It's important to understand that the packaging industry, which we pay vast amounts of money to, floods the earth with never ending flow of single use plastic.
That industry WANTS us to keep thinking about and talking about recycling. Don't be sucked in - recycling is the distraction that they want you to think about.
Recycling is NOT the answer. The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic.
If you want to fix this problem, start laying the blame at the feet of the "garbage brands" - the companies and brands that buy the single use plastic. We need to start with the big, obvious targets like Coca Cola, and we need to associate their precious logo and trademarked red swirl with ruined beaches and reefs and oceans. That's when change will happen - when those big brands come to be tightly associated with garbage.
"Recycling is NOT the answer. The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic."
And the manufacturers/retailers need to stop claiming that they are only responding to "market demand" - in numerous decades of buying stuff, no-one has ever asked me what my packaging preferences are. There'll come a time when we can't recycle our way out of our own mess - what will be Big Pollutions smug solution be then?
I eat a lot of frozen vegetables. This is less wasteful than fresh, because I can buy them in bulk and store them for several months. With fresh vegetables I'd have to make two or three journeys a week. Additionally, a lot of fresh vegetables rot in the supply chain.
I demand my frozen vegetables are packaged in plastic bags. This is the standard packaging for good reason. There is no other material that combines the flexibility, lightness, and waterproofness of plastic. Plastic bags are not easily recyclable, but very little material is needed to make one. I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff to send a few grams of plastic to landfill (where the carbon stays out of the atmosphere), or burn it for energy recovery, to avoid spending far more fossil fuel on transport and wasted production.
Banning plastic packaging without thinking about the consequences will do more harm than good.
≥ I demand my frozen vegetables are packaged in plastic bags.
Paper boxes are perfectly suitable for frozen veg. They stack perfectly. Less flexible, I'll give you that. But a compostable box versus plastic seems like a win to me.
I suspect the reason manufacturers and grocers like plastic is that in a paper box, poor handling is dead obvious, because if the produce partially thaws in transit the box gets damp and is a telltale for poor temperature control.
If this caught on wouldn't the article be in 5 years "Just 10% of U.S. paper products are composted?" Is the problem really the material or is is the fact that it's single use.
I once had some frozen foods delivered to me in a paper/cardboard box. There was ice around the frozen food, and it had melted partially, and the water had made the bottom of the cardboard box soft and mushy. When I lifted the cardboard box, its bottom tore, and my frozen foods started poking out. A plastic-like bag would not have tore due to wetness/water, would have been be a lot thinner, lighter, and not required any dead trees to make. If it were biodegradable, there no major environmental concerns either.
Paper boxes are also single-use and meant to be recycled, aren't they? This subthread is about how recycling is not enough and how we need to switch to reusable packaging.
Instead of paper boxes, it would be nice if it became the norm to go into stores with our own containers to put our food in instead of using store-provided, single-use packaging. It's ok if they're plastic as long as they're intended and made to be used and reused for years.
I get my frozen vegetables in cardboard boxes and they keep fine. They definitely don't need to be in plastic. Plus they stack: extra bonus for a clean-looking freezer.
The bags being made by the process in the cited article are specifically designed to be quickly recycleable ... eliminating the 'worthwhile tradeoff' in the event of sensible, defendable policy.
Banning plastic would mean you'd need to buy more fresh vegetables, which would reduce the amount that's wasted now. It would also encourage you to plan your trips more efficiently (eg shop somewhere closer to home).
I feel like banning the sale of fresh vegetables would do a whole lot more to reduce waste.
Every grocery store talks about "shrink" in their Form 10K. They buy extra fruits, vegetables, and meat so that the consumer has a full shelf or display to select from. XX% of that goes unsold, gets processed into prepared food (chopped fruits/vegetables, etc.), and then what's unsold from that gets tossed or donated.
Farmer's Markets have shrink too -- and the lack of climate control means that spoilage happens on the order of days, rather than weeks.
>Banning plastic would mean you'd need to buy more fresh vegetables, which would reduce the amount that's wasted now.
It would not. If I (and frozen vegetable buyers in general) switch to buying fresh vegetables, the market will increase production of fresh vegetables to compensate.
Well, the market demand is driven more by what sells than by what people say if you ask them. And there's a reason for that: When you ask people how they'll behave, they'll give you an answer that reflects their aspirations as much as it does their actual behavior.
Possible scenario: People will tell you they prefer low-waste packaging when you ask them in a survey. But when they're at a store trying to pick out an item, they still end up perceiving the item in the small paper box as being lower quality than the one in the giant clear plastic clamshell whose contents are clearly visible. So, regardless of what they said they prefer, in reality they might still tend to go for the high-waste packaging.
I'm old enough to remember when breakfast cereal came in cardboard outer boxes with the product in a waxed paper bag inside, so the product was still visible. I don't believe that was recyclable (and back then we didn't do that anyway) but nowadays it could probably be burnt as fuel.
The worst packaging I ever saw was a chicken curry and rice meal in 2 compartments, each covered in non-recyclable clear film. In addition, the rice container was non-recyclable while the chicken container was (!) We now hear statements that black plastic containers are not always recyclable, so maybe I should have just thrown the whole lot in the garbage anyway...
With the recent improvements in China's waste management, and the concomitant crackdown on "recycling" imports, my local recycling services here in the midwest have advised people not to recycle such black plastic, regardless of the recycling number on the plastic.
In a way it's a shame, in a way it's an annoyance, but realistically it seems possible only a fraction of that black plastic was ever truly being recycled anyway.
This is true, this is why the government must be the answer here.
They can tax things to help with the cost of properly disposing of single-use plastic or they can outright ban them. This would make the market more realistic because the cost would include disposal of the items.
People, in general, are bad at long term thinking, and they aren't going to pour hours of research into what type of packaging they are going to use. People also think that their singular actions are not going to have that much effect on the bigger picture. While this may be true, everyone cannot think this way.
>They can tax things to help with the cost of properly disposing of single-use plastic or they can outright ban them. This would make the market more realistic because the cost would include disposal of the items.
That cost is, depending on the market, about $80/tonne. Pricing in the cost of disposal would add about 0.04 cents to the cost of a plastic bag and 0.24 cents to the price of a large bottle of soda.
