> why should they be on the hook after it leaves their hands? Consumers are using the said products Consumers aren't typically buying plastic packaging. They're buying whatever the plastic packaging contains. When regular people buy plastic packaging and throw it away, then yes they are culpable (as in plastic bags and wrap for food storage, which I'll admit that I do use on occasion). The rest of the time, it's not…
That's not correct. I'd much rather buy a plastic bottle of water than a heavy glass one.
Probably not if the product in a plastic bottle is much more expensive than the same thing in a glass bottle, right?
This is for glass recycling not plastic, but I recently found out that my county ships all of their glass recyclables to be dumped in a landfill of a neighboring state. In my state, waste disposal companies are legally obligated to recycle everything they can that ends up in a recycling bin. But with glass it's actually vastly cheaper to produce new glass bottles than it is to make them out of recycled material. So t…
Glass is about the most harmless thing you could put in a landfill. Right down there with naturally occurring rocks. What environmental problem are they causing by burying it?
It seems you either don't know what an externality is, or you don't understand how plastic is an externality. In the second case, I literally cannot help you. Try to imagine yourself as a member of the ecosystem which is actively collapsing? The oxygen you are breathing isn't made in a lab. The creation, purchase, and disposal of plastic has consequences for people that are not involved in that chain, and therefore h…
What specifically, and how large (dollars / plastic item/unit) are these externalites? If you can't describe and quantify them then there isn't an argument for compensating (taxes, bans) against them. [0] e.g. If I dump 100 PET soda bottles into the ocean how many humans would be inconvenienced, how many fish killed? My napkin math says essentially none of either.
Your napkin math says this? So it must be right then... Surely all that is required for such a decision on the scale of every human doing this every year is some napkin math.
The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturer…
Might be interesting to see if we can get more reusable medical supplies in the future. Autoclave for sterility, replace smaller portions (like needles) to reduce waste. Plastic has its place for its characteristics, but if we can do the same and reuse at the same time, I'm all for it.
I’m not against these ideas but you do have to zoom out a bit to fully realize the impact of each alternative. It’s not as simple as replacing a “bad” one with a “good” one, because there are side effects. (I haven’t added up the total impacts of every option either; this is just something to consider.) For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of b…
All the cost/energy benefits listed are exactly the type of short term business arguments that enabled companies like Coca-Cola to transition from glass bootles to producing 110 _billion_ PET bootles, every, single, year. [0] There are a number of long-term costs not captured in these business decisions: - The energy cost of recycling a PET bottle is much greater than producing a brand new one from crude oil. This cr…
If you really want to recycle you can. In Switzerland 80% of PET bottle are collected and recycled (without deposit). This is paid by manufacturers and distributors who have to collect and pay for the recycling. Current bottles are composed of 50% of recycled PET, and some manufacturer are starting to introduce 100% bottle. Of course, to reach that result you need laws, you cannot expect the free market to do it.
They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics. I don’t think consumers are blameless, but you can’t get everyone in the world to change their purchasing behavior without regulation, which is necessary when lower prices are subsidized by huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large.
>huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large. What are these negative consequences? The only ones I can think of are related to improper disposal (eg. littering), and would be present regardless of whether the material was recyclable or not. ie. if we replaced all the non-recyclable plastic bottles with 100% recyclable aluminum cans, the littering problem would still be there.
I agree that just changing the material is not the solution. But it doesn't mean that the manufacturers get to skip their responsibility. In Finland we have to pay a considerable deposit by law (found in section 2: https://www.finlex.fi/en/laki/kaannokset/2013/en20130526.pdf) for every drink container you buy and you get the deposit back when you return them back to any store that has a returning machine (almost every single place you can buy those bottles). It seems that this is working very nicely, since the return rates are around 90% (https://www.palpa.fi/beverage-container-recycling/deposit-re...). Usually when drunk people are throwing beer cans to the streets, there's almost always someone picking up those cans for the deposit.
I'm not an expert, but I think the problem is that in the US, The industry would never allow that kind of decree to pass, since in this case "The manufacturers and importers of beverages fund return systems through different types of payments."
All the cost/energy benefits listed are exactly the type of short term business arguments that enabled companies like Coca-Cola to transition from glass bootles to producing 110 _billion_ PET bootles, every, single, year. [0] There are a number of long-term costs not captured in these business decisions: - The energy cost of recycling a PET bottle is much greater than producing a brand new one from crude oil. This cr…
> Simply google "plastic endocrine disruptors" I did, and found that the 1996 paper that helped launch the movement against endocrine disruptors, was retracted in 2001 because the data was made up. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-02-0... (I'm not making any claim here about whether endocrine disruptors in our environment are a problem or not. Maybe they are. But I don't like to be told "just G…
Fair point, I assumed this to be a matter-of-fact but I add more info below.
Evidence on the health effects of Bisphenol and Pthalates (commonly used chemicals in plastics):
All the cost/energy benefits listed are exactly the type of short term business arguments that enabled companies like Coca-Cola to transition from glass bootles to producing 110 _billion_ PET bootles, every, single, year. [0] There are a number of long-term costs not captured in these business decisions: - The energy cost of recycling a PET bottle is much greater than producing a brand new one from crude oil. This cr…
If you really want to recycle you can. In Switzerland 80% of PET bottle are collected and recycled (without deposit). This is paid by manufacturers and distributors who have to collect and pay for the recycling. Current bottles are composed of 50% of recycled PET, and some manufacturer are starting to introduce 100% bottle. Of course, to reach that result you need laws, you cannot expect the free market to do it.
Do you have a source to backup that statement?
It is true that there are separate containers for PET in CH, problem the way I see it, is that people simply do not know which bottles are PET and throw in there all kinds of plastic. Sometimes, when I throw mine, I take 5 and watch what the others are throwing, essentially, if the bottle has this 3 arrows "recycle" sign, it goes in the PET basket, simple as that.