281–290 of 362 posts
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In Mumbai, citizens seen to be carrying plastic bags are liable for fine of 5000 INR for first time offenders and up to 3 months prison time.
How do you enforce this? What if I just kept a year-old plastic bag around?
A tax seems the fair solution, if it costs X to dispose of a plastic bottle then tax X each bottle, use the money to dispose of the bottle, adjust X if costs change.
But such a tax gives no incentive for companies to change their packaging. The tax is paid by the customer who usually has few or no options. For example in the UK plastic one-litre milk pitcher bottles are ubiquitous. Even the few remaining door-to-door milkmen deliver them, instead of the old one-pint reusable glass bottles. I simply can't buy fresh milk in anything else and i have a recycling bin full of them. Rev…
A good example on how taxes help, is the extra cost you have to bear when you want plastic bags at checkout. Almost everyone I've seen at retailers bring their own bag. It also looks better.
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It needs to become fashionable to basically carry lots of reusable stuff with you. We “sort of” have this for coffee containers and shopping bags but it would be good if people could also always carry a metal fork, plate, cup, and even a reusable napkin at all times. It’s one of those things that would remain weird if only a few people did it but wouldn’t be weird if most people did. It would also require eating esta…
Why would that help? Let's take going to a salad bar or buffet. Many health rules say that only clean plates may be used. For example, from http://EzineArticles.com/1402314 : > There must be clean plates and other tableware at or adjacent to the buffet or salad bar and customers should be reminded, or notified if need be, that only clean tableware is to be used when returning to the buffet. Most restaurants are "set…
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>Instead, government could've imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away. Broadly speaking, that would be a te…
> the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. You're comparing the transportation costs of cucumbers to the production costs of plastic wrap, this conflated comparison seems disingenuous to me. It also needs to be qualified that whatever truth is in that statement only applies to cucumbers that went to the grocery store and weren…
Cucumbers are wrapped in plastic to enhance their shelf life and reduce waste due to spoilage. If the environmental impact of the plastic is lower than the environmental impact of the cucumbers that would be lost due to spoilage, then it is a net environmental benefit. I have provided references to support this argument in another comment in this thread.
I'm curious what water usage has to do with this? Water used to raise a cow gets to be used again, right?
Water loops around endlessly through the water cycle, but clean water is a limited resource. The run-off water from cattle feedlots, grazing pastures or the fields used to grow cattle feed cannot be readily recaptured in a usable form; this run-off water will have polluting effects on aquatic life due to contamination with nitrates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology)
>Are you claiming that every kg of beef production releases more CO2 than every kg of plastic production? How do you figure that?
Yes. I found the figures in published reports. Producing a kilogram of polyethylene packaging film results in about 2.7kg of CO2 emissions, from refining the oil through to disposal. Producing a kilogram of beef results in about 39kg of CO2 equivalent emissions from farm to plate, made up partly from direct energy inputs and partly from the methane and nitrous oxide produced by the cattle, which are significantly more potent warming gases than CO2.
http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-...
http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodolog...
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The "ban single-use plastic" hype train seems illogical to me. Having your city littered with garbage is a government services problem - they should provide convenient waste disposal receptacles, empty them frequently to be disposed of properly, and give citations to litterers. We should not be cheering this short-sighted law. I also don't understand why plastic in a landfill is all that bad. The fact that it is biod…
> With an eye toward AGW, how can paper packaging and burning refuse be seen as a responsible choice? Plastic takes oil and therefore carbon out of the depths of the Earth, until it eventually gets burnt, biodegrades or otherwise degrades and turns into CO2 contributing to global warming. Trees instead take CO2 from the atmosphere, turn it into solid cellulose that we make paper from, until the paper biodegrades or g…
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I do, and, apparently, coming from Amazon, "minimal and plastic-free" means that, if I order a single item, it will come in retail packaging (plastic tray to immobilize and cushion, inside a cardboard box that is at least 6 times the size of the product - hence the need for that plastic tray - inside shrinkwrap), and then that item will be placed inside another cardboard box that is at least 6 times the volume of the…
Tyvek is a high density polyetylene. In other words, exactly same plastic as the bag you want to replace with it :).
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>Instead, government could've imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away. Broadly speaking, that would be a te…
I see two problems with your argument. One - you are giving humans and plastic a lot of benefit of doubt. Time and again, it is demonstrated that human convenience trumps environmental concerns. So governments can have state-of-the-art recycling facilities but getting people to co-operate is an uphill challenge. Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production…
If you just burn the wrapper in your fireplace, it'll produce less than 6g of CO2. We're talking about the equivalent of half a teaspoon of gasoline. Growing and transporting a cucumber produces about 1kg of CO2. The wrapper is not the problem.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110...
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By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical. Humans don't dispose of things properly. That's a fact. Creating more plastic waste will create more plastic pollution. It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste. Again, producers don't plastic wrap cucumbers to save CO2. T…
>By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical. Not at all. Cucumbers have a relatively short shelf-life due to a high water content and a permeable skin, so wrapping them makes economic and environmental sense. Apples and citrus fruits don't need plastic packaging, but their shelf life is considerably enhanced by the application of a protective wax coating. Some products like lo…
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I've seen restaurants where they serve most of their food in plastic containers even for dine in customers. Most poke places for example always use a plastic bowl that patrons just throw away after they're done, along with plastic cutlery. Some restaurants serve water in cups with a plastic straw, which is also totally unnecessary.
Oh, I see... that's very unfortunate. The only kind of "restaurant" that does this shit over here is McDonalds (and similar US franchises) and it makes me shake my head. Do you know what's infuriating? They're now going all "green" in some spots. But instead of avoiding creating all the trash to begin with, they put it on you, providing four of five different cans for every type of trash, and patronizing signs on the…
> Chaudhary, a taxi driver, said he had started carrying a cloth bag and that his local mutton vendor had begun wrapping the meat in newspaper rather than plastic sheets. I am sure this is healthy.
The practice was common enough that it occurs in Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" (p14 in my copy), which was written in 1958. The line is "I had the Centerville Clarion but it's only fit for wrapping salami."