Plastic is not a problem. It has never been a problem and it never will be a problem. Eliminating plastic packaging is at best a complete waste of time and at worst totally counter-productive.
Climate change is a catastrophe; we have already passed the point of no return, and can now only choose how severe that catastrophe will be.
Then one must ask why are we not responsibly getting rid of our plastic?
Why is there plastic in every corner of the planet[0]?
Why is there trash covered islands that humans don't live on and should be pristine[1]?
Maybe banning plastics is not the answer and responsible disposal is the correct answer, but there is currently a very large plastics problem that must be addressed.
They ask you every time you purchase something. If you don't like the plastic. Put your money where your interests are. Buy the glass bottle, ask for the paper bag. If you can't get it in that form, these things don't need to be purchased. "Market demand" is exactly how they are asking what preferences are.
Maybe go for the aluminum can instead. In the age of single-stream recycling, glass doesn't get recycled all that much more than plastic does. (Some sources suggest it gets recycled even less.) Worse, it tends to render other materials unrecyclable when it shatters and contaminates them with shards.
Also, the can weighs less, which means less pollution incidental to transportation.
While glass has recently stopped being recycled, and the transportation costs are concern, it's worth considering that glass is the most naturally recyclable of the 3 materials;
I sometimes wonder if i should crush all of my glass bottle before tossing them in the trash; or to "recycle" them more quickly, drop them somewhere in deep water; though I suppose if it were near a continental shelf, it would be even better.
Interesting! Also I have always wondered why we don't recycle styrofoam. You can dissolve it in all sorts of solvents, filter it and then evaporate and reclaim the solvent.
Expanded polystyrene is, by design, a very lightweight and flimsy material. And the very fact that it's so flimsy, and also typically used in food containers, is why nobody wants to use it: it tends to be horribly contaminated with foreign material, and is difficult to effectively clean. I'm not sure there's much of a market for a post-consumer material that consists of a mix of polystyrene and uneaten cheese.
Well for one styrofoam is neither dense nor valueable so even if said solvent stew approach could work without cleaning and filtering economically (not a given) hauling a bunch of styrofoam wouldn't be all that efficient compared to even glass let alone aluminum.
Is glass a viable alternative? It costs a lot more energy to produce than single-use plastic. It can be reused, but that requires an infrastructure of collection and cleaning. It can (and is) be (being) infinitely recycled, but that costs a lot of energy as well.
Glass bottles can avoid the 'trash' stream with 'bottle bill' legislation. Most of europe does this, some even for PET and aluminium cans. Collection is essentially the same route as delivery to the cusomers, but in reverse: the customer brings it back to the shop. The bottling plants eventually bring in their output. It's more economically all around than re-flowing the glass bottles. I know that Belgian brewers lean heavily on reused green and brown bottles. In this case, it helps that there are a few near-universal beer bottle types, but perhaps that's more a result of the reuse.
Some music festivals use '10 empty plastic cups = 1 free drink' to reduce the amount of single-use plastic trash laying around. It's simple economics.
Aluminium cans are some of the best items to be recycled, as recycling one takes only 5% of the energy needed for creating one anew. This should be reflected as a higher deposit of course, to get high return rates. I think Finland achieves nowadays over 95% return rate for aluminium cans.
I like glass, but seems like the market has spoken on that one. We used to recycle (reuse, really) glass soda bottles back in the 70s and 80s. The bottles get ugly after a while, so people prefer fresh new ones. Today we still struggle to get above 50% recycling on glass, though it has been increasing over time.
Might be better to switch to aluminum. The recycling system appears more advanced.
In the US we may have spoken but the situation has also changed, so perhaps it is time to speak again? The market may not have realized the implications and externalities of switching to plastic for say all beverages.
I for one would welcome a switch back to reusable soda and beer bottles that were collected. (see Oregon bottle deposits)
> At least 90% of today’s food cans have replaced linings that previously contained the controversial chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. This is in reaction to market demands for more options in food safety.
> Food can linings now are typically made from acrylic and polyester. And all new materials are extensively tested and are cleared by regulatory agencies before being sold in the market. Linings are necessary to prevent the can from corroding, provide a barrier to bacteria and maintain food quality.
Available research has left us with a reasonable idea of the bounds on BPA toxicity, and seems to indicate that, in the amounts you get from modern cans, the effect, while non-zero, is probably quite small, possibly to the point of being negligible in the grand scheme of things.
For example, the bacteria and yeast that ferment food also tend to produce all sorts of known carcinogens and toxins. I'd personally expect the fermentation by-products present in my sauerkraut to have a much bigger effect on my health than the BPA that's used to line the can it's packaged in. That seems to be borne out in the science, too, insofar as the health risks associated with eating pickles are readily observable in humans at normal consumption levels, but it seems to take obscenely large megadoses of BPA to make a lab rat sick.
Available research has also left us with a reasonable idea of the health impact of air pollution, including from diesel truck exhaust. And I would guess that the health impact from the extra air pollution produced in shipping heavier glass containers instead of lighter aluminum ones is greater than that of the BPA dose you'd get from cans' linings.
BPA is an Endocrine/hormone disruptor, these are not harmful due to toxicity. They do not follow a simple dose-responce as in, say, carcinogens. Some studies even show a higher effect at lower doses of BPA for instance.
Giving up altogether on a product you need just because it's packaged in a way you don't agree with is not a workable solution. Choosing between otherwise similar products is viable, though.
Anecdata: I rarely counter Coca Cola bottles on the few times during August when I clean a small section of beach here in Portugal. What does occur in large quantities are the plastic stems of cotton buds (which I think are banned in the USA) and liquid yogurt bottles. So Nestlé would be a better target - at least in Europe.
Also eat less fish - the seas will be healthier and there will be a lot fewer nets, ropes, hooks and floats washing up and fewer birds tangled up in them too.
I've spent time beach cleaning in the Mediterranean and fishing nets are absolutely the worst. Those blue thing plastic threads that disintegrate and get everywhere: the beaches are bleached with it.
Counterargument: Aluminum is crazy recyclable. I don't see people talking about single use aluminum (maybe I'm just not in those conversations). Plastic is great for a whole bunch of applications, and making it easily recyclable / recoverable seems like a big win.
