in Seattle...
I love the idea of recycling but I just don’t do it anymore when I realized my city’s single stream recycling was likely just ending up being shipped to Asia with fossil fuels and dumped in the ocean eventually and adding to the Pacific plastic gyre. Burying it in a landfill seems highly more optimal than that.
Anyone with a modicum of product and process exp. knows progress > perfection.
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We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be recycled is better or worse than a plastic container.
Even if they are not recycled, a glass jar is used for more than five years in an household, only by replacing the caps in the process. If we don't need the jars, we give them away to people who need them, adding more usable glass to sneakernet of jars.
Glass is finicky in some forms, and expensive to make it durable during production and transport, but rarely, if ever, ends up in a trash bin.
And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float
In 70s after an all night party I nearly got run over by one. The only moving vehicle in sight!
Was brilliant during lockdown because you could order food stuffs the night before 3 times a week as part of regular delivery.
What a really nice, fully reusable bottle with no waste at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd-neck_bottle?wprov=sfti1
I always loved dandelion & burdock.
https://www.sunderlandecho.com/heritage-and-retro/retro/sars...
Alas cost of living took hold and they stopped the service, so sadly off to the store for the milk now. They didn't even put up an option of 'we can't afford to keep this going, so how much would you pay extra for it'
I bet they would have been surprised what people would illogically pay to have their milk and eggs delivered...
Nothing compared to https://www.google.com/search?q=landfill+plastic&tbm=isch
In the beginning of 90s, when plastic packaging became popular, it was a huge change as we did not have to worry about many health issues ( food poisoning etc).
If soda drinkers cared about plastic consumption, they would switch to anything that has glass containers and spend more - or just cut the habit due to the waste generated. But that's not happening.
Sure, there can be political will to force Coke to switch to something else - bypassing the need for the customer to do anything - but that would result in higher prices which makes people mad. Good luck asking a politician to do something that will upset their constituents
[0] https://www.research-in-germany.org/idw-news/en_US/2023/10/2...
I wish I knew how it worked but her and her business partner don’t talk about it much. Probably for good reason. Pretty sure they take plastic off people hands and sell it to someone who uses it, paid to take it away and then paid again by a buyer.
If ethane (the feedstock for ethylene production) were not useful for plastics, it would just be left in the natural gas and burned with the methane.
Aside from the ketchup dispensing utility, you also escape tedious discussions about the best way to get ketchup out of a glass bottle. Do you tap the side? Shake the bottle? Angle it? Smack the bottom? Just sit there patiently? Warm it up? Stick a knife in it? You can be pretty sure that if you use any of these methods, someone is going to tell you about one of the others.
i store the ketchup bottle upside down and when i open it, it is immediately ready to pour and is mostly controllable
You make a good point and it can be interesting to know how many use of a bottle are required until it becomes more energy-efficient compared to disposable plastic, etc.
The shift to the all plastic packaging paradigm was made when companies found out that they could simply let the consumers deal with the packaging once the product was consumed instead of having to get it back from their hands and process it. Hence the modern plastic dystopia.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale-8-One
EDIT: The bottles for sale on the website are specifically "non-returnable", not sure if that implies no more returns, or only store-purchased bottles are returnable.
Most of my plastic waste is from prescriptions. OMG so wasteful. Wax paper bags would be just fine.
YMMV.
I don't get why people keep pretending plastic being widely used today is due to some conspiracy instead of it's just better at its main function, even without factoring in cost.
Compared to glass container, plastic ones are much lighter, harder to break, flexible, malleable, .. the list goes on.
In the 1980s, the use of glass containers was more out of necessity than preference. People didn't opt for heavy glass containers to be environmentally friendly; they simply lacked alternatives.
The appeal of single-use (plastic) containers lies in their convenience. Although they are undoubtedly more wasteful, their ease of use cannot be denied. People favor them for this convenience, with their wasteful nature being an unfortunate byproduct. If we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth, progress in environmentalism will never be done.
Yes but they also have the huge waste issue and society isn't doing enough to deal with it. The drawbacks are also huge, the cost just isn't an issue for the companies putting the plastic out into the world. It's more cost effective because we allow it to be, because we subsidise the oil industry, because we don't tax plastic waste highly enough etc etc.
Yes, they are much more convenient in multiple ways (ease of transportation due to weight, flexible and malleable to take any shape or form, etc.) but there's no pricing of the externalities, if plastics would cost as much needed to take care of their disposal in environmentally friendly ways this convenience would have a much higher cost, naturally diminishing its uses.
While the side-effects of using plastics are not priced into the material it won't ever be solved.
I prefer glass bottles to plastic ones and I always buy soda in glass bottles if they are available(and this means almost always since they are available in the supermarket close to my home).
I don't know how you read parents comment and concluded that they're talking about some conspiracy. They seem to genuinely ask a question that I'm sure they're not the only one thinking about.
> In 80's people use more glass containers because they didn't have choices, not because they love to carry heavy glass containers around to help the environment.
Again, don't think they said that people used glass containers back then to help the environment, just that for whatever reason they used those containers, it was less harmful to the environment. Not because that was the reason, that was just a side-effect of glass being the only choice. Then they ask the community what the reasons could be for everything being wrapped in plastic now.
As it reads right now, your comment doesn't seem to assume good faith of parent comment, but instead you're arguing against some position that isn't even talked about.
Even then, in the end I'd still end up buying it in plastic. The plastic squeeze bottles are just way more convenient. I'd probably be fine buying it in bulk and fill my own squeeze bottles to reduce plastic consumption, but buying smaller and radically more expensive glass bottles isn't really a winning choice in my book.
