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.
Unfortunately your kind of argument is what often comes up in ecological debates. I am not denying the impact of microplastics but raising the point that it is a complicated equation. Banning plastics is just a silly comment. What about tires, medical devices, plastic jugs to get water to people with no access to clean water. It is an easy argument to make if you might be in a place of privilege and you can hand wave most of those problems away. My posistion is that yes microplastics pose a possible issue on a go forward basis, I don't know the totality and I believe that humans are still better off than we were before plastics.
Banning micro-plastic sources from consumer purposes isn't so silly if it contributes to dementia and other neurological issues long term.
They're finding they stuff embedded in utero lining; your argument strikes me as the same old rebuttal to the things we can't political agree to study. You can't deny there is a lot of business momentum to keep plastics in production, no? And yet the more we learn the more checkmarks in the minus column for petro-chemicals accumulate.
Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it.
We most definitely need to fully study the impacts of plastics on the human body. We don’t know the full extent of what it’s doing and it’s important we figure it out.
It’s a complicated equation that we do not fully understand. It’s easy to say just ban it but there is are a lot of other negative consequences that will come out of that decision. That’s my point, none of us know the exact outcome either way so it’s silly and all too easy to just make proclamations like yours and then sprinkle in some dementia with it. I am certain you can pull out a study that has a link between the two but I suspect we still don’t know the true origins of dementia and we do not know the full impacts of plastics on human health.
I bet you don’t even know the source of microplastics fully. I sure don’t. For all I know it is from car tires that makes it into the water ways and we eventually drink it or consume meat that has drunk it.
We don’t know the equation enough to know what concerns we should weight heavier on a global/population scale.
> Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it.
Politics is the struggle to gain, retain, and use power. The use of plastics creates a huge amount of wealth and power for many, by definition anything that could affect this is political.
But we should keep producing more year on year until it's studied properly?
Studied by whom? Petrochemical companies have studies on their stuff back for decades. They'd never endanger the public to improve their bottom line. Plastics are fine, dontchaknow?
I think this has taken too much of an emotional turn instead of logical. You will not be able to get plastics banned until there is conclusive evidence that a significant portion of the population is dead from it. Ignoring corporations, I do not believe you can get any large enough portion of population to ban it or even limit it in any meaningful amount.
I personally am excited for the coming years and hopefully us having a better idea how we can use plastic more efficiently. In the near term we should be able to get a better idea of major contributors to microplastics and maybe be able to reduce those.
I'm not talking about just banning plastics (it should be banned involving anything food related IMO) but actually taxing these materials as the hazardous materials they surely are.
Why would you ever expect a bottling plant to move away from plastic when there is no incentive? Why would anyone move to better materials or continue researching when there are cheaper alternatives that aren't rightfully taxed against their externalities?
Why are we as a society, one which has banned lead from gasoline (resulting in lower crime rates across the world) or banning CFCs to repair the ozone layer, feel so helpless trying to hold these corporations accountable for not polluting our world around us today?
I don't think I generally agree with a plastic tax but lets imagine there was one. I am honestly not even sure how you would set the price, my whole point is the externalities are hard to measure. I also suspect the cost of the implementation will be on the shoulders of the consumer. We can hand wave it away and say we can create more rules to prevent it but at the end of the day that is most likely what will happen.
There's no reason the tax needs to directly reflect the environmental impact. We figure out an amount that is enough to change corporate behavior without bankrupting them, maybe with some kind of sliding scale to put more responsibility on larger businesses who would otherwise benefit from regulatory capture, throw in some exceptions for the aforementioned medical devices, etc. "Pricing the externalities in" is a nice political justification but in reality this kind of thing happens because we've already decided that plastics are significantly worse than the alternative and we want to incentivize change.
Regarding consumers shouldering the cost - well, yeah, regulation drives prices up; even my liberal self agrees that that's broadly true. Those same consumers will be shouldering the cost of an environment permeated by toxic microplastics, which we are increasingly being driven to believe will be a greater impact than that of more expensive consumer goods.
and when they jack up prices, we use the tax revenue to subsidize the poor so only the well off pay that assholery, we can do this for carbon in all forms.
For someone so skeptical, why buy the 'cost increases will be passed on to the consumer' BS? Clearly that's not true.
