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Food Packaging

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Re: Food Packaging

#101

Post by [deleted] »

aldebran wrote: post #32
simulate-me wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The material you’re taking about, plastic, is made from carbon stored inside of the Earth. If we can reliably get it back in the Earth, e.g. via landfill, then I don’t see a huge issue with it. Also, wood was a forever material prior to the evolution of white rot.

Human manufactured Wooden objects are not found in remote places on earth. Tiny specs of wood are definitely not found in bodies/blood of humans including infants. Single use wooden items don’t cause flooding and damage wildlife. These are not the same. They don’t have the same problems.

[deleted]

Re: Food Packaging

#102

Post by b112 »

aldebran wrote: post #32
simulate-me wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The material you’re taking about, plastic, is made from carbon stored inside of the Earth. If we can reliably get it back in the Earth, e.g. via landfill, then I don’t see a huge issue with it. Also, wood was a forever material prior to the evolution of white rot.

Human manufactured Wooden objects are not found in remote places on earth. Tiny specs of wood are definitely not found in bodies/blood of humans including infants. Single use wooden items don’t cause flooding and damage wildlife. These are not the same. They don’t have the same problems.

This is true, however:

Burying is not the same as being thrown in the ocean, or ripped into little pieces and thrown on the ground.

Burying would likely keep plastic in the immediate vicinity, and we have another tool to add. Bacteria.

There are bacteria which eat plastic. If we could find some anaerobic ones, burying might work quite well.

Of course I guess that leaves the carbon free again, unless...

We find or engineer bacteria which produce a great precursor, to make plastic!

It would be a strange outcome, if plastic became fully renewable.

Re: Food Packaging

#103

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

aldebran wrote: post #31
ramraj07 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s because none of us truly want to give up what we have gained. You’re still commenting on a website using a computer or a phone. The only way this will fix is after the planet is truly fully fucked, where no amount of money can protect you from that, then humanity will figure out whacko ways to fix it. Many if not most will suffer indescribably, for sure. But I see no other way this will play out.

Some people do. 1. Reduce plastic consumption as much as you can. 2. Use reusable bags 3. Choose packaging that contains less plastic. This is truly horrible in the US. Apple sauce containers for kids have so much unnecessary plastic. I mean the ones with the fancy caps that are big only to appeal to kids. And to reduce your carbon footprint further - controversial point incoming - reduce or stop eating meat. “But, a…

To that end, does anyone know a good way to deal with dog waste that doesn't involve plastic? I feel like sealing dog waste away in this nigh-indestructible container is a really stupid idea, but I haven't yet thought of a better way of picking the stuff up.

Re: Food Packaging

#104

Post by nightski »

panta wrote: post #89
thomasguide wrote: post #83

This is very interesting, but I can’t help but feel that a glass bottle with a metal cap (and one of those Dutch condiment spatulas) would be just fine for all these applications and also be more easily and effectively reused and recycled. I re-use jam jars for food storage, drinking glasses, mini herb gardens, etc. and could incorporate bottles, jars, and other glass containers into a variety of needs around the hou…

> Transportation costs and breakage are perhaps higher, but maybe that’s a cost we should accept? I suspect that transportation and breakage costs are higher only because we don't account for externalities when considering plastic: in other words producers don't sustain the full costs and are effectively subsidized by the society at large and the environment (through increased healthcare spending, lower QOL, higher o…

Glass has externalities as well. If all transportation weight is significantly higher that is going to have a large impact on global warming until we switch to clean transportation which to be frank is a long ways off if we are being honest.

Re: Food Packaging

#105

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

9dev wrote: post #100
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know? Maybe a few dozen standard sized and broad/wide necked tops made out of laboratory grade glass would do. That stuff is almost indestructible and does not leach or take on anything in the concentrations used for food/drink stuff. Not even tea or coffee stains! So there is the question of the returns. Why returning when you could have a refill