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That's a narrow perspective - the root case is the broader expectations about packaging, from both producers and consumers. Lots of food comes wrapped in single-use plastic, too. It's one way to keep food shelf-stable. We need alternative packaging (or package re-use), since can't stop buying food.
I would argue most of what you are referring to as "food" is not and should not be considered food for humans though.
It makes me wonder if we were ever really recycling, or if "recycling" was a marketing buzzword for "cheaply dumping your trash in China". I seem to remember a lot of controversy over recycling in the 80s and early 90s, with my local town government insisting it was too expensive. Suddenly everything changed in the late 90s, right around the time that globalization took off, and recycle bins took off everywhere. By t…
1. Waste management companies charge less for recycling to incentivize separating trash and because it was profitable to sell.
2. Single-Stream recycling programs still require consumer separation of non-recyclable trash from potentially recyclable material.
It's all about capital investment. It is expensive to develop and buy machines that specialize in sorting massive amounts of trash at a high throughput. Globalization allowed us to export that to places where labor was cheap enough that real humans would actually sift through the stuff.
The thought process is: why make the investment in specialized machines when there's human labor cheap enough to do it by hand, land cheap enough to store it in perpetuity, or environment regs lax enough to openly burn it and all that’s preventing these alternatives is government regulation?
In places where there’s strong faith in government like Europe you see many companies investing the R&D dollars in these machines. They also have strict packaging requirements that limit the number of inputs that these machines can expect to handle.
Here, the EPA and Dept of Interior can change hands every four years to people wholly uninterested in preserving our commons for the next generation. This administration is selling off pieces of National Parks for oil exploration, to name just one of many examples. It’s no wonder no one wants to actually put dollars towards green R&D.
Recycling was always a lipstick on a pig. Inefficient, subsidized, hypocrisy. Wanna help the environment? Reduce consumption overall.
1. Reduce.
2. Reuse.
3. Recycle.
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As a counterpoint, single use packaging is a godsend to people with food allergies.
Out of curiosity, what's wrong with single use paper packaging or some other non-plastic alternative to the same effect?
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And have a vegan/vegetarian diet.
Sarah Taber explained the complexity of this aspect of dietary environmentalism better than I ever could in this thread on Twitter: https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/100636377572388864... tl;dr: the effectiveness of vegetarian diets is dependent on local conditions. Vegetarianism in a globalized world relies on fossil-fuel-based transport or farming techniques.
I'm kind of skeptical about the benefits of recycling certain materials that are so cheap that the operational costs of recycling are much greater than the value saved. This seems to be happening in the article where people are increasingly subsidizing unprofitable recycling programs. As far as I know, it's not an environmental disaster to just dump aluminum, glass, and plastic in a landfill, and it seems cheaper to just produce more of those products from their original materials than to recycle the used materials. Maybe we should take a step back and ask ourselves whether it's worth our time to recycle certain materials.
It's hard to make a case that it was all just trash when somebody was paying for it.