Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
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Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#2Fred Baur, the inventor of the original Pringles can, was buried in one of them (on his request)
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#3Fred Baur, the inventor of the original Pringles can, was buried in one of them (on his request)
Gene Wolfe (the SF author) helped develop the machine to make them.
> I was in the engineering development division, and asked to develop mass production equipment to make these chips. And we divided the task into the dough making/dough rolling portion, which was done by Len Hooper, and the cooking portion, which was done by me, and then the pickoff and salting portion, which was done by someone else, and then the can filling/can sealing portion which was done by a man who was almost driven insane by the program. Because he would develop a machine, and he would have it almost ready to go, and they would say "Oh, instead of 300 cans a minute, make it 500 cans a minute." And so he would have to throw out a bunch of stuff, and develop the new machine, and when he got that one about ready, they'd say "make it 700 cans a minute." And they almost put him in a mental hospital. He took his job very seriously and he just about flipped out.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090916170648/http://home.roadr...
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#4If 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 labeled recyclable often aren’t once they are processed.
One thing that sticks with me (and this is just one representative example) is that almost none of those plastic salad containers that have overtaken supermarkets are ever recycled.
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#5Fred Baur, the inventor of the original Pringles can, was buried in one of them (on his request)
Like, buried in a giant replica of the can as a coffin? Or cremated and put in a normal size can?
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#6I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it.
This is one of the big problems I have with recycling. When I was a kid in school (throughout the 90’s), we learned the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is last on the list.
The list is in order of increasing waste for a very good reason. We should first strive to reduce the amount of wasteful stuff we purchase, barring that we should try to reuse things around the house (plastic bags, containers, etc), and finally if we can’t do either we should recycle the stuff to try and recover the materials.
Nowadays I don’t hear about the 3 R’s anymore. It’s become all about people dumping everything in a box and making it somebody else’s problem, just as trash was in the first place.
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#7Given that most recycling ends up in landfills anyway, I’m not sure it matters much. We have a much bigger recycling problem.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#8Fred Baur, the inventor of the original Pringles can, was buried in one of them (on his request)
Gene Wolfe (the SF author) helped develop the machine to make them. > I was in the engineering development division, and asked to develop mass production equipment to make these chips. And we divided the task into the dough making/dough rolling portion, which was done by Len Hooper, and the cooking portion, which was done by me, and then the pickoff and salting portion, which was done by someone else, and then the ca…
Gene Wolfe's job as a plant engineer before he became a full-time author gave him a front-row seat for other low-quality mid-20th-century American processed food. In his novel Peace, it is subtly revealed towards the end of the book that the protagonist’s family business produces Tang (through breaking potatoes down into their starch and then adding flavoring).
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#9Wouldn't it be better to use as much paper as possible in the packaging and certify the paper is sourced from sustainable forestry? They we use the package as a carbon sink.
Re: Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'
#10The Stax chips packaging is almost a 100% reusable plastic bottle, and I think they taste better than Pringle's, so I buy Stax occasionally.
If the plastic lid was screw-on, it would be ideal for a relief tube when flying, but it's just press-fit.