How would you prefer Coca Cola get their product to you? I suppose don't drink Coke or anything else you need to ship in a bottle at volume to prevent pollution when people throw things in the ocean.
In general, I think we will find more success in pragmatic alternatives that make sense in the market (which could obviously include applying the cost of externalities like pollution on companies that use single-use plastics) so a recycling option that allows for more efficient re-use to reduce the overall volume created seems like it would only help the cause?
The article said that this new research makes plastic recycling like aluminum recycling in that it can separate impurities. I don't see any reason why recycled plastic wouldn't be at least price competitive with virgin plastic if this technology works at scale.
Simple solution: make producers take back the waste as a condition for selling.
External cost now internalised.
In fact, new companies that are environmentally friendly (refills, product last years, etc) would be on a competitive level with former extremely cheap single use disposable companies.
Downside? Increased consumer costs and decreased shareholder value.
Once a government adopts this or plans to adopt this, expect to see massive and intense lobbying by packaging/consumable industry. In Australia, Coca Cola spent a lot to fight container deposit schemes which I think is a bandaid solution. The above solution could work with anything, not just plastics.
Coca Cola and Pepsi don't strike me as obvious targets -- most folks can switch to buying aluminum cans (or, in some markets, glass bottles) that contain literally the same drink and definitely are a net profit to recycle.
In my opinion, the place where we need to lay blame for single-use plastic are people who eat take-out food, and people who go to a restaurant and ask for a take-home box to avoid wasting food. Wasted food that goes to compost or landfill is benign. But go to any small or medium sized business that serves food, and you will see stacks and stacks of single use plastic containers. Go to stores that market to small business owners (Costco, Smart & Final) and you'll see dozens of pallets of single-use plastic trays, plates, cups, all for the buying. The sheer scale of single-use food packaging is mind-boggling. The movement against plastic straws at fast-casual and upscale restaurants is fine, but those restaurants usually have reusable glass or metal cups, and we need a real solution for restaurants that serve "regular people".
The actual, physical food waste may be more benign than plastic, but the supply chain that produced it in the first place is not. All the cattle feed and greenhouse gases required to deliver a burger to someone's plate are a problem, but I would argue that it's a bigger problem to use all those same resources to deliver that burger to a landfill. Food taken home as leftovers can easily take the place of another resource-demanding meal.
You aren't wrong about all the waste produced by that process, but I think the better answer is to make portions smaller, not to throw away food as if food waste isn't also a huge problem.
>Wasted food that goes to compost or landfill is benign.
No, no, a thousand times no.
Farming is massively carbon-intensive. That handful of leftovers might have resulted in hundreds of grams of CO2 emissions during its production, processing and distribution. Plastic just sits there in landfill, or maybe chokes a sea turtle if someone tosses it in a watercourse. Atmospheric CO2 is causing the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; ocean acidification will likely make the sea turtle extinct within a century.
Using a few grams of plastic to avoid hundreds of grams of CO2 is a huge win.
"The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic"
What's the question? Because I can tell you right now that plunging us back into a world of expensive commodities won't be accepted by most consumers. Not in the developed world, and not in developing nations.
It may surprise you that reusable glass bottles are the norm rather than the exception in some developing countries. I lived in Rwanda for a while and every soda and beer bottle is reused glass. (and it is indeed great and no burden at all)
There are many things that could easily switch to being packaged in paper/cardboard, and reusable glass containers with a deposit fee for quite a few others.
>Recycling is NOT the answer. The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic.
Yes. And I have a silly question to ask. For plastic bags, why cant we make them only last one year and it will start to decompose itself. Making it an issue for Supply Chain management rather than recycling. I specifically use bags here because I am not too sure if the same could be possible for plastic bottles, you don't want your bottles to have 1% chance of self decompose before you drink it.
The problem is, people are lazy, we want convenience. That is why sometimes I still use plastic bags.
I really wish people would stop coming up with ideas on how to throw things into the environment and "make it good".
Reuse, not decompose, because it's still shit you're dumping into the environment.
Do you really want unlimited paper bags in the ocean, dissolved so they are not visible and therefore not creating outrage but still fucking the environment?
Bio-degradability can not be under-rated. The big problem with plastic is that it degrades extremely slowly, practically speaking it is not bio-degradable.
You clearly care about the environment, so do understand that plain paper is as biodegradable as tree leaves. Little bugs of all sizes happily eat it like leaves. It will never accumulate in the oceans.
There are problems with how it can be produced, but it can be one of the most ecologically advantageous and sustainable materials possible.
Totally Agree, it's a pretty sad state when we're looking for magic tech solutions that can be heavily mitigated by simple behavior changes like bringing water, bringing bags and coffee mugs.
When i visited Germany you bought a bag if you didn't have one and it seemed everyone had them. In the US grocery chains knock a nickel off your total for all the bags you don't use. I don't think saving 20-40 cents is a huge motivator for people. If all grocery chains charged $1 per bag used, behavior may change.
Ideally we should try to motivate people into proper behavior and make it part of the cultural expectation.
It's important to remember the order of operations are listed in order of importance.
1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle
Sometimes i forget mine too, we're human but i reuse those when i can and stick them in my car, backpack etc.
Why would any paper bag need to be dumped in the ocean? Are U.S. plastic bags and single use takeout containers ending up in the ocean in significant quantities? If so, what municipality is dumping them in and why aren't we stopping them?
We have plenty of space (absent NIMBY zoning issues) and the capability to build ever safer landfills.
The average American dumps 16.5 tonnes of CO2 into the environment every year. Sixteen and a half tonnes. That's the same mass as seven Ford F150s. Three adult elephants. 265 adult humans.
I don't care about paper bags in the ocean. I don't care about plastic bags in the ocean. Neither has the capacity to seriously affect the functioning of marine ecosystems on any reasonable timescale. If we don't seriously reduce our carbon emissions now, most marine ecosystems will collapse due to acidification and deoxygenation.
Plastic is a useful material that is frequently the least energy-intensive (and by extension carbon-intensive) option, but that's largely besides the point. It simply doesn't matter. If you think it does matter, you have grossly under-estimated the effects of climate change. Our house is on fire and we're too busy arguing about the mess on the lawn to put it out.
