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Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

bbc.co.uk

41–50 of 401 posts

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#41

The Stax chips packaging is almost a 100% reusable plastic bottle, and I think they taste better than Pringle's, so I buy Stax occasionally. If the plastic lid was screw-on, it would be ideal for a relief tube when flying, but it's just press-fit.

The article alludes to removing the plastic components altogether if possible in place of the plastic, so yes, the Stax container is easier to recycle, but still not ideal.

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#42

The thing is they don’t need that plastic lid. They say without it the food would be spoiled but if you have a big bag of crisps, you open them and eat them or they go off - this is no different. Kellogg’s seem to believe they have invented a type of crisp that can only be eaten over a period of time.

They need some kind of closure on the tube to keep the chips and crumbs in and the dust out in the cupboard. (The foil/paper closure works until first opened but not after.)

Chip bags can be clipped closed for this.

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#43

Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. The way problems with it are treated as fundamentally unfixable always strikes me as against the site's ethos, yet people love pointing them out. Recycling just gets dumped in landfill! Ok, lets ban that. But, actually, its more environmentally friendly to landfill it! Are you sure? Science doesnt really agree. But anyway, can we make recycling more efficient? N…

> Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. Same here. Especially as someone from central europe where most recycling just works and noone even thinks twice about it. Heck, a lot of landfill dumping is even banned here already and anything dumped must be thermally threated first anyway.

Actually, I'm not sure how well recycling works in "Central Europe". In Czechia, at least, although waste sorting seems to work fairly well, as far as I'm aware, the share of plastic waste that gets recycled is negligible. Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity.

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#44

Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. The way problems with it are treated as fundamentally unfixable always strikes me as against the site's ethos, yet people love pointing them out. Recycling just gets dumped in landfill! Ok, lets ban that. But, actually, its more environmentally friendly to landfill it! Are you sure? Science doesnt really agree. But anyway, can we make recycling more efficient? N…

I agree with your sarcasm

> If it made sense the free market would already do it!

The free market only takes actions if there is economical incentives to do so. For the environment, it's difficult to achieve with the current process, which is why we can't trust the market to naturally adopt eco-friendly solution.

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#45
post #29

We need to focus on the second R, reuse. I have mason jars that my grandmother and then my mother used for pickling. The only waste is the rubber ring which needs to be replaced occasionally and THAT could be recycled. Many of these bottles have been used for 80+ years now. I have a few Ball jars which my GREAT grandmother used 100+ years ago. Beer bottles in Canada are reused dozens of times and are recyclable (brow…

There's a Classico pasta sauce line that uses jars molded with Atlas Mason on them and fit Mason jar lids but are not designed to be reused for canning. Just for marketing.

I've found a way to upcycle those, they make excellent drinking glasses. My home is an old farmhouse in a semi-rural area, so it fits the aesthetic perfectly. I grew up poor, with my family reusing Mason and Bell jars as drinking glasses between canning seasons, so I'm comfortable with it. With the opening narrower than the body, they also prevent ice cubes from invading our mouths when we consume iced drinks.

As an added bonus they seem to be far more durable than our regular glasses and tumblers; we end up breaking one of those every couple of months. They have been almost completely replaced by "free" pasta jars at this point and we have yet to break any of those.

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#46

Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. The way problems with it are treated as fundamentally unfixable always strikes me as against the site's ethos, yet people love pointing them out. Recycling just gets dumped in landfill! Ok, lets ban that. But, actually, its more environmentally friendly to landfill it! Are you sure? Science doesnt really agree. But anyway, can we make recycling more efficient? N…

I grew up in a normal german household on the 'countryside'.

I alwasy recycled. Never thought about it much and my family is not 'alternative or whatever'.

3 Years ago i see a documentation telling me, that dark plastic can't be recycled and gets burned. Thin plastic can't be recycled and will be burned.

We have a system called 'green point' which basically means that the producer has to pay a little bit of money for the packaging they produced so that other company in germany takes it, its called the yellow bin.

So you have your black bin for garbage and you have a yellow bin for the green point which are 99% plastic (pringles has that sign on it as well). I thought, they would have a high recycling rate. Nope 40% of that already recyclematerial is recycled. 60% is just burned.

I could have thrown this shit away uncleaned, unseperated in my normal garbage bin for years and you know what? Everyone around me is doing exactly that.

Don't get me wrong, i will not become a pig, i will still put my plastic into that and sort and clean and recycle but wtf...

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#47

The Stax chips packaging is almost a 100% reusable plastic bottle, and I think they taste better than Pringle's, so I buy Stax occasionally. If the plastic lid was screw-on, it would be ideal for a relief tube when flying, but it's just press-fit.

I hope you fly solo...

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#49
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy. I've heard people say that the environmental cost of producing the clean water necessary to wash bottles for reuse is also harmful. I'd really like to see a side-by-side comparison of the environmental cost of the different available "obvious" options. > We need to just force manufacturers to bear th…

> I've heard people say that the environmental cost of producing the clean water necessary to wash bottles for reuse is also harmful. If this is true, wouldn't it be more environmentally friendly to use disposable plates, bowls, and utensils? That doesn't seem right.

It sometimes is, at least for packaging. Glass containers may be reusable, but they’re heavier, often a lot heavier (even after decades of technological progress), than plastic containers, and transporting them to consumers and back costs energy and produces waste, too.

Also, some plastic packaging decreases food waste. That plastic cucumber packaging, for example, may seem wasteful, but makes them last three times as long and, because of that, decreases the fraction that gets thrown away (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...)

Now, individual stickers on bananas and kiwis, those should, IMO, be banned, but what do I know? Maybe they’re an essential part of tracking where fruit comes from (doesn’t look like it from my view, though)

Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

#50

The thing is they don’t need that plastic lid. They say without it the food would be spoiled but if you have a big bag of crisps, you open them and eat them or they go off - this is no different. Kellogg’s seem to believe they have invented a type of crisp that can only be eaten over a period of time.

They definitely don't need the plastic lid, no way I can stop myself from eating the whole thing in one session.
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