First, price increases depend on elasticity. I'm guessing that ketchup demand is pretty elastic; it's not diabetes medication or higher education.
Also, we can assume Heinz, being sophisticated, has already priced it for the highest possible marginal return; there's not necessarily room for increasing the price without reducing return (by driving down sales).
We're seriously going to say that a substance that was very recently introduced to human society is as risky as food poisoning? How often do the commoners have to suffer through businesses ill-attempt to save money while poisoning us?
Leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, asbestos, pet food laced with poisons and filler, baby food laced with heavy metals, opioids, cigarettes, campaigns about seat belts being unsafe, round up, fracking that poisons the ground water, etc.
Excuse me if I doubt the corporations, that continue to poison the the world around us unless literally forced by nation states not to, are being honest when they safe "oh it's not harmful" and not the reality of the situation. Wanting to save a buck, repercussions be damned.
Why are you saying "clearly" as if it's 100% guaranteed? We have no idea the repercussions of introducing a new substance that has literally infiltrated all organic life on earth. This is completely new territory and acting like it's all "solved science" is extremely disingenuous.
you don't actually know that. if, imagine, the increase in dementia or cancer or any major illness is increased at all by microplastics, and we will find this out before long, and it will indict Big Plastic and Big Oil, we will learn it's killed far more of us that you whoring for Big Oil and Big Plastic suggests.
These subthreads from my comments are absolutely bonkers, people are willing to give companies that routinely lie to us again and again sometimes lying for literal generations to us!
and people STILL give them the benefit of the doubt.
People willing to allow others to poison us so they can earn money.
Fair point, but I don’t store very much of my food in a tire and I rarely, if ever put food in a shirt before I microwave it.
In the other hand, I probably have about a pound of Tupperware in my body. I guess my point is that you’re right about micro plastics in the environment, but I’m more concerned about the ones in me.
I don’t know the exact sources and that’s what we should be studying. For all we know it’s tires to roadways to rain runoff that makes it into ground water or bodies of water that we eventually treat for drinking.
That’s a fair point reusable containers are a great candidate for replacement with glass. You are right overall though we definitely seem to be polluting our environment with plastics that will never go away.
Use the same rule for tupperware that you apply to shirts! I store and buy food in plastic containers often, but I always move it onto a ceramic dish before I microwave it.
I don’t believe anyone has defended anything of that sort. Simply pointing out what are more bigger issue but we also don’t know how to solve those issues yet.
You along with others have no issue saying plastic is evil, we should ban it, we should tax it, but have done no critical thinking on how to make that actually work.
> Should plastic containers shedding millions of nano particles be considered sanitary?
It's not really on the scale of sanitariness. It's a pollutant and a problem. You can even say it's not worth the tradeoff. But no, plastics are not unsanitary because they can produce microsplastics.
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.
It's well-known the total environmental impact is much less for plastic than glass. Just the weight alone should allow you to understand this [0] [1] [2].
Glass is not recyclable widely. It is a contaminant in single-stream recycling because broken glass is a hazard for sorting, and even if you are able to recycle it, the transport costs are extremely high [3].
I don't think anyone is completely ignoring it. I think it is an extermely complicated equation. Factoring in PFAS and microplastics gets even more difficult. I don't have research in front of me but it would be interesting to look at regions like Japan that have very tight loops on plastics. How many microplastics get out in the wild. The other problem there is the microplastics from tires, huge issue since those could get in the drinking water eventually. Its a difficult problem.
That works in some parts of the world but I still don't believe the total environmental cost is as easy to calculate even in your scenario. The total cradle-to-grave environmental cost of a product has many variables and its not always as clear. Those variables can also have different weightings depending on the user (maybe microplastics is a greater concern that total environmental cost).
In the past, even when accounting for recycling of the glass, plastic bottles for example had a lower environmental impact that glass.
edit: And I enjoy using glass myself, especially for items I am storing longer term but I also try to think about the total environmental cost of the item. I know in the US people often do things that feel good, like buying reusable shopping bags instead of plastic bags given my the store. The problem is the number of times that reusable bags needs to be used to be better for the environment is often many more times than they often get used.
What's the definition of environmental impact you're working with?