There are no factual points that can be countered here, but it needs to be pointed out that recycling is very much a big part of "the answer". This is very much an area of research and there are lots of data to support this.
While we certainly should try to minimize unnecessary packaging, whatever we use should absolutely be recycled as raw material whenever possible. Recycling plastics is difficult because it is such a wide term, but if comparable countries recycle five times as much then surely improvement is possible. Hate on plastic bottles all you want but when 90% is recycled, at comparably low cost, it's not clear what the alternatives are.
The obvious alternative to single use (recyclable) packaging is re-filling containers. That's what everyone did half a century ago. But the food supply chain is rather wasteful as it is and sealed packaging was revolution when it came. Producing food for humans has huge energy costs by the use of fertilizers and diesel. It might seem counter intuitive but burning plastic containers is always better than burning wasted food.
I am sick from looking at what my family tosses out each week--plastic packaging on top of plastic packaging. It's crazy how nasty packaging is in the US. Worse, producers have been putting less and less actual product in the package which just make more trash in the end. It's just cheap and lazy and we shouldn't allow them to get away with it.
No you're right, we should go back to not having cheap, affordable packaging the world over. That way people in developed nations can go back to paying through the nose for shipping products, thus making products cost more, thus lowering the affordability of those products for the middle and working class.
And as for the developing nations who have been increasing their middle class with affordable packaging and plastic products? Eh, screw 'em, right?
/sarcasm
I'm only using this to illustrate how you went right into the "industry bad, four legs good" mantra of the pro-green movement without regard to an alternative that would keep or raise the quality of living for people the world over.
Fact of the matter is if it weren't for plastics, the everyday products that we all consume would either cost way more, or be so expensive that quite a few of us would never get to use them.
Stew on that before you jump to "ban all plastics".
> Fact of the matter is if it weren't for plastics, the everyday products that we all consume would either cost way more, or be so expensive that quite a few of us would never get to use them.
That's fine. When the choice is not having some luxury items vs total biosphere collapse, I'll side with the former. I guess you'd rather keep sipping your Diet Coke while the world burns.
As soon as you made it a personal, moral issue, you lost the argument entirely. If the goal is to get everyone to adopt good habits for the environment, you're going to have to address price and convenience.
"I wish they would have addressed the price and convenience issues and not made it such a question of morality", I say, as I eat a handful of dirt and survey the barren lifeless landscape around me.
I've been drinking almost exclusively tap water the better part of my life. I suppose my luxury is drinkable tap water. So let's aim for that for everyone instead.
Food doesn’t always need to be wrapped in plastics. For example I’ve seen bananas wrapped in clear plastic bags. Why is that when bananas come with their own “wrappers”?
And I simply don't believe that it's not possible to create a highly standardised, reusable washable container system.
These sorts of objections are what the packaging industry will scream till it's lungs fall out because the packaging industries profits and maybe existence depends on spewing out infinite garbage.
That industry needs to say things like "well you're hurting the third world if you stop us spewing infinite garbage".
> No you're right, we should go back to not having cheap, affordable packaging the world over
We really should. Plastic packaging is only cheap because the environmental cost is externalised. And reused glass / cardboard is not even that much more expensive. Long-term to medium-term plastic packaging is going to be a lot more costly.
I agree, how is it anti-capitalist to make things cost what they cost?
The disposal of things should be built into the purchase price. Currently, the tax payers shoulder the majority of this burden
Cardboard, paper, bamboo, corn starch... the list of sustainable, biodegradable materials goes on and on. It's only cheap laziness that makes you believe the choice is either we have single-use plastic for everything or we give up affordable products.
People are working on this problem already, and you'd better believe a lot more would happen if government took appropriate steps to tax and/or ban rubbish plastics.
The article fails to describe whether this plastic behaves like polyethylene, which can be pliable and flexible, or polypropylene, which is rigid and brittle.
Or any of the other dozens of varieties of plastics, each with their own specific use in this modern world of ours.
Every time I overhear someone at a party or gathering giving their half-baked description of a story like this I have to roll my eyes. There's no "cure-all" sustainable green plastic that can replace the variety we make from natural gas. There just isn't. And even if we were to switch to bioplastics derived from plants, it would still be too energy-intestive to be cost-effective.
Too expensive? How expensive is it?
If a package cost an extra couple dollars to send we could make do.
A big part of tackling all of these environmental issues is that certain things are going to be more expensive. If it cost 10$ to make certain a disposable water bottle makes it to the right place a bottle of water should cost about 11$. Same with packaging, this will of course change consumer habits, and make people think twice.
You have to consider the economies of scale. A few dollars multiplied over millions of manufacturing orders and shipping costs.
And that's just cost. The reason I'm stressing about virgin plastic over recycled is also in consideration of the electricity you use to recycle, the water costs, transportation costs, human labor, ect.
The same applies to glass and cardboard. That sand isn't coming from thin air. The cardboard wasn't made from hopes and dreams. These are physical commodities which are either as finite as natural gas (sand) or require space, water and nutrients to grow (trees for paper for cardboard). Yes, paper is biodegradable and plastic is not, but you're spending a LOT of time and energy to make something that could be better served quickly via plastic.
You also have to consider the cost of disposal, which isn't currently done when creating plastics. Is it eventually going to have to be paid for by the taxpayers of some countries?
By making cheap, quick plastic we are creating a very expensive problem. Might it be better to deal with this problem on the front end?
The new plastic appears to be a vitrimer, which is a class of thermoset, so not well suited as a replacement for the types of polymer plastics that tend to junk up the environment (thermosets, because of their durability, tend to have very long useable lifetimes -- I have milk crates I use for storage that are older than me!)
With the exception of metal and glass, recycling is largely a myth. Most paper and plastic that is “recycled” gets dumped in a landfill or sent overseas where it gets dumped in a landfill: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil.... It’s getting worse now that China has stopped accepting US “recycling.”
The meal kit industry is particularly insidious for that reason. They invoke environmental concerns heavily in their advertising, but those individually plastic wrapped ingredients obliterate whatever incremental environmental benefits there are from organic ingredients or substituting meat for vegetables.
