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Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

bbc.co.uk

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

#221

Post by ch4s3 »

remote_phone wrote: post #121
pkphilip wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One of the costs is weight, which means that transporting glass bottles releases more CO2. We also shouldn’t underestimate how dangerous glass can be when dropped.

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

#222

Post by Ensorceled »

strogonoff wrote: post #150
Ensorceled wrote: post #16

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…

On board with mandating recycling and encouraging use of infinitely recyclable materials in container manufacturing. A couple nits to pick, though. – You have to be specific when advocating for reuse. Some like to keep using—for long periods of time—bottles made from cheap thin disposable plastic. That plastic, when repeatedly emptied, may quickly accumulate tiny cracks and leech chemicals, which in case of P(V)C may…

Since I’m literally talking about institutional reuse of glassware and institutional recycling of aluminum, and advocating not using plastic at all; I’m not sure what nit you are picking with me.

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

#223

Post by masklinn »

yourapostasy wrote: post #40
masklinn wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to focus on the second R, reuse. That means you need to end both single-use containers and selling stuff in containers entirely . There’s only do much of one type of reusable container you even can have a use for, and that’s assuming you do even have a use for them in the first place: I don’t make jam at home, I buy it, I don’t have a use for a new jam jar a month, and every jam-making friend has more jars…

> That means you need to end...selling stuff in containers entirely. If we energy-cost-accounted for all externalities, then I wonder how returning the containers to the factory to automatically sanitize and re-use compares to recycling. Land filling is not an option: say you're in a closed loop environment like on a generation ship trip to Proxima Centauri b, and the concept of a land fill as we know it is obscenely…

> If we energy-cost-accounted for all externalities, then I wonder how returning the containers to the factory to automatically sanitize and re-use compares to recycling.

That would be interesting, but it's very difficult to price externalities, and the very same people who are against any form of recycling mandate are also against pricing externalities (just look at who killed Australia's carbon tax, and which party's blocking any sort of cap-and-trade or carbon tax in the US).

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

#224

Post by Ntrails »

gambiting wrote: post #183
mattmanser wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We" didn't stop, it was cheaper for Coca-Cola to use plastic. Coca-Cola did it. Stop blaming consumers for corporate choices to slightly increase profits. Like in the UK, Tesco have just inexplicably switched from using cardboard egg containers to plastic ones. Is that my fault?

The corporations only make those choices because they are allowed to(or rather, because they are not forced by the regulations to actually pay for the environmental cost of what they make). Yes, I recently noticed that with Tesco eggs, I have complained to them about it. And it's not our fault but we can definitely try to avoid these products as consumers. Telling companies why you avoid them is also a good thing to…

We are responsible for our parliamentary representatives, and thereby our laws. It is absolutely our fault, as a society, as consumers.

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

#225

Post by SirLuxuryYacht »

d0gbread wrote: post #101
crazygringo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but all the glass that gets used for reuse is for liquids , which are also all heavy to begin with. Do you have examples of successful packaging reuse for solid dry food such as Pringles? Or cereal? Or sugar? Or chocolate? (And that's before even getting into packaging of meat, fish, etc.)

Sure, here in Vermont we have lots of dry good options (cereal, dry tea, spices, etc) that are bulk into reusable containers. Pringles aren't conducive to that but I'd certainly scoop tortilla chips, goldfish, etc if I could.

Goldfish yes, but the store would have to accept a loss due to crumbification of the chips from people jabbing the scoop into the pile of chips all the time

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

#226

Post by 1123581321 »

justinph wrote: post #120
srtjstjsj wrote: post #61

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.

The environmental cost of collection, transport, inspection and cleaning, and transport to be filled would outweigh the cost of manufacture and transport to be filled. So that regulation would make jam more expensive and/or the environment worse.

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

#227

Post by RandallBrown »

srtjstjsj wrote: post #69
kbos87 wrote: post #4

If you want to have your eyes opened about just how little of the material you probably think you are recycling actually gets recycled, watch the recent Frontline episode called “Plastic Wars”. The sad truth is that while recycling is worthwhile, it’s also a woefully insufficient solution that has been held up by the petroleum industry as a cure all to prevent a backlash against plastic. Even products that are labele…

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!

Can you explain how Seattle has a fine for NOT contaminating the recycling stream?

I know there's a fine for putting compostables in your trash, but I've never heard of another fine.

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

#228

Post by detaro »

treis wrote: post #179
kbos87 wrote: post #4

If you want to have your eyes opened about just how little of the material you probably think you are recycling actually gets recycled, watch the recent Frontline episode called “Plastic Wars”. The sad truth is that while recycling is worthwhile, it’s also a woefully insufficient solution that has been held up by the petroleum industry as a cure all to prevent a backlash against plastic. Even products that are labele…

>while recycling is worthwhile, I'm not sure it's that worthwhile for most things. Glass is made of sand, which we have plenty of. Cardboard is trees which are renewable. Plastic is petroleum and it's probably better that we use it and bury it then burn it. Metal is rarer and some of that is worthwhile to recycle but again not like we're running out of iron ore. We also have plenty of land to bury stuff in. The thing…

And recycling can be one strategy to reduce carbon footprint. E.g. it takes almost double the energy to turn sand+X into glass than re-melting and re-using existing glass (while also not needing to dig up more landscape to get sand, and covering more landscape in old glass).

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

#229

Post by blacksmith_tb »

ad_hominem wrote: post #209
stx wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Maybe the reason is because of stronger food safety laws and tort law. If some guy used his bottle as a hammer for several months before turning it in for recycling, then someone cuts their hand on a jagged edge or drinks a glass sliver, that's a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Unlikely maybe but at Coca-Cola scale I imagine things like that will happen eventually. These companies would have to have sophisticated QA pr…

That's quite a hypothetical - if there were a rash of lawsuits the lead up to Coke being sold in 2 liter plastic bottles, that would be indicative, but I am not aware of anything like that - and you'd expect there'd be no glass bottles of anything (beer, mustard, maple syrup) if that was the case.

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

#230

Post by insanebits »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #122
Mirioron wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Here in Lithuania we have like 90% of plastic bottles have a deposit logo on them, pretty much all of the soda, beer, water, milk bottles are recycled. Most of the non recycleable bottles are from outside of EU brands, and those are generally more expensive. Collection points are also automated, where you put them on conveyer kind of belt ant it uses OCR to detect if the bottle can be recycled. Those collection points are attached to a store and you get a credit in associated store which can be used to either buy groceries or jus get your money in cash.
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