I think microplastic pollution is horrible. It's arguably worth putting extra carbon in the atmosphere to avoid plastic pollution. I'm not actually sure.
Up until most recent history the equation has been something about net energy cost or co2 cost. There is indeed a new variable which is microplastics. Something that needs to be researched more. For all we know that ketchup bottle has little to no impact on your health but it’s plastics further upstream in processing or the farm itself.
There's a practical concern there which is really relevant with little ones running around: glass breaks easily. A plastic bottle or cup or whatever vessel can fall from a shelf or counter to the floor and be unharmed and not harm any people. Glass containers, not so much. It's only viable for sensible humans with good coordination, and a lot of fully-grown ones don't even have that!
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.
While I’m a big fan of being able to buy quantities in bulk, it’s worth remembering we did just go through a 3 year period that should illuminate why “every Tom, Dick and Harry brings their likely barely washed if not fully contaminated packaging from home and uses the community ladle to scoop out of the community bin into their bag” might not be the best default. At least with factory -> sanitized individual wrappings you can spend a lot of effort stopping contamination at specific points in the supply chain. Bulk -> consumer reused packaging is much much harder to prevent contamination.
> You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container.
yeah, that would be a great use of everyone's time. line up at the olive oil station, line up at the beer station, line up at the flour station, line up at the coffee station, line up at the ketchup station, ....
and then on top of that, add up the time and expense of everyone getting a different price based on how much their unique container holds.
I'd love if there were just dispensers for the soaps and juices and what not I buy. Just tap my credit card, press a button, and fill a big jug. I agree I probably wouldn't want everything sold as such but loads of staples where I am probably going to go through a lot of it all the time or are already going to have a short shelf life, sure.
And yeah, I actually do go with the "line up at the beer station and get bulk beer", a number of breweries around me have walk-up growler filling stations. It is pretty nice getting fresh beer straight from the source. A few groceries near me fill growlers as well.
I know this will blow your mind, but where I do my shopping (France) this exists in many places and there are no queues.
It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.
Perhaps you prefer the “old” way. Perhaps it is faster. But if we can not make tiny changes like that, how will we explain ourselves in 30 years time to our grandchildren?
“Yea I know sweety we messed up your planet. But I’ll be dead in 5 years and in the mean time it was really convenient. Sucks to be you”
> It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.
1 minute for each product, vs like 1 second for each product. I think it's a similar efficiency loss as containerized vs break bulk shipping.
We can't have nice things because we don't enforce any standard of conduct. Progressives are more concerned about git branch names than ensuring children actually learn something in school.
Many (most?) nicer grocery stores in the US already do bulk packaging for coffee, to no discernible detrimental effect.
Compared to narrow aisles and decision paralysis from 60 different plastic bottles with the same ingredients but different scents/dyes, I think any inefficiencies in bulk shopping are probably pretty small.
This might be a local thing for you. The only store around me that has bulk coffee is the very bougie food co-op. Even nice stores like whole foods, wegmans, trader joes don't have that.
Wegman's definitely has bulk food sections. The memorable part is the candy but there are other foods. I'm not sure if they have bulk coffee? Their name brand coffee bags have the roast date on them (vs. "best by" BS dates) so I zeroed in on that and didn't look back.
Also Stop'n'Shop, a very much NOT a bougie food store, has bulk coffee with a grinder. At least in some locations.
Possibly. I know for a fact that Whole Foods in NYC has bulk coffee, as well as bulk rice and other grains. It's also the norm in local mid-range chains (Westside Market, Fairway) and greenmarket-style stores.
They’re common, but A) generally make up a tiny portion of floor space (at least in the U.S., apart from rare specialty stores) and B) I would hazard a guess that they are less sanitary and even less fresh on average than comparable packaged foods.
You clearly have no idea about what you are talking about.
I've been buying bulk everything I can for a long time and I don't see any downside to it.
It's smarter in every single point:
- I buy what I need instead of what was decided by the packager.
- I don't buy a package to throw it away and buy a new one next time. What a waste of money on top of the environmental impact.
- It's way more efficient for shopping. When things are organised in bulk it's visually much easier to spot in comparison with packaged stuff with random designs in aisles.