As a European temporarily living in the US I am truly shocked by the amount of plastic used in packaging here.
Moreover, the number of plastic bags that it's used in supermarkets is also shocking.
Where I come from (Italy) we banned plastic bags 2 years ago in favour of compostable bags with no problems.
Instead of creating a different kind of plastic, I think that we should really enforce at least a global ban on light plastic bags.
The other thing that is very obvious as an European currently living in the US is the insane amount of plastic associated with food. Hotel breakfast will be (even in relatively upscale hotels) on single-use styrofoam plates, with single-use plastic cutlery, plastic lined single-use "paper" cups and composed of tons of individually plastic packed items.
Food in the cafeteria (I have seen the well hated name Aramak in a few places there) is served in single-use take-out containers, even if you explicitly tell them it is "for here" not "to go", because the cafeteria works have no (clean) plates at their stations. Cutlery is also plastic, since they removed the silverware a few weeks ago after too many complaints that it had been poorly cleaned. The disk washers are now busy taking out mountains of trash, instead of cleaning reusable items.
Once dinner time comes around most of my colleagues eat take out, that is put in plastic lined paper in the best case and styrofoam in the typical case. And even if it is a single item, it will be in a plastic bag or two, along with a large handful of napkins, ten tiny sachets of bbq and hot sauce and three straws, even if no single drink is included.
To add on to this: The plastic bags in the supermarket are also typically too flimsy to be used as garbage bags, which was my standard way of using them when we still had plastic bags in Europe. Instead they are already full of holes by the time I get home and all I can do is throw them straight into the trash and by extra plastic bags just to take out the garbage.
Eh as someone who lived in the UK for a number of years I didn't notice much of a difference than the US.
But sorry, I won't detract from the token US bashing that must go on in every single thread on the entire internet as if these types of issues are uniquely american.
I wish there was data out there on how much plastic actually gets recycled. It seems like no one can actually tell us. I'm suspecting more and more that recycling of plastic is nearly completely a scam.
"""The next big question is whether manufacturers will use it and recycling plants will accept it. Because the new plastic’s byproducts are more valuable—and because recycling plants likely wouldn’t need a total overhaul to process it, this sustainable plastic could one day shift the global economics of plastic recycling."""
One question is what is the price to create this new plastic, sure the output "recyclable" is more valuable because it's more broken down - so the process of decomposition towards usable components is improved.
"One question is what is the price to create this new plastic"
You actually hit the nail on the head better than I did. Virgin resin is cheaper than recycled plastic. Which means that manufacturers have an incentive to buy fresh plastic pellets over more-costly recycled material (which is usually of inferior quality anyway).
That's why lots of products you see will say "made from X% recycled parts". A bottle that's 100% recycled just sucks compared to a fresh one.
Not just price, but what are its other physical characteristics? how easily does it melt (will it melt if I leave it in my car during the day), is it rigid or flexible, etc.
There are thousands, maybe millions of different plastics in existance because they all fill a different niche, and price is just one variable in those equations.
Although I guess the point is to replace single use plastics, but that still represents a large variety of things.
The amount of people posting how "plant-based plastics" are the solution goes to show just how out-of-touch most of us are with being poor or stuck in an underdeveloped nation.
It's easy to spend more on "sustainable" alternatives to plastic when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with. But if you're a low-income working class family, commodities like single-use plastics are a godsend.
I'm not saying pollution is not an issue. I'm not saying the plastics industries don't have an agenda to make more plastic. What I'm saying is, you're all blind to the solutions that plastics provide to people who ARE NOT rich white Americans.
- It uses biodegradable materials to create burnable gas
- The has to run a generator
- The generator to power a plastic shredder
- The shredded plastic pieces are used by a 3D printer
- The 3D printer (also powered by generator) can print materials out of recycled plastics
I think the issue is probably more towards the inappropriate disposal of a lot of things... I wouldn't mind seeing plastics heated and compressed into larger composite cubes as part of the landfill process, and contrasting see paper shredded and burried in layers.
Right now, so much trash is being sent in unclosed containers all around increasing general and specifically ocean pollution. Microplastics are a problem and likely to become bigger over time. Not just the US, but a lot of places really need investment in trash infrastructure in general.
That doesn't even touch on electronic waste. I'd love to see a law requiring unlocking codes for mobile devices that have active security flaws that have been fixed for over a year, without the update released to the device. At least then you could get a longer tail life out of a lot more devices.
Isn't most plastic a byproduct of oil/gas use anyway? All the same, would love to see the disposable snack/beverage companies held more accountable to the litter and waste their packaging brings. The problem is that too many people don't care... and too many others are tired of hearing about it. Divisive conversations and politics doesn't help here.
When we discuss plastics developments, I believe we should focus on their decomposition properties, too, and whether they'll stay around forever as tiny particles now coined as 'microplastic' particles.
"Five Asian Countries Dump More Plastic Into Oceans Than Anyone Else Combined" [1] We should help these countries first to recycle and reduce their plastic usage if we want to make a real difference.
The main point I haven't mentally solved in my use of plastic is what to do with household trash. I live on the 30th floor of an apartment building in NYC and there's no other way to dispose of trash other than to throw it down the chute (though we do recycle what we can in separate bin).
Curious to hear what others think / be enlightened. Even if I move to the suburbs, to my knowledge waste management companies rely on you packaging your trash nicely in plastic bags, so I'm not sure what to do...
I'm in the same situation, one chute, no recycling except cardboard. At least we can both rest easy that none of our garbage is being dumped in the ocean.
I genuinely find it hard to determine whether I should buy some products with or without plastic packaging. Is it better to buy produce without plastic wrapping, even though that means a bigger portion of it went bad and needed to be thrown away? Should I buy some sauce in a glass instead of plastic bottle, even though it made the transport less efficient?
There are of course the obvious ones, like those flimsy bags for loose produce, and I try to avoid those. Any advice for the non-obvious cases though?
Make plastic easy to burn. We'll need storable fuels for use even in a zero CO2 economy, and piles of packaging and other combustible trash could serve that purpose.
That industry WANTS us to keep thinking about and talking about recycling. Don't be sucked in - recycling is the distraction that they want you to think about.
Recycling is NOT the answer. The answer is to stop making the endless flow of single use plastic.
