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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'

#241

Post by mac-chaffee »

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…

> Glass is made of sand, which we have plenty of.

On this point specifically, glass is made of a specific type of sand that is high in silica, which we are running out of: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...

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

#242

Post by ad_hominem »

blacksmith_tb wrote: post #229
ad_hominem wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you'd expect there'd be no glass bottles of anything (beer, mustard, maple syrup) if that was the case

That's completely different - you're confusing recycling with reuse. The bottles you're referring to are made anew from glass that has been smashed into cullet and re-cast into new glass.

What the commenters above are advocating are thicker glass bottles that are washed and reused as-is, i.e. reuse.

Different QA concerns when you're manufacturing fresh glass versus collecting it from randos

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

#243

Post by rurp »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #161
strogonoff wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It gives me the creeps every time I see someone heating up their lunch in an old plastic container. Old dairy containers with snap lids are very common. It must be leaching so much garbage into the food. I can’t tell if that’s phobia due to bad science or these people are actually gradually poisoning themselves.

Same, though it seems hard to determine just how risky it is.

I have drank water from thin plastic bottles that had been sitting out in the sun and elements for a quite a while. I don't know exactly how long, probably a year or two. The water was gross! I attribute it to the plastic breaking down and contaminating the water, but that's just a guess.

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

#244

Post by pkphilip »

jjoonathan wrote: post #203
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…

Flexible glass isn't a lost ancient mystery. We call it "silicone."

Silocone is used for food packaging but, as far as I know, I do not know any company shipping food in silicone bottles. However, silicone food packaging bags exist:

https://www.stasherbag.com/blogs/stasher-life/food-grade-sil...

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

#245

Post by savolai »

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…

It appears your comment about sand is somewhat misguided. Sand is consumed a lot nowadays. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is...

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

#246

Post by Falling3 »

omegabravo wrote: post #156
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

Recycling is unfortunately not a guarantee even when consumers do everything right. Plenty of curbside recyclables end up in landfills.

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

#247

Post by parliament32 »

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…

>We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%

There's literally no way to do this. Any costs you try to pass on will just be passed to the customer, and there's no legal way to prevent that from happening. And no, the customer won't care about a 5c recycling tariff, which is about the most you could charge for this without getting sued to oblivion.

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

#248

Post by rhacker »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #233
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.

A bunch of states have bottle deposit laws. Stuff goes to recycling rather than direct reuse, but still, the concept is to use the deposit as an incentive to reduce litter and increase recycling rates. At the end of the day, if we want companies to do more sustainable things than using single use packages that cost nearly nothing to dump in a landfill (or litter), then we need to start charging them enough to incenti…

There's at least one company in the west (US) that still does this. Have you tried Strauss farms milk? The creamtop is absolutely delicious. There's a $2 bottle deposit which encourages the bottles to be returned. Only problem is you can only get this milk at higher end grocery stores or fancy co-ops.

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

#249

Post by qwertygnu »

treis wrote: post #195
qwertygnu wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Plastic is petroleum and it's probably better that we use it and bury it then burn it. > We also have plenty of land to bury stuff in. > The thing we should focus on is carbon footprint. Is this a joke?

... No. Which part do you disagree with?

I'm finding a huge disparity with your ideas. Saying that we need not worry about using too much glass, paper, or plastic because we have plenty of sand, trees, and land to bury waste, then saying we need to reduce our carbon footprint doesn't make sense.

Do you not think creating waste and dumping it in landfills, in oceans, in nature, is part of our carbon footprint? Do you not think the processes to make and transport and dispose of these materials is part of our carbon footprint? Even if trees are renewable, we in no way are using them in a sustainable way. Another commenter also linked an article about running out of sand.

Recycling is not a good answer, even doing more harm than good, but that doesn't mean to give up on reducing and reusing. And I don't mean (only) at a consumer level. We need large scale industrial and societal changes in how manufacture, consume, and dispose of goods.

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