- Never experience "queues at stations" so this is a non problem in my 2 decades experiences of shopping in bulk in various cities/countries
You know what’s actually a waste of my time? Cleaning out my fridge of all the food waste generated because I couldn’t actually buy just 1 carrot, I have to buy 3 pounds wrapped in plastic for some reason.
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.
Historically it was pure glass but modern retro recreations usually adds that plastic cap, pusher rod and a plastic wrapper for easier manufacturing as well as for corporate liabilities. Those aren't technically necessary.
I have not seen one that is pure glass. The oldest I have seen has a gasket. Every source I see indicates a rubber gasket was used in the first versions.
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.
I can attest. We had a milkman (daily), and a vegetable man, an egg man and a bread man who came around every week. Only the milkman had an electric vehicle.
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 growing up when milk delivery in glass bottles was replaced by milk delivery in plastic bags (in cardboard boxes). All that ultimately went away when milk was just another thing you bought at the grocery store. I imagine the supply chain got fast and good enough that milk wouldn't spoil before it could be consumed, going that route, so the extra cost of home delivery became difficult to justify.
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.
Paid for the service? I grew up in Scotland, milk and meat came from the farms every morning (90s), you'd put your order in the old milk bottle with the money and they'd leave whatever your order was. I seem to recall it was 50p for most type of milk and 75p for creams. (Except the BSE years.. shudder ugh the BSE years.)
[Edit] Do you think that the Aphex Twin song Milkman makes reference to this lack of milk delivery during this period?
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. . . . Spread to humans is believed to result in variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD). As of 2018, a total of 231 cases of vCJD had been reported globally.
BSE is thought to be due to an infection by a misfolded protein, known as a prion. Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal (MBM) that contained either the remains of cattle who spontaneously developed the disease or scrapie-infected sheep products. The outbreak increased throughout the United Kingdom due to the practice of feeding meat-and-bone meal to young calves of dairy cows.
I just looked into it a bit. Timeline makes a lot of sense, Milkman was released in 1996, right during the height of the precautions (some farm kids couldn't come to school, needed to get sprayed down with some chemicals when we went into the high school, every shop/library/etc had a bucket of alcohol you walked through. However, it seems James was living in London during that period, and I don't think the restrictions in the cities were are harsh as the country. Interesting theory tho, I like it. :)
I just had a look at this (I'd been meaning to for a while, I miss the milkman leaving milk and other bits from my childhood). The milk is literally 4x the price I would pay in the supermarket. It's a lovely idea, but in this economic climate, most people are more price-conscious than that...
There's often a few middle men with better websites but if you have a more direct option see if you can. The milk we get has a big creamy layer on the top, and tbh it's quite handy just getting a regular delivery of something we have commonly. We often add in some eggs.
It's more than the supermarket prices but those are insanely low for the product. I understand many feel the pinch more but if you can, skipping the supermarket can mean more to the actual producers.
Yes it is unfortunately... we used to use them as it supports a local farmer with a proper price for their milk and the delivery guy gets paid a fair amount but when prices shot up we went back to supermarket milk.
I'm all for making sure farmers get paid properly instead of ripped off by the supermarkets but when it comes down to it had to count the pennies at home first
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.
Recycling of plastic is only even possible for a really low percentage of the total produced, it's not a fungible thing since there are seven different grades and each one is incompatible with the other in terms of recycling. Some of those grades are not recyclable at all.
Currently we recycle 9% of plastics, sorting through the cheaper grades is non-trivial, we can't recycle our way out of this mess.
Burning plastic will just create more pollution, capturing outgassing from burning is also non-trivial.
We should instead use less plastic, the 3 Rs start with Reduce, then Re-use and only after that Recycle.
Thank you for remembering the other 2 Rs! I just had a conversation with someone last week where I brought up the two prior to Recycle, and they had completely forgotten.
Even the ubiquitous 3 Rs logo with arrows has now become shorthand for just recycle.
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
check to see what aluminum cans and even the cans of canned food are lined with... It doesnt look so good to me. Without that sealant, metal leeches into the product.
It's not Coke vs Pepsi and pricing competition (Coke costs more than it's competitors), it's using a useless manufacturered product and shipping water in a can instead of drinking from the tap and adding a scoop of sugar and spice of your want.