If you want to fix this problem, start laying the blame at the feet of the "garbage brands" - the companies and brands that buy the single use plastic. We need to start with the big, obvious targets like Coca Cola, and we need to associate their precious logo and trademarked red swirl with ruined beaches and reefs and oceans. That's when change will happen - when those big brands come to be tightly associated with garbage.
And the manufacturers/retailers need to stop claiming that they are only responding to "market demand" - in numerous decades of buying stuff, no-one has ever asked me what my packaging preferences are. There'll come a time when we can't recycle our way out of our own mess - what will be Big Pollutions smug solution be then?
I demand my frozen vegetables are packaged in plastic bags. This is the standard packaging for good reason. There is no other material that combines the flexibility, lightness, and waterproofness of plastic. Plastic bags are not easily recyclable, but very little material is needed to make one. I think it's a worthwhile tradeoff to send a few grams of plastic to landfill (where the carbon stays out of the atmosphere), or burn it for energy recovery, to avoid spending far more fossil fuel on transport and wasted production.
Banning plastic packaging without thinking about the consequences will do more harm than good.
Paper boxes are perfectly suitable for frozen veg. They stack perfectly. Less flexible, I'll give you that. But a compostable box versus plastic seems like a win to me.
I suspect the reason manufacturers and grocers like plastic is that in a paper box, poor handling is dead obvious, because if the produce partially thaws in transit the box gets damp and is a telltale for poor temperature control.
Only if you coat the inside with plastic, thereby making the paper non-recyclable.
Instead of paper boxes, it would be nice if it became the norm to go into stores with our own containers to put our food in instead of using store-provided, single-use packaging. It's ok if they're plastic as long as they're intended and made to be used and reused for years.
1: https://earth911.com/food/frozen-food-box-recycling/
Every grocery store talks about "shrink" in their Form 10K. They buy extra fruits, vegetables, and meat so that the consumer has a full shelf or display to select from. XX% of that goes unsold, gets processed into prepared food (chopped fruits/vegetables, etc.), and then what's unsold from that gets tossed or donated.
Farmer's Markets have shrink too -- and the lack of climate control means that spoilage happens on the order of days, rather than weeks.
It would not. If I (and frozen vegetable buyers in general) switch to buying fresh vegetables, the market will increase production of fresh vegetables to compensate.
>shop somewhere closer to home
I already shop as close to home as possible.
Possible scenario: People will tell you they prefer low-waste packaging when you ask them in a survey. But when they're at a store trying to pick out an item, they still end up perceiving the item in the small paper box as being lower quality than the one in the giant clear plastic clamshell whose contents are clearly visible. So, regardless of what they said they prefer, in reality they might still tend to go for the high-waste packaging.
The worst packaging I ever saw was a chicken curry and rice meal in 2 compartments, each covered in non-recyclable clear film. In addition, the rice container was non-recyclable while the chicken container was (!) We now hear statements that black plastic containers are not always recyclable, so maybe I should have just thrown the whole lot in the garbage anyway...
In a way it's a shame, in a way it's an annoyance, but realistically it seems possible only a fraction of that black plastic was ever truly being recycled anyway.
People, in general, are bad at long term thinking, and they aren't going to pour hours of research into what type of packaging they are going to use. People also think that their singular actions are not going to have that much effect on the bigger picture. While this may be true, everyone cannot think this way.
That cost is, depending on the market, about $80/tonne. Pricing in the cost of disposal would add about 0.04 cents to the cost of a plastic bag and 0.24 cents to the price of a large bottle of soda.
Plastic is not a problem. It has never been a problem and it never will be a problem. Eliminating plastic packaging is at best a complete waste of time and at worst totally counter-productive.
Climate change is a catastrophe; we have already passed the point of no return, and can now only choose how severe that catastrophe will be.
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/studies/pdf/eucostwast...
https://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/2e935b...
Why is there plastic in every corner of the planet[0]?
Why is there trash covered islands that humans don't live on and should be pristine[1]?
Maybe banning plastics is not the answer and responsible disposal is the correct answer, but there is currently a very large plastics problem that must be addressed.
[0]https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-47947235
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2017/05/15/henderson-i...
You are right, but I suppose you mean "we", like in "we the people".
Maybe go for the aluminum can instead. In the age of single-stream recycling, glass doesn't get recycled all that much more than plastic does. (Some sources suggest it gets recycled even less.) Worse, it tends to render other materials unrecyclable when it shatters and contaminates them with shards.
Also, the can weighs less, which means less pollution incidental to transportation.
I sometimes wonder if i should crush all of my glass bottle before tossing them in the trash; or to "recycle" them more quickly, drop them somewhere in deep water; though I suppose if it were near a continental shelf, it would be even better.
Some music festivals use '10 empty plastic cups = 1 free drink' to reduce the amount of single-use plastic trash laying around. It's simple economics.
Aluminium cans are some of the best items to be recycled, as recycling one takes only 5% of the energy needed for creating one anew. This should be reflected as a higher deposit of course, to get high return rates. I think Finland achieves nowadays over 95% return rate for aluminium cans.
Might be better to switch to aluminum. The recycling system appears more advanced.
I for one would welcome a switch back to reusable soda and beer bottles that were collected. (see Oregon bottle deposits)
> At least 90% of today’s food cans have replaced linings that previously contained the controversial chemical bisphenol-A (BPA), according to the Can Manufacturers Institute. This is in reaction to market demands for more options in food safety.
> Food can linings now are typically made from acrylic and polyester. And all new materials are extensively tested and are cleared by regulatory agencies before being sold in the market. Linings are necessary to prevent the can from corroding, provide a barrier to bacteria and maintain food quality.
I admit I've not researched the topic much, and would love to learn that safer materials are used now.
Available research has left us with a reasonable idea of the bounds on BPA toxicity, and seems to indicate that, in the amounts you get from modern cans, the effect, while non-zero, is probably quite small, possibly to the point of being negligible in the grand scheme of things.
For example, the bacteria and yeast that ferment food also tend to produce all sorts of known carcinogens and toxins. I'd personally expect the fermentation by-products present in my sauerkraut to have a much bigger effect on my health than the BPA that's used to line the can it's packaged in. That seems to be borne out in the science, too, insofar as the health risks associated with eating pickles are readily observable in humans at normal consumption levels, but it seems to take obscenely large megadoses of BPA to make a lab rat sick.
