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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'

#281

Post by staplers »

akiselev wrote: post #277
conradev wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found this article incredibly illuminating: https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas... The United States is seemingly uniquely bad at this, thanks to - you guessed it - corporate greed. Container deposit laws work: > The United States' overall beverage container recycling rate is approximately 33%, while states with container deposit laws have a 70% average rate of beverage container recycling.…

A significant fraction of that 70% is collected by homeless individuals and others living below the poverty line, for whom recycling is a zero cost, zero training income source that can pay out the same day. If our (California) social safety nets were effective, I suspect the collection rate would be more in line with the national average.

In Oregon it is amazing how effective this program is. You never see cans or bottles as litter.

Another effect is it lowers your garbage/recycling bill as homeless will often rummage through your bins for cans/bottles freeing up bin space so you never really have an overflow problem of glass or cans.

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

#282

Post by munificent »

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…

I hate this attitude that treats corporations as having zero responsibility beyond what they are legally mandated to do. Yes, it is an observable fact that corporatism and market economics incentivize corporations to behave that way. But it is an unjustified leap to turn that into a moral claim that it is ethically acceptable for that to be true.

People are incentivized to commit package theft in the US today. The odds of being caught and prosecuted are very slim, and the upside is you get free stuff. As an economic action, it is very market efficient: low barrier of entry, large number of "sellers", few cabals or controls over prices. There definitely isn't perfect information on products, but given that the cost is near-zero, that doesn't matter much. As a business, "package theft" is a great one to get into, and the market highly rewards you for doing so.

However, we correctly consider people who do so as despicable shitwads who rightfully earn our scorn and condemnation. We publicly shame them, and certainly don't want to hang out with them and count them as friends.

We should do the same with businesses that do morally harmful acts, regardless of whether the act is technically illegal or incentivized by market forces. It is certainly the business's fault when they do a shitty thing. They have fully agency in the choice of whether or not do so.

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

#283

Post by dflock »

adrr wrote: post #204
ZeroGravitas wrote: post #14

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…

The biggest environmental issue about plastics is that it gets into the ocean and kills wildlife and gets into our food supply, but recycling doesn't fix that. So whats wrong with just burying it in ground where it will eventually turn into its original form after a million years? Last thing we should be doing is shipping our trash to other countries where there is a chance it is just disposed of in improper way and…

Burying plastic puts all the leachate into groundwater, where some will end up in the water supply.

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

#284

Post by dragonwriter »

munificent wrote: post #282
gambiting wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I hate this attitude that treats corporations as having zero responsibility beyond what they are legally mandated to do. Yes, it is an observable fact that corporatism and market economics incentivize corporations to behave that way. But it is an unjustified leap to turn that into a moral claim that it is ethically acceptable for that to be true. People are incentivized to commit package theft in the US today. The od…

Corporations aren't natural persons and have no ethics. They are abstract creations of law and the only legitimate expectations of corporations as corporations are their responses to structural incentives including enforced legal obligations.

We can talk about the ethics of the actions of corporate decision-makers, but only while keeping in mind that structural incentives mean that decision-makers who sacrifice the narrow interests of corporate investors for ethical reasons beyond the constraints forcibly externally imposed on corporations are likely to, over time, be replaced by those who do not.

If you want corporations to act consistently with some view of ethics, you aren't going to do it sustainably by moral persuasion directed at decision-makers, but only by shifting the structural incentives.

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

#285

Post by RandallBrown »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #88

My immediate thought is it sounds like Kellogg's/Pringles could get a lot of free positive marketing by just switching to a "100% biodegradable" bag? Nobody likes Pringles because they're in a tube.

I buy Pringles because they're in a tube.

Ever take a bag of chips on a backpacking trip?

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

#286

Post by munificent »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #88

My immediate thought is it sounds like Kellogg's/Pringles could get a lot of free positive marketing by just switching to a "100% biodegradable" bag? Nobody likes Pringles because they're in a tube.

The tube and the product are part of a holistic design whole.

Pringles are made by pressing ground up potato paste into a disc shape and drying them. That makes them weaker than regular potato chips, necessitating a rigid tube container.

You might ask why make chips that way in the first place? My hunch is that they exist as a way to use up byproducts produced by other potato products. Sort of like how sawdust from lumber production is used to make particleboard.

Pringles are essentially edible particleboard.

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

#287

Post by akiselev »

munificent wrote: post #279
akiselev wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant fraction of that 70% is collected by homeless individuals and others living below the poverty line, for whom recycling is a zero cost, zero training income source that can pay out the same day. If our (California) social safety nets were effective, I suspect the collection rate would be more in line with the national average.

I love this comment because it's a great example of how the exact same data can be used to support opposing narratives. The raw data here is that California sees a certain quantity of bottle recycling and has a certain level of social safety net. * One narrative is that the high bottle recycling rate shows a problem with the social safety net. * Another narrative is that recycling rate shows that it is itself functio…

> Another narrative is that recycling rate shows that it is itself functioning as part of the solution to the social safety net.

In my experience, no one in good faith argues that bottle deposits are a part of the social safety net, let alone a functional part.

Edit: to clarify, mine is a US centric experience. I think the argument for recycling collection as a tool of economic mobility is perfectly sound as long as it's not economically coercive (i.e. if the safety net is adequate without resorting to roaming the streets collecting recyclable material).

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

#288

Post by beenBoutIT »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #258
rhacker wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, Strauss is great. Sadly it's getting harder to find their cream. Everyone seems to carry the ice cream tho.

Strauss is great but they need to use amber glass bottles to protect their delicious milk from light.

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

#289

Post by dr_orpheus »

detaro wrote: post #228
treis wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

It is a similar story for aluminum. It takes much less energy to re-use recycled aluminum than to manufacture new. [0, about 2/3 of the way down the page].

[0] https://www.aluminum.org/aluminum-advantage/facts-glance

Also the aluminum association is a trade organization so they are obviously promoting the use of aluminum. But still some of the facts are quite interesting.

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

#290

Post by beenBoutIT »

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.

Syringes, urine cups, stool sample collection cups, catheters, condoms - these days nobody wants to go through the hassle of washing and sanitizing certain items for reuse. A single-use plastic ban would make dealing with biohazards an energy and chemically intensive cleaning nightmare.
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