It is still a pricing competition. Sure Coke costs more, but they're also riding on their brand recognition to bump up their perceived value. No amount of brand loyalty would save them if they had to undergo the price jump that comes with a massive logistics change of switching off of plastic without a proven alternative.
It might cost a buck more per 6pack for Coke right now - but people aren't going to get it if it costs 2-3x more than Pepsi.
Not sure if that's true. Soda has tripled in the last few years mostly just due to corp greed and realizing people are very stuck (addicted?) to their preferred flavors. Pepsi and Coke are competitors but not substitutes.
I view recycling schemes for plastics as a way to make burning the stuff more convenient. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.
After fossil fuels are done, the reduced carbon in the waste stream (including plastics, but also cellulosic materials) will become more valuable as feedstock for various chemical processes. Garbage refining will be a thing. It will be an aggressive chemical endeavor, more akin to petroleum refining than to recycling.
That's not plausible, IMO. Plastic may become somewhat more expensive, but it doesn't require fossil fuels. Overall secular increase in societal wealth should overcome any transient increase in price.
In Germany we have reusable thick plastic bottles, and a deposit system that's attractive enough for people to bother bringing them back (or for homeless people to collect them). Not perfect but much better than single use plastic
Where I grew up the reason stated when they replaced glass with plastic was that the weight of the glass alone caused more pollution from transport than the plastic bottles that replaced them
It's not just about emissions, though. Single-use plastics literally just accumulate in landfills until the end of time, while glass is highly recyclable (and one of the few economically viable ones).
Where I live, everyone can buy bottled water in glass bottles. I think there are now glass bottles with Coca Cola, too, though I'm not certain (I don't drink soda).
The gist: similar to Big Tobacco, etc., internally with the plastics industry, there seems to have been a much greater degree of pessimism about the long-term economic viability of plastics recycling, but it was sold to the public anyway via ad campaigns and lobbying to forestall regulation or legislation limiting plastics as public sentiment was shifting towards a greater sense of environmental awareness.
I guess it might refer to the fact that 80% of the plastic produced ends up in landfills and it's not recycled, for different reasons, one of them is that recycling plastic is very expensive.
Also there are several different types of plastic that do not melt together, or do not melt at all, and can't be easily recycled or reused. It also degrades and becomes more toxic on every cycle and, unlike glass, health safety of recycled plastic cannot be guaranteed so to package food the only safe option is to make new plastic.
Is the 80% a number for the US? In northern Europe I assume that a small percentage is recycled and the rest is incinerated for electricity and heat -- landfill usage has restrictions in the EU.
Some countries like Sweden and Finland use incineration to such extent that they have a lack of domestic waste and have to import it [0].
While we might think that much of the world's plastic waste is recycled, only 9% is. Half of the world's plastic still goes straight to landfill. Another fifth is mismanaged – meaning it is not recycled, incinerated, or kept in sealed landfills – putting it at risk of being leaked into rivers, lakes, and the ocean.
I misworded my first sentence, I meant that 80% either goes to the landfill or it's not recycled, but apparently it's more like 70%.
It takes mere moments to google "how much plastic is actually recycled"
You would have to be naive to believe that executives in the petroleum and plastic industries are unaware of how little plastic is actually recycled rather than complicit.
There have been a few articles about that recently. However, you can notice it for yourself if you notice how many products claim to be "recyclable" but how few are recycled.
If recycling were widespread, you'd expect the vast majority of products to be made with recycled plastic.
I particularly "admire" compostable cardboard hot food containers, which are coated with PFA forever chemicals to keep the food oils off the cardboard.
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.
People used to (and still kind of do) worry about glass chipping... ironically we can see that and deal with it. Unlike micro-plastics. Human nature right?
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.
Last time I bought parchment paper, I settled on Costco/Kirkland brand, for that reason. I dimly recall it has a silicon-based coating for non-stick feature. Quick look at the box has no info.
I anticipate we'll learn that all this fancy new silicon is toxic as well.
FML.
I still think paper is preferable to plastic. IIRC, Amazon Rx is using paper now.
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 point is plastic is not only cheaper but also better (in term of functionality) and that's a problem we need solving to actually get ordinary people on the wagon. Reflecting their environment impact into cost with tax etc. is cool, but that's not enough.