Available research has also left us with a reasonable idea of the health impact of air pollution, including from diesel truck exhaust. And I would guess that the health impact from the extra air pollution produced in shipping heavier glass containers instead of lighter aluminum ones is greater than that of the BPA dose you'd get from cans' linings.
No. It's worse than plastic, even if the bottles are re-used rather than recycled.
http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Final%20Report%20Doo...
Also eat less fish - the seas will be healthier and there will be a lot fewer nets, ropes, hooks and floats washing up and fewer birds tangled up in them too.
I'm not one for sharing Facebook videos but if you want to see impact: https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1727552737379394
How would you prefer Coca Cola get their product to you? I suppose don't drink Coke or anything else you need to ship in a bottle at volume to prevent pollution when people throw things in the ocean.
In general, I think we will find more success in pragmatic alternatives that make sense in the market (which could obviously include applying the cost of externalities like pollution on companies that use single-use plastics) so a recycling option that allows for more efficient re-use to reduce the overall volume created seems like it would only help the cause?
- Extracting aluminum from ore is very expensive
- That makes recycled aluminum cheaper than fresh aluminum
- Aluminum is a metal, you can melt it down to burn off or separate any impurities
None is those is true of plastic.
External cost now internalised.
In fact, new companies that are environmentally friendly (refills, product last years, etc) would be on a competitive level with former extremely cheap single use disposable companies.
Downside? Increased consumer costs and decreased shareholder value.
Once a government adopts this or plans to adopt this, expect to see massive and intense lobbying by packaging/consumable industry. In Australia, Coca Cola spent a lot to fight container deposit schemes which I think is a bandaid solution. The above solution could work with anything, not just plastics.
In my opinion, the place where we need to lay blame for single-use plastic are people who eat take-out food, and people who go to a restaurant and ask for a take-home box to avoid wasting food. Wasted food that goes to compost or landfill is benign. But go to any small or medium sized business that serves food, and you will see stacks and stacks of single use plastic containers. Go to stores that market to small business owners (Costco, Smart & Final) and you'll see dozens of pallets of single-use plastic trays, plates, cups, all for the buying. The sheer scale of single-use food packaging is mind-boggling. The movement against plastic straws at fast-casual and upscale restaurants is fine, but those restaurants usually have reusable glass or metal cups, and we need a real solution for restaurants that serve "regular people".
You aren't wrong about all the waste produced by that process, but I think the better answer is to make portions smaller, not to throw away food as if food waste isn't also a huge problem.
No, no, a thousand times no.
Farming is massively carbon-intensive. That handful of leftovers might have resulted in hundreds of grams of CO2 emissions during its production, processing and distribution. Plastic just sits there in landfill, or maybe chokes a sea turtle if someone tosses it in a watercourse. Atmospheric CO2 is causing the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; ocean acidification will likely make the sea turtle extinct within a century.
Using a few grams of plastic to avoid hundreds of grams of CO2 is a huge win.
What's the question? Because I can tell you right now that plunging us back into a world of expensive commodities won't be accepted by most consumers. Not in the developed world, and not in developing nations.
This seemed the norm in East African in general.
Yes. And I have a silly question to ask. For plastic bags, why cant we make them only last one year and it will start to decompose itself. Making it an issue for Supply Chain management rather than recycling. I specifically use bags here because I am not too sure if the same could be possible for plastic bottles, you don't want your bottles to have 1% chance of self decompose before you drink it.
The problem is, people are lazy, we want convenience. That is why sometimes I still use plastic bags.
Reuse, not decompose, because it's still shit you're dumping into the environment.
Do you really want unlimited paper bags in the ocean, dissolved so they are not visible and therefore not creating outrage but still fucking the environment?
You clearly care about the environment, so do understand that plain paper is as biodegradable as tree leaves. Little bugs of all sizes happily eat it like leaves. It will never accumulate in the oceans.
There are problems with how it can be produced, but it can be one of the most ecologically advantageous and sustainable materials possible.
When i visited Germany you bought a bag if you didn't have one and it seemed everyone had them. In the US grocery chains knock a nickel off your total for all the bags you don't use. I don't think saving 20-40 cents is a huge motivator for people. If all grocery chains charged $1 per bag used, behavior may change.
Ideally we should try to motivate people into proper behavior and make it part of the cultural expectation.
It's important to remember the order of operations are listed in order of importance. 1. Reduce 2. Reuse 3. Recycle
Sometimes i forget mine too, we're human but i reuse those when i can and stick them in my car, backpack etc.
Re-usable carrier bags are worse for the environment under any realistic scenario.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
We have plenty of space (absent NIMBY zoning issues) and the capability to build ever safer landfills.
I don't care about paper bags in the ocean. I don't care about plastic bags in the ocean. Neither has the capacity to seriously affect the functioning of marine ecosystems on any reasonable timescale. If we don't seriously reduce our carbon emissions now, most marine ecosystems will collapse due to acidification and deoxygenation.
Plastic is a useful material that is frequently the least energy-intensive (and by extension carbon-intensive) option, but that's largely besides the point. It simply doesn't matter. If you think it does matter, you have grossly under-estimated the effects of climate change. Our house is on fire and we're too busy arguing about the mess on the lawn to put it out.
While we certainly should try to minimize unnecessary packaging, whatever we use should absolutely be recycled as raw material whenever possible. Recycling plastics is difficult because it is such a wide term, but if comparable countries recycle five times as much then surely improvement is possible. Hate on plastic bottles all you want but when 90% is recycled, at comparably low cost, it's not clear what the alternatives are.
The obvious alternative to single use (recyclable) packaging is re-filling containers. That's what everyone did half a century ago. But the food supply chain is rather wasteful as it is and sealed packaging was revolution when it came. Producing food for humans has huge energy costs by the use of fertilizers and diesel. It might seem counter intuitive but burning plastic containers is always better than burning wasted food.
And as for the developing nations who have been increasing their middle class with affordable packaging and plastic products? Eh, screw 'em, right?
