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Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

bbc.co.uk

151–160 of 401 posts

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

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And many cities subsidize waste by charging money for trash hauling but not for putting trash in the recycling bin. Seattle even introduced a punitive fine for NOT contaminating the recycling stream!

Regular trash costs extra money after a couple bags, here, so we're encouraged to put anything in recycling that can go there. Our city has us put recycling out at the curb, unbagged and uncovered, in plastic bins. Meanwhile, wind exists. It's more of a littering program than a recycling program, really.

Do they still have a plastic bin? Where does it go I wonder, now that China isn't taking it.

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

#152
post #48

FWIW - Pringles tubes are very effective in increasing wifi signal range. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ioJ8i56pA

The world will run out of antennas to boost.

MIMO cantenna! Now with more M’s.

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

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's real easy to say when you work in an air conditioned office and shop at whole foods. Sure the demographics most represented here could absorb the cost but these demographics are a minority in the first word and a tiny minority globally. Economic stability is what permits people to have the free time to care about abstract things like "the environment". Raise the cost of food, raise the cost of fuel, "internali…

We're in an era of companies worth trillions and their owners worth billions. It's silly to say we have too few resources to provide enough economic stability for people to care about the environment, meanwhile mega yachts are being made and islands are being purchased by an uber wealthy elite class, and there are people who will defend that behavior, all because they have a lot of money, so it must be okay.

Market driven economies that do not take into account environmental destruction and which cannot come to terms with wealth inequalities will be a huge danger to the future plight of humanity. Waiting for the market to "naturally" react by raising prices due to resource scarcity and destruction of supply chains due to environmental hazards will be too slow, and too little too late.

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

#154
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Burning is better for the environment than landfill. It's getting less good comparitavely as grids become carbon free via renewables, but especially for district heating its probably going to be a good thing for a while. Half recycled and half used to avoid burning coal seems a pretty good deal, especially if its paid for by the producers. So why the big overreaction?

There's no chance that buring is better than a landfill. There's so much empty (useless) surface area on earth. Burning puts poison into the air and requires a ton of energy.

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

#155
post #66

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…

Because without fancy, bespoke packaging people will be less inclined to buy copious amounts of junk food. We need to fundamentally rethink our entire food system. For example, having every individual buy, transport, cook and dispose of their own food is a huge inefficiency, particularly now with smaller and individual households. We need to encourage more neighborhood kitchens, with food prepared cheaply and healthi…

You seem to have thought this through pretty thoroughly, how do you intend to incentivize people to go to these communal meals vs cooking at home or getting a “personalized” meal at a restaurant?

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

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would fill-your-own-bottle work with online shopping and home delivery, which more and more people are doing even for groceries?

1. A factory ships a product to the seller in a durable container. Puts $1 into a smart contract to resolve on that container's return. 2. I buy $5 worth of product in durable container from seller and pay $7. 3. Seller gets $5, remaining $2 goes into smart contract from step 1. So now there's three incentives to get the container back to the factory (each is $1 in this example, but would be a parameter in reality).…

are you familiar with deposits in parts of the world? The aluminum cans have 10c stamped on the lid, and the bottles have it printed on their labels.

I couldn't be bothered going to a recycling depot so I would leave my recyclables outside next to the bins. People would walk around afternoon/night collecting all the recyclables with deposits from people's bins (recycling and trash).

It seems far simpler than your proposal.

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

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most countries around the world do this by default. For example, those big jugs of water that get delivered. In most places they are clean and reused. Where I'm living right now, in Turkey, those big bottles are made out of glass and it just gets replaced with a previously used glass jug. Same with the beer, all the bottles are collected, cleaned, and reused.

Agreed. The “first world” really needs to get it’s act together on this.

The thing is we (the US) did do this at one point in time. When I was a kid you could buy a coke in a glass bottle and return it when done to be re-used by the manufacturer. For some reason we stopped. We should bring that back.

When I was in Mexico around the early 2000 they still did this. When you buy a drink you could return it for a few cents back from the vender.

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

#158

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…

100% recycling would be a disaster since recycling almost everything other than aluminum has a larger carbon footprint than making new. Additionally it would do almost nothing for plastic pollution since microplastics come from textile manufacturing, paint, tires, and other airborne particles from dense human population zones. Macroplastics largely come from dumping that's already banned under laws we don't bother enforcing.

"Recycle everything" is a mantra for people who care more about feeling good about themselves than the actual mathematics of our environment.

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

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular trash costs extra money after a couple bags, here, so we're encouraged to put anything in recycling that can go there. Our city has us put recycling out at the curb, unbagged and uncovered, in plastic bins. Meanwhile, wind exists. It's more of a littering program than a recycling program, really.

Do they still have a plastic bin? Where does it go I wonder, now that China isn't taking it.

Oh it's much worse. It's all mixed up together, no sorting. I doubt any of it actual gets recycled, except maybe the metal. It's such an obviously terrible program that surely it only exists to funnel money to someone's cousin, or something. Ineffective, and directly causes several trash-devils swirling down the street every year. Been that way for at least a decade, and there's little or no agitation to eliminate or fix the program.

[EDIT] that is, I meant the bins are all made of plastic, so light and prone to blowing around or tipping, not that it's a bin dedicated to plastic. We don't sort, here, all the metal, cardboard, and plastic goes in the same open-topped plastic containers. No glass collection is done whatsoever, as it's not permitted in regular trash or recycling, so you have to sort that out on your own.

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

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's real easy to say when you work in an air conditioned office and shop at whole foods. Sure the demographics most represented here could absorb the cost but these demographics are a minority in the first word and a tiny minority globally. Economic stability is what permits people to have the free time to care about abstract things like "the environment". Raise the cost of food, raise the cost of fuel, "internali…

Degrading environment is leading to economic in-stability. The chickens will come home to roost.
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