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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'

#291

Post by tomlor »

staplers wrote: post #281
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.

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.

The pickers in my neighborhood are a nuisance. If my recyling bin is full, then they move good recyclables from my recycling bin to my trash bin in order to try to find cans and bottles. Often, then don't move them back when they're done rummaging.

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

#292

Post by kthejoker2 »

munificent wrote: post #286
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 l…

So why not just package them Ritz Cracker style, cardboard box outside, wax paper inside?

Again, seems more like a failure of imagination.

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

#293

Post by Theodores »

kilroy123 wrote: post #65
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…

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.

I know a lot of people are conditioned to not drink tap water, however, we need a world where tap water is not only clean enough to drink but also seen as the definitive clean water that you would want to drink.

I live in the UK and never buy water. All mine comes through the tap. There is no lorry delivering water for me although the water supply does have lots of big pumps and processes that mean it isn't arriving in my house by gravity alone and it does have a carbon footprint.

If you are living 50 miles out in the desert then you are going to need a lorry to fill up a big tank rather than bring lots of little glass or plastic bottles. Otherwise, tap water rules and needs to be kept clean. Drinking bought bottled water should be discouraged.

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

#294

Post by kevin_b_er »

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…

Why should laws to protect people be deleted and laws added to protect corporations?

You base laws that protect the well being of the citizenry into a tort reform call. Protecting corporations that abuse the public does not improve the lives of the public. It just improves the profit margin.

The basis of "tort reform" is a panic assessment that lawsuits run wild and the only solution is to indemnify the rich and powerful. This lets them abuse the public even more.

Your link implies this is for liability, but it could just as easily be a filtering step so that the bottles provided are up to a certain quality standard to be readily reused.

The root problem is the bottles are cheaper to make out of disposable material. The cost burden is shifted to The People over a longer term. This is the tragedy of the commons.

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

#295

Post by Nasrudith »

pkphilip wrote: post #70
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…

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…

I thought the Romans were known to outright despise glass, although that was in architectural contexts. Flexible glass sounds very unlike them given references to pottery and wineskins instead.

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

#296

Post by munificent »

kthejoker2 wrote: post #292
munificent wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

So why not just package them Ritz Cracker style, cardboard box outside, wax paper inside? Again, seems more like a failure of imagination.

> Again, seems more like a failure of imagination.

Sure, but on the designers' part or ours? I certainly would not be surprised if there were reasons why the Ritz approach wouldn't work.

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

#297

Post by Nasrudith »

kbenson wrote: post #263
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…

> The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times. I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut down because a vendor in a different country offered such good pricing for a while that nobody could/wanted to compete, but has since greatly raised they prices. Weight does matter quite a bit when shipping something literally halfway around the world, but we don'…

Weight matters less than you would think for long distance shipping - look at ore and crude oil for one both could have /major/ weight savings by in situ refining but the economics confirm shipping it to be refined is the winner.

Global shipping's sheer scale tends to snap people's intuitions in two compared to the actual numbers as it feels like it really shouldn't be this efficient by cost or carbon. The reality is that when you keep on getting bigger and bigger container ships the efficency when fully loaded keeps going up. Think of it like how a diesel train is more efficent than a highway of commuters despite the tonnage difference between one car and a full train.

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

#298

Post by somehnguy »

tomlor wrote: post #291
staplers wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The pickers in my neighborhood are a nuisance. If my recyling bin is full, then they move good recyclables from my recycling bin to my trash bin in order to try to find cans and bottles. Often, then don't move them back when they're done rummaging.

Yeah, in theory I have 0 problem with people picking through the dumpsters at my place. In practice though trash gets thrown around outside the dumpster for the wind to make a mess of the parking lot with. I wouldn't care at all if they would just pick up after themselves. But they don't - so I do care.

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

#299

Post by gwbas1c »

alexanderthe- wrote: post #35

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…

Ever see a soda or beer can? Pretty standardized. Same goes for a beer bottle, or even a lot of soda bottles. (This is my perspective in the US, but things seemed similar the week I spent in Europe and the week I spent in India.)

1 gallon milk jugs are quite standard, same goes for milk cartons.

When I was a teenager I worked in a dairy. We sold milk in both single-use containers and returnable glass bottles. The returned bottles were washed and refilled. The "problem" is that single-use won in the marketplace. The owners couldn't get it together to charge a deposit on the glass, and lost a lot of money from customers who didn't realize they had to return the glass bottle. (Edit: All of the containers, single-use and returnable, were standard and came from a distributor.)

We really only see unique packaging when some business sees it as in their best interests to design unique packaging for their product. Otherwise, beverage / food makers are just going to buy easy-to-get equipment that fills easy-to-get containers.

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

#300

Post by shortandsweet »

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…

The solution is more data. Let's see how CA rates compare to that of say... MA, which has a significantly less population of homeless.
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