/sarcasm
I'm only using this to illustrate how you went right into the "industry bad, four legs good" mantra of the pro-green movement without regard to an alternative that would keep or raise the quality of living for people the world over.
Fact of the matter is if it weren't for plastics, the everyday products that we all consume would either cost way more, or be so expensive that quite a few of us would never get to use them.
Stew on that before you jump to "ban all plastics".
That's fine. When the choice is not having some luxury items vs total biosphere collapse, I'll side with the former. I guess you'd rather keep sipping your Diet Coke while the world burns.
And I simply don't believe that it's not possible to create a highly standardised, reusable washable container system.
These sorts of objections are what the packaging industry will scream till it's lungs fall out because the packaging industries profits and maybe existence depends on spewing out infinite garbage.
That industry needs to say things like "well you're hurting the third world if you stop us spewing infinite garbage".
I don't believe it.
We really should. Plastic packaging is only cheap because the environmental cost is externalised. And reused glass / cardboard is not even that much more expensive. Long-term to medium-term plastic packaging is going to be a lot more costly.
Cardboard, paper, bamboo, corn starch... the list of sustainable, biodegradable materials goes on and on. It's only cheap laziness that makes you believe the choice is either we have single-use plastic for everything or we give up affordable products.
People are working on this problem already, and you'd better believe a lot more would happen if government took appropriate steps to tax and/or ban rubbish plastics.
The article fails to describe whether this plastic behaves like polyethylene, which can be pliable and flexible, or polypropylene, which is rigid and brittle.
Or any of the other dozens of varieties of plastics, each with their own specific use in this modern world of ours.
Every time I overhear someone at a party or gathering giving their half-baked description of a story like this I have to roll my eyes. There's no "cure-all" sustainable green plastic that can replace the variety we make from natural gas. There just isn't. And even if we were to switch to bioplastics derived from plants, it would still be too energy-intestive to be cost-effective.
A big part of tackling all of these environmental issues is that certain things are going to be more expensive. If it cost 10$ to make certain a disposable water bottle makes it to the right place a bottle of water should cost about 11$. Same with packaging, this will of course change consumer habits, and make people think twice.
And that's just cost. The reason I'm stressing about virgin plastic over recycled is also in consideration of the electricity you use to recycle, the water costs, transportation costs, human labor, ect.
The same applies to glass and cardboard. That sand isn't coming from thin air. The cardboard wasn't made from hopes and dreams. These are physical commodities which are either as finite as natural gas (sand) or require space, water and nutrients to grow (trees for paper for cardboard). Yes, paper is biodegradable and plastic is not, but you're spending a LOT of time and energy to make something that could be better served quickly via plastic.
[0] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/03/great-pacific-ga...
The meal kit industry is particularly insidious for that reason. They invoke environmental concerns heavily in their advertising, but those individually plastic wrapped ingredients obliterate whatever incremental environmental benefits there are from organic ingredients or substituting meat for vegetables.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/india-plastic-wast...
EDIT: spelling
Food in the cafeteria (I have seen the well hated name Aramak in a few places there) is served in single-use take-out containers, even if you explicitly tell them it is "for here" not "to go", because the cafeteria works have no (clean) plates at their stations. Cutlery is also plastic, since they removed the silverware a few weeks ago after too many complaints that it had been poorly cleaned. The disk washers are now busy taking out mountains of trash, instead of cleaning reusable items.
Once dinner time comes around most of my colleagues eat take out, that is put in plastic lined paper in the best case and styrofoam in the typical case. And even if it is a single item, it will be in a plastic bag or two, along with a large handful of napkins, ten tiny sachets of bbq and hot sauce and three straws, even if no single drink is included.
Today I looked in the fridge at work and saw precooked hardboiled eggs in a plastic bag.
- Sad American
But sorry, I won't detract from the token US bashing that must go on in every single thread on the entire internet as if these types of issues are uniquely american.
One question is what is the price to create this new plastic, sure the output "recyclable" is more valuable because it's more broken down - so the process of decomposition towards usable components is improved.
You actually hit the nail on the head better than I did. Virgin resin is cheaper than recycled plastic. Which means that manufacturers have an incentive to buy fresh plastic pellets over more-costly recycled material (which is usually of inferior quality anyway).
That's why lots of products you see will say "made from X% recycled parts". A bottle that's 100% recycled just sucks compared to a fresh one.
(edited for punctuation)
There are thousands, maybe millions of different plastics in existance because they all fill a different niche, and price is just one variable in those equations.
Although I guess the point is to replace single use plastics, but that still represents a large variety of things.
It's easy to spend more on "sustainable" alternatives to plastic when you have more disposable income than you know what to do with. But if you're a low-income working class family, commodities like single-use plastics are a godsend.
I'm not saying pollution is not an issue. I'm not saying the plastics industries don't have an agenda to make more plastic. What I'm saying is, you're all blind to the solutions that plastics provide to people who ARE NOT rich white Americans.
This open source project is interesting: http://www.metabolizer.org/
- It uses biodegradable materials to create burnable gas - The has to run a generator - The generator to power a plastic shredder - The shredded plastic pieces are used by a 3D printer - The 3D printer (also powered by generator) can print materials out of recycled plastics
Right now, so much trash is being sent in unclosed containers all around increasing general and specifically ocean pollution. Microplastics are a problem and likely to become bigger over time. Not just the US, but a lot of places really need investment in trash infrastructure in general.
That doesn't even touch on electronic waste. I'd love to see a law requiring unlocking codes for mobile devices that have active security flaws that have been fixed for over a year, without the update released to the device. At least then you could get a longer tail life out of a lot more devices.
Isn't most plastic a byproduct of oil/gas use anyway? All the same, would love to see the disposable snack/beverage companies held more accountable to the litter and waste their packaging brings. The problem is that too many people don't care... and too many others are tired of hearing about it. Divisive conversations and politics doesn't help here.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/hannahleung/2018/04/21/five-asi...
Curious to hear what others think / be enlightened. Even if I move to the suburbs, to my knowledge waste management companies rely on you packaging your trash nicely in plastic bags, so I'm not sure what to do...
There are of course the obvious ones, like those flimsy bags for loose produce, and I try to avoid those. Any advice for the non-obvious cases though?