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Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

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Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#331

Post by ars »

bunderbunder wrote: post #290
ars wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CO2 would enter the food, and make it taste like a weird kind of seltzer. Is all the food air sealed?

CO2 doesn't really go into anything to any significant degree unless it's under pressure.

And yet it did when I had food cooled by dry ice. So what counts more, what actually happened, or the theory?

The reason is that if the item is cold (especially right above freezing) you don't need much pressure to get CO2 to dissolve.

The food was weird it was all tingly and fizzy on the tongue. Kind of like the flavor of flat seltzer.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#332

Post by st26 »

greedo wrote: post #317
dougmwne wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch A life cycle analysis might hypothetically conclude that landfills are a perfectly sustainable solution to plastic. Unfortunately a lot of this stuff makes it into the ocean instead where it will not biodegrade and will interfere with fisheries and ecosystems. Properly structured economic incentives and laws could solve this problem, as they have…

How much waste is making it from a landfill to the GPGP? I'd bet about 0% in the West. Studies have shown that most of the waste in the GPGP is from rivers in Asia. In my town, it'd be cheaper/better for the environment to landfill all the waste instead of sending it overseas to be "recycled." Our city recently prohibited placing cardboard in the trash. Something I would have thought is easily broken down...

Cardboard is one of the most valuable recyclables.

Additionally, landfills are expensive to build and run so some municipalities are pushing recycling, composting, etc as a cost saving measure. Less trash into landfill, the longer until we have to build a new one.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#333

Post by ak217 »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #288
dougmwne wrote: post #65

This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show meant to distract from the real source of the garbage, the manufacturers. Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or dis…

>"...the bill always comes due..." Yes. But it's __always__ the consumer that pays that bill. Increase in the cost of anything simply gets added to the price. Yes. You might get manufactures to change. But the consumer is still the one who pays.

The whole point of the concept of environmental externalities and the tragedy of the commons is that the bill comes due for all of us, or our future generations, because a select few consumers got to exploit the environment, courtesy of the manufacturers. The point of the discussion is that this is fundamentally unfair, and consumers should pay that bill.

Furthermore, the cost of the bill is often exaggerated. Yes, retooling the manufacturers' plants to avoid externalizing environmental costs is a large one-time investment that will be passed on to the consumers. But that must be done to stop destroying our environment, and after that initial investment is paid off, the running cost of producing the goods will in almost all cases come back down to what it currently is, so the consumer price will come back down too.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#334

Post by smallnamespace »

smolder wrote: post #243
darkerside wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so they can enrich themselves That's the only thing I take issue with here. Characterizing this as intentional misconduct muddies the waters. The line between cutting costs and benefiting from an increased share price is long and winding. Don't blame people; examine systems. Where most of the money goes is back to keeping costs low for consumers, the same ones that are conscientiously keeping the tap water off.

Just because you can't easily put the blame on individuals doesn't mean they're not responsible. Our "system" is great at "blame laundering" or obfuscating ethical implications of decisions through diffusion of responsibility and removal of context at different boundaries. But the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way. Leaders who don't act to change…

> the system itself is not a thing you can blame, as it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way

Strongly disagree with that assessment; viewing systems as solely the product of individual decisions is like viewing your brain solely as the product of the movement of individual atoms. You lose all predictive capability. If you do something immoral, is there some group of cells or atoms that I can directly 'assign blame' to?

A more nuanced and honest view would be to observe that certain structures predictably result in the some consequences, often regardless of the initial beliefs, desires, or moral righteousness of the individuals caught within them.

Sometimes the only way to change the outcome is to change the large-scale structure and incentives within the system. We can do that by changing laws, regulations, and also sometimes by naming and shaming certain individuals; but first we have to admit that systems do have 'a mind of their own'.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#335

Post by kardos »

I wonder how bad are the economics of going back to glass for product packaging, eg, like milk bottles. We still do it for beer so it mustn't be atrocious. Could we make inroads that way? I'm envisioning there'd be order 1-2 dozen standard bottle sizes to make recycling easy (cheap) to automate.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#336

Post by st26 »

chiefalchemist wrote: post #288
dougmwne wrote: post #65

This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show meant to distract from the real source of the garbage, the manufacturers. Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or dis…

>"...the bill always comes due..." Yes. But it's __always__ the consumer that pays that bill. Increase in the cost of anything simply gets added to the price. Yes. You might get manufactures to change. But the consumer is still the one who pays.

That's fine, but if the consumer pays the real cost up front, people will behave appropriately for whatever that cost is. By hiding the real cost, we distort the market and people make different choices.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#337

Post by ryan-allen »

newswriter99 wrote: post #240

Let's look at some actual numbers without the hype. "91% of potentially recyclable plastic ends up in landfills, or worse, in oceans." So right there, no ratio. How much goes into the landfill and how much into the ocean? Because lets face it: Landfill>Ocean For comparison, 8m tonnes of plastic ends up in the ocean annually according to the cited 2015 UCSB study: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/014985/ocean-plastic Tha…

My cynical take is that these kinds of articles are cooked up in major polluters PR departments. It's classic misdirection, and we seem to fall for it every time.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#338

Post by _bxg1 »

dougmwne wrote: post #65

This is a classic externality problem. We can berate consumers all day long to be more diligent in their recycling, but all that finger wagging is for show meant to distract from the real source of the garbage, the manufacturers. Just like the classic "blame the user" mentality, the users were given an impossibly complex system with barely any incentive to get it right. Nothing about the interface is intuitive or dis…

This kind of thing is the biggest case for government regulation. There are just some things that capitalism alone will never incentivize.

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#339

Post by FuckOffNeemo »

state_less wrote: post #117
pwenzel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My college room mates and I were still doing this with Miller High Life bottles as late as 2003-2004. If you collected a dozen cases you'd have enough returnables for a free case of beer!

Similar for the plastic beer pitchers at UW-Madison's terrace. You'd pay like a $1 deposit on the pitcher, if you bring the pitcher back, you get the dollar. Drunk kids or the indifferent would leave their plastic pitcher and some enterprising person would come by pick it up and return it for cash. There is a lake nearby, so it's important these didn't make it in the lake. The deposit system seemed to be pretty effec…

A festival in Brisbane, Australia had exactly the same approach.

The festival was Parklife and I think it was back in 2012?

$1 price increase on all cups, bottles and food containers. If you brought the item back (it didn't have to be yours!), you got a $1 back per item. It started off as coupons so you could purchase other goods with the coupon but at the end of the festival you could cash them in.

Never in my life have I gone to a one-dayer EDM festival and went home with significantly more money than I started with.

The economics of the choice being, the festival didn't need to pay for cleaners on significant overtime rates. And we're incentivised because I made a fucking profit from an EDM festival!

For the life of me I can't find an article on the event.

Needless to say after some choice after market vitamins, I was motivated to clean the venue during artists I wasn't too interested in. I was also incentivised since the festival was held in my cities Botanical Gardens which are around the corner from my office.

At the end of the festival, not a scrap of rubbish could be found.

It wasn't an absolute success though. Some people started fishing rubbish out of bins to get their own coin back towards the end...

Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve

#340

Post by WalterBright »

victorhooi wrote: post #327
WalterBright wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately, people have built-in biological CO2 detectors. If it is just flight crew (no passengers), they all have oxygen masks they can use if the CO2 suffuses the cabin.

Umm, surely you can see that's a little crazy? I'm all for environmental awareness - but it's a bit like the people saying, oh, why do you not use re-usable containers for everything, or do you really need to dishwash everything? Things like food safety, and not making your customers sick are enshrined in law - and that's a good thing. Even at my work, they aren't allowed to re-serve/re-heat things that have been ser…

I don't see what your reply has to do with my comment.
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