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Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

bbc.co.uk

121–130 of 401 posts

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

#121

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…

One of the key issues with using bottles is the cost, weight and the fact that there is a lot of breakage. The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times. One key invention which could really help here is flexible glass packaging. Interestingly, one of the lost technologies from the Roman era is flexible glass: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass Corning does have flexible glass, bu…

Let the costs increase then.

All food containers must be recyclable or compostable. This should be a rule across the globe.

We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce ... You are being naive, even in the European Union which has a fairly contained level of corruption the Plastic and Petro-chemical lobby are incredibly strong. Many countries wanted to introduce a single-use plastic ban, almost immediately a campaign came out saying they were trying to kill people at hospitals wher…

> The natural progression of this is to create large plastic bootle/container deposits. Again this will never happen because it obviously stops the current externalization of costs in the plastic business. We already have that in a lot of EU countries. Every soda bottle has an additional deposit cost (10 cents) on top of the soda itself. You pay that when you purchase it and get the 10 cents back when you take the bo…

> We already have that in a lot of EU countries

Citation needed?

There are many glass deposit schemes, but apart from Norway and maybe Germany, other EU countries' _plastic_ deposit schemes to my knowledge are either draft proposals or rejected draft proposals? What exactly do you mean by a _lot_ of EU countries?

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

#125

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…

To this day, the majority of wide mouth glass jars you see at the grocery store have the same diameter and thread pitch of one of the mason jar lid sizes. Which means you can find a clean replacement lid for most of them, and use it to store other food or non food items.

Classico pasta sauces literally come in a tall Mason jar, with volume marks on the side.

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

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could, but no one wants to pay extra effort and energy cost when it's easier to make new glass from dirt.

Then this is a perfect case for regulation, to make it cost more to make new glass than re-use existing containers. It worked in the past just fine. But the first world incentivized energy production so much that we drove down the need to be efficient.

For glass bottles, I don't see the point. There's no glass shortage, and glass debris doesn't kill anything or leech into the soil from landfills.

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

#127

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce standardized packaging across product "classes" to streamline reuse and recycling - for example, all soda bottles of size x, must come in shape y, made out of polymer z. The obvious financial impact would be companies having to potentially retool their factories to facilitate that, but there can also be sensible tax r…

Europe forced automakers (indirectly) to change what plastics cars were made out of. Previously there were so many unique formulas of plastic that you’d never be able to sort them properLy.

But as has been mentioned already, plastics don’t recycle well.

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

#128

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…

Such efforts have popular support, but a lot of lobbying opposition:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/20/plastic-bags-have-l...

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/09/20/how-to-recycle-pl...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/10/plastics...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/government-...

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

#129
post #6

I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it. This is one of the big problems I have with recycling. When I was a kid in school (throughout the 90’s), we learned the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is last on the l…

What do you use Pringles cans for that makes them so useful: say you were buying one per week?

I can think of more uses if you cut them shorter. Pencil holder, ... ok that's it.

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

#130

The best approach would be to make corporations and people pay based on the amount of trash they generate. Similar to VAT, have a GAT. All of a sudden, consumers would be keenly aware and happy to purchase products that reduce trash. Even better, weight it against the long term damage to the environment. Yes, this is going to be ugly politically, but that's probably one way to capture the negative externalities of a…

You’d have to bill them collectively for things like cleaning up the ocean and you’d get countersued to hell and back. It’d be easier to just tariff everything, but then you either soft ban that material or embolden them (do the time, do the crime style).
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