I can sometimes find fancy ketchup in glass bottles, but considering that I only buy ketchup once or twice a year, I just can't remember. The glass bottle available isn't the Mutti ketchup that I bought years ago, so I'm just buying Heinz.
That seems absurdly large to me.
64 gallons is 250 litres. We're four and we use about one 30 litres (8 gallons) bag for "rest" trash per week (everything not recyclable, including diapers which take a lot of space, so hopefully soon we can at least halve that trash volume) one 30 litres bag for recyclable plastic/metal every two weeks and maybe one 30 litres bag for compostable stuff (mostly just vegetable and fruit peels from cooking) every two weeks or so.
That's about 60 litres or 15 gallons per week for a normal-sized family. I can see some of my neighbours having somewhat larger bags, some with smaller bags, but I feel like we are mostly average for our area (in Belgium).
In fact, a quick search tells me that Belgians have produced on average 683 kg of trash per year in 2022, which comes to 13 kg per week per person and seems rather consistent with my numbers.
I live in a household with 3 adults generating trash, we don't even fill up a 190L bin every 2 weeks in between pickups, usually when I roll the bin to the street it will be about 1/3 to 2/3 filled. We have a compost bin about the same size which also gets about 1/3 to 2/3 filled every 2 weeks.
Apart from that our recycling bins (about 60L for the paper/plastic ones, 20L for glass and metal) gets filled in about 4-6 weeks which I then take to the recycling station.
In summary as 3 adults we generate in the absolute top end about 117 gallons of non-compostable trash a month (those are very rare instances), so about 30 gallons a week for 3 adults even when adding up all the recycling we do.
Easy - it's way cheaper.
That was surprising to me and, uh, no, they don't, unless you're considering building materials (i.e. rocks).
It's not easy to find numbers, but for milk in Germany, it appears to be around 10%, about the same as packaging. Milk should be worse than many other products because it's cheap and heavy, on the other hand it's rarely shipped over great distances. [1]
Another report [2] considers transportation costs relative to the value of the goods transported, which isn't exactly the same as "how much of the consumer price is transportation", but surely related, and has 2.7% for foodstuffs (and 55% for rocks).
I mean, I'm sure it varies widely for different kinds of consumables, but overall, transporting stuff is cheap. I think even in terms of CO2, which is certainly underrepresented in cost currently, production dominates transport for most goods in a grocery store, apart from produce shipped by air.
[1] https://www.agrarheute.com/tier/rind/78-cent-fuer-trinkmilch...
[2] https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/G/MKS-Wissenschaft... (Tabelle 8)
The local milkman of the 50s, did better with glass collecting and delivering milk. The national enterprise benefits, as you say, from weight reduction.
The common 2kg×6 PET bottles format is too heavy for glass bottles, so you end up paying more for heavier 1.5kgx6 bottles that are going to last you less.
Short term benefit and profit margin dominate the calculation of if life environments deserve to continue unpolluted or they deserve to be destroyed in the name of compound interest.
> The new cap's uniform composition of polypropylene (PP) simplifies recycling and ...
> Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States.
It's sad, but realistically almost all plastic one disposes of needs to go in the trash can rather than recycling.
You can't even rely on dedicated collection - https://abcnews.go.com/US/put-dozens-trackers-plastic-bags-r...
Almost all plastic packaging is collected, including wrappers and trays.
https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-plas... (in Danish)
Funny you phrase it like that, because that's exactly what the STEINERT UniSort does. Plastic waste is finely shredded, dumped onto a conveyor belt, imaged, then passed over air puff sorters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3QHa9oQshw
Is it worth it? Of course not. Far cheaper and easier just to burn it. But for EU nations that are really dedicated to recycling, it can be done.
(we're working to solve this problem though in the classic VC backed way - DM for more information!)
Here in germany some sort of plastic recycling actually works, because there is a deposit fee on all plastic bottles - you bring them back to the supermarket to get it back - and then there is one source of the same plastic, that does get used for new products.
There is obviously hope, just not enough incentive because it costs.
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Cost savings often benefit sustainability. You probably heard the "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order" thing. The "reduce" part also reduces costs.
Here it looks like there is one less part (the silicone ring), which I believe makes it cheaper to build, cuts on supplies (no more need for silicone), and improves recyclability, which is good for the image and maybe some regulations. I don't know how good it is at delivering ketchup, but if it is as good or better, then we all win. Granted, it is still disposable plastic, but I don't see why that design would be unsuitable for a reusable bottle.
Exactly the kind of R&D I like.
So do the shareholders. Less cost == more profit.
Maybe the same push is not present in the US, but creating a new cap for European market makes sense. Also using the better cap across the whole world to save costs makes sense again.
All engineering is a tradeoff, and I would be interested to see how those factors were considered when doing the redesign.
Isn't the whole reason Heinz ketchup is self stable is because it's too high in acidity for mold to even grow
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Here is an innovation Heinz can work on... go back to glass bottles.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/05/plastics-rec...
Even if the majority of people hate it, so what. They hate turning off lights and monitoring electricity usage and driving under the speed limit and wiping their ass.
Traditional clay (earthen) "bhar" cups are pretty awesome. Sanitary (kiln fired), no glazes, durable, water proof, single use, non-toxic, etc.
When you're done sipping your chai, just smash your bhar cup on the ground. It simply becomes earth again.
Surely we can come up with some spiffy new modern variations.
All it'd take is investment and policy.
--
For the eeyores:
Startups are now developing and deploying out carbon-free cement and carbon-free steel.
All it took was investment, cheap energy, and policy.
--
Aside: Since the early '90s, Howard Schultz (Starbucks) has promised us an eco-friendly coffee cup. Any day now, right? I'm so tired of waiting.