Why not ban manufacturing certain plastics that end up in consumers' hands?
Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
411–420 of 460 posts
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#412I'm always impressed with how Japan handles recycling, despite being a heavy plastic user and producer. Last figure I read was 70% of all plastic recycled.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#413Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is such a big part of it and it's amazing that they get away with it. Case in point: Blue Apron. Blue Apron positioned itself as one of the more "recycle-friendly" food delivery services to try and fight the stigma against every delivery having bags upon bags of individually wrapped goods by providing recycling services. As a former Blue Apron customer, I loved that I could separate stuff out (hard plastic, soft…
It is amazing how often humans continue to essentially create new problems that are easily solvable on their own. A culture of convenience and throw-away (not my problem) or "I don't have the time for x" is why we keep having mountains of waste. Anyone who is concerned with waste can make the conscious choices to eliminate or reduce that waste in a lot of areas of their life. 1. Buy real food and cook it 2. Grow food…
> Buy real food and cook it
> Bring your own containers/bags
I eat out once a fortnight for dinner and once a week for lunch, and cook the rest of the time. The vast majority of what I buy is fresh food (fruit, vegetables, some small amounts of dairy, meat and pulses). Everything I buy is packaged in single use plastics. My lunch today, the tomatoes came in a cardboard box that was wrapped in plastic, the cucumber was shrink wrapped, the pitta breads came individually wrapped. There are two supermarkets I can choose from and both of them suffer the same problem. All the meat comes in disposable trays with a film covering, and a plastic inlet. Technically the tray is recyclable if I remove the meat and the inside tray and wash it, but my recycling services won't accept it in case it's contaminated by food.
My plastic toothpaste container comes in a cardboard box. My biodegradable bin liners come with a plastic wrapper to protect them.
This isn't something that I can fix, I don't have the option to buy unpackaged goods, or to provide my own containers.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#414It's quite typical that when somethung in the political realm fails, our instinctive diagnosis is moral.
House prices rise? Its either corporate greed or NIMBYism. People got addicted to medicines? Pharmaceutical companies are cynical. Welfare system is full of mess? You just can't trust poor ___ people. King lost a war? Someone hasn't been pious enough.
Pollution? Ecological degradation? Extinctions? No one cares any more. In the past, we lived in harmony with nature. We took no more than we needed. We had morals.
Bollocks. Morality is just the easy answer. These are practical problems, not moral ones. What we need is more competence, not more righteousness.
Anyway, I find this striking:
"91 percent of potentially recyclable plastic in the U.S. ended up in landfills – or worse, in the oceans. (79% in Europe)"
There is a massive difference between landfill and ocean. There is a massive difference between landfill 1 and landfill 2. Recycling has been idealised as some sort of moral goal. Garbage has been vilified as a moral failing. The practical impacts on the environment have a lot more to do with how much garbage makes it to landfill, and what they do with it there.
Give me 0% recycling and 0% stray garbage and I think we'd have a big net win.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#415Perhaps we should start doing something like what Taiwan did with their trash: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/separation-anxiety/ > The trucks only accept trash bags officially sanctioned by the government of Taiwan which come in a distinctive blue color, complete with an official seal. The bags range in price and size, from 3 liters to 120 liters. The most popular bag is 25 liters (similar to a tiny bathroom…
Targets the wrong place. It may reduce contamination of recycling streams, but does nothing to encourage less production. Perhaps a combination approach: $5 for a pack of small bin liners, or return your waste to the shop for free. If Tesco were filled with piles of consumer waste given back to them I posit the problem would be on the way to being solved within weeks.
Less production means less growth - means less future revenue - which means less chance of paying off all those loans predicated on consumption growth patterns.
Also - consumption isn’t all bad. There’s many poor people who can’t afford much, and we very much are promising a better life where they can consume goods and lead healthy lives (goods such as medicine, clean water and chocolate as much as Coca Cola in a plastic bottle)
And also - if people were charged for old school packaging, costs would go up. People wouldn’t buy as much and this would start a new round of economic troubles.
At its price point, I suspect that plastic is so cheap, that even with all the pollution and waste being collected, it’s still ends up with positive utility.
There’s a report on carry bags which shows reusable cloth bags have significantly higher environmental impact because of the cost of production costs, water use and eventual decay into some carbon gas like Methane.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#416One of the ways to solve this issue is to incentive or give rewards to customers who give back their plastic waste. In Germany and Scandinavia, its been in place for years.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#417Earlier quoted context omitted.
From what I was told, the food remains on salad or sandwitch container will be destroyed in the process of dealing with separated trash. Theoretically, you dont have to care about it much. However, it can smell pretty quickly and bugs like it, so if you plan to collect plastic for multiple days especially if it is hot, then you clean it up.
Wow, Clean up trash before we throw it? We're throwing away our time is all we're doing. Looks like no one here values time. Sorting into 13 bins, etc. We need govt to get out of the way so someone can figure this out and make money (their incentive to figure it out). Govt's not going to figure this out for us. It has no incentive to.
I just wrote that you don't have to do it, provided you take it out often enough or don't mind smell.
Useless outrage.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#418Earlier quoted context omitted.
> it's orchestrated by people who wanted it to work that way This is exactly what I'm talking about. Capitalism is basically a force of nature, like evolution. Claiming anyone can orchestrate it is analogous to intelligent design. I do agree that we all, and leaders more than most, bear responsibility to improve the system. But don't overestimate the capacity of any one person. If it were that easy to control complex…
I would replace "orchestrate" with "influence". It's obvious it can be influenced negatively, to make the situation worse in context of this discussion -- otherwise the concept of bearing responsibility to influence it positively, which you acknowledge, would make no sense. As for "force of nature", that just sounds like what someone living under monarchy might say about monarchy, etc. Yes, trading things is very old…
I agree with most of what you said. I'm not saying capitalism is a mysterious force we can't understand or control, just that it has emergent behavior that is more powerful than any individual directive that can be handed down. Look for another post further down describing this very well.
Monarchy is based on social hierarchy, which is literally a force of nature. So there's that.
It's easy for you to not steal, and that's great. Just remember to credit your parents who raised you, a healthy environment of anyone that you grew up in, and the fortune not to be catastrophically impoverished at a young age. I'm not saying your environment could inside you to steal now (I don't know you), but I assure you, a childhood where you were raised in a lawless gang would not have gifted you the same set of moral values.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#419How is plastic waste ending up in landfills even a problem? If we don’t have the technology to efficiently recycle plastic waste now, we will in 50 years. Future landfill miners will praise us for our foresight. I’m having a hard time understanding the concern given the bigger environmental problems out there. Habitat loss, pollution, and climate change are less visible but more pressing problems.
Re: Plastic recycling is a problem consumers can't solve
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's nonsense. I have formal culinary training and Blue Apron was never about needing to learn how to read a recipe and cook with "a paint by numbers erector set". It was almost exclusively about the convenience and ease of recycling what was sent. You're projecting.
No,i agree with parent. What is so damn hard about picking a recipe and then ordering produce/goods from your local grocery accordingly? It seems wasteful to use a service like that purely for convenience.
It's much less wasteful to have many meals made up at once than for everyone to invent ad hoc meals. Also you just get enough of each ingredient for the meal instead of having to buy whatever unit size the grocery store feels like selling.