Eating out and food delivery being 2x or even sometimes 10x more expensive than making food yourself never stop (some) people to do that anyway because of its convenience factor.
It also goes without saying that's its materially preferable in many cases. But for a business preferable generally comes down to profitable. The point I was driving at is that by withdrawing subsidies from these industries we can nudge the trade off point to a place that more often selects for environmental options.
> 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 actually expect consumer preference is or ever has been a primary factor. It's cheaper and more reliable to ship plastic bottles. Manufacturers will use them for those reasons and then we'll buy them because it's what is available. Or it's cheaper. Or we have a preference. But at that point, it hardly matters.
> 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.
There are already lots of sibling comments saying the heavy use of plastic is "forced on people" by companies, so yes it is talked about. And that's exactly what OP implied.
I'm not even saying this point is entirely false, just want to emphasize that people actually prefer convenient things regardless if it's forced on them or not.
> There are already lots of sibling comments saying the heavy use of plastic is "forced on people" by companies, so yes it is talked about. And that's exactly what OP implied.
Reply to those comments instead then? Instead of assuming bad faith like "OP implied". I cannot be the only one who doesn't think parent implied anything at all and instead just asked a question why the change happened from glass to plastic.
I already replied to this guy. I honestly think his concept of convenience is overrated. I know a lot of people who would rather drink from glass than plastic. Surprisingly this convenience has never reached the beer industry and you can always have beer available in glass. I can never find milk in glass bottles though and I can't see why, I'm literally forced to use tetrapak due to the lack of options.
I think that in a lot of cases plastic is a poor container and that's why I asked the question, for me it's not obvious the convenience of the plastic nor why plastic is the only available packaging material for almost everything.
Not every reply to a comment you make is a personal attack, and it would behoove you to recognize that. Sometimes people just want to enhance a discussion with relevant and topical information, and may even just be curious about your thoughts on related topics.
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.
(Fellow country man here!) That still sounds like a lot to be honest. According to the yearly stats we receive from our trash collector: in 2021 our family of 4 produced 27,50kg of non-recyclables. That's not per month or per person but for all of us for the whole year. Granted, no diapers anymore here; that takes quite some space (and weight, which is more important since we pay per kg).
We saw a significant drop after they started collecting plastics separately. We have a 120 litre bin that we put to the curb every two months or so. I don't quite understand what people are throwing out all the time that you can fill a large bin every week...
Its a 64 gallon bin but I'm not packing it in either, trash is bagged. I guess I should have figured that based on the reaction in the comments. I'm probably tossing in 2-4 13 gallon tall kitchen bags of trash into there a week and even that much is enough to have it fill up to the top of the lid. I can squeeze in two weeks of trash in there if I forget to put it out for pickup one week but no further.
Also family of four: we fill a 120l garbage bin per week, to the brim, and a 120l compost bin every two weeks (this one maybe is not full, but it stinks by that time) and a ton of "recyclables" (cardboard, paper, metals, plastics).
> Also family of four: we fill a 120l garbage bin per week
What goes into this since you already recycle bio, cardboard, plastics and metal? My "generic trash" is a 25 liter bag that I empty about once a month or so. Since most things go to the specific recycling containers, the generic waste is dominantly just napkins and tissues that shouldn't go to bio.
I don't have kids so no diapers or anything like that, but 120l weekly sounds still a lot after recycling.
We have a very small compost bin in the kitchen that is frequently (about once a day) emptied into a garbage can with lid in the garage, which is then infrequently dumped into a compost pile. The particular combination of materials going into the garage compost can (like coffee grounds, citrus peels) gives it a spicy rather than putrid odor when the lid is opened.
I tired to do a compost last year but I live near a stream and tons of small flying insects infested the compost bin. It would never get hot enough to compost, ants moved in after the flies left in the spring. My climate is hot during the summer but even compost started wouldn’t help.
I have lots of kitchen waste, grass waste, and plenty of brown organic matter I can add that’s around my yard. The bugs love it.
Sounds like too much water content and/or not enough air for aerobic bacteria to get to work. Tossing the pile with a pitchfork somewhat frequently should help it.
Unfortunately, compositing when you live with wildlife is a challenge. I don't bother because if the raccoons didn't get into it, the bears would, and both are annoyingly messy when they do. I even had a bear do structure damage to my garage when she broke in to get at the garbage one year.
I have a special compost barrel that was given to me. It has rollers and small holes. Raccoons and other animals are not able to get into it. Bears are not much of a concern.
I’ll try again with more dry leaves. Spring is close to starting in my area.
Cardboard strips, egg cartons, and (untreated) sawdust or animal bedding style wood shavings can make for some good dry material as well if your compost is in fact too wet. Good rule is to layer it while you are building the pile, then turn twice a week once it is going / ready to go.
Your local hardware store may also have some compost kickstarter liquids as well, which might be helpful if you want to get it going before too many flies or ants come out to infest the pile.
I also live near a stream. I don't notice lots of insects in the pile, but I'd only really worry about flies on meat, and I don't put meat scraps in the pile.
How large is your property? I can put the actual pile some distance away on a > 1 acre lot.
In the past, I composted cat litter (paper variety, not clay) in a compost pile, and that did cause serious odor problems. Don't do that.
We put our compost bag in the bottom compartment of the fridge. It doesn't smell or leak there and for especially smelly things, we first wrap them in a smaller compostable bag before putting that in the city-provided bag.
We nominally go through a garbage bin a week... but if you compact it down it isn't anywhere near full. It's just effectively impossible to compact as an end user without special appliances.
I think a lot of people make the mistake of looking at a quantity of trash and measuring it by apparent visual volume, but that's not a very useful measure. Mass is a lot closer to a useful number. Many things that visually appear enormous are in fact not that big a deal, many things that visually seem small actually represent a lot of resources.
Yeah I am using the visual volume measure here. Its probably 2-4 13 gallon kitchen bags of trash in there usually but that is enough to fill up the 64 gallon bin up to near the lid, sometimes push it up a little. Of course all the data in the literature out there is using weight as their metric, and I have no idea how much weight I am tossing, just a loosely packed volume of trash.
Interesting, I wonder how they process them and what they become after recycling. Here in Antwerp diapers are explicitly supposed to be put in the rest[0] though.
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.
I'm not compressing my trash or anything. I don't even push down the kitchen trash because the sooner I take it out to the main bin the less likely it starts to reek for whatever reason. Then of course I don't compress the 64 gallon roller bin because it gets collected weekly, but by visual measure I am filling it up to the lid with 2-4 of these 13 gallon bags a week. They are kind of a terrible shape to slot in efficiently into this sort of bin the city has provided. One bag falls down vertically where it narrows substantially then two more fall on top of that, and the bin is pretty much filled to the lid at that point without some force and tetris.
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.
It does with glass, and the cleaning solutions, and the water used during re-use.
I'm sure glass is far more environmentally sound, but to claim that glass production, glass cleaning(and the harsh chemicals and their production cost to the environment), and water for flushing afterwards are not relevant, would be wrong.
So every business off-loads some environmental impact to the tax payer.
My point? While your statement is true, it has nothing to do with how the business decision is made re: cost to the business. The metric used there is "what saves the business money".
The only way we get this hyper optimized bottle cap is with a dominant global ketchup superpower. They will save enormous amounts of money with this cap, because of the giant volume of sales that they do.
And as the cost of workforce increase, or in order to generate even more profit, using plastics enables industrial automation and removal of the delivery workforce.
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.
Ketchup should be in a jar rather than bottle really. You can't get the ketchup out of glass bottles. Or atleast 5yo me couldn't. And that was about the last time I had those.
Boxed wine comes in a plastic container. Beer goes off rather quickly without excellent storage, which is why cheap beer has settled on aluminum cans which preserve well while being cheaper and lighter than glass.
> which is why cheap beer has settled on aluminum cans
Where I come from beers come almost exclusively in glass bottles for the large ones (66cl), aluminum cans are only used for the small ones (33cl) but you can buy them in glass as well.
Many of the cheapest beers are imports, for example Bavaria, that you usually find in aluminum cans in Holland but in glass bottles in Italy.
I can't explain why, but for us some things must be bottled in glass or they aren't "good".
Tomatoes is another example: you can find cans of tomato pulp or peeled tomatoes, but not the sauce, it always comes in glass bottles (it exists of course, but it's a very weird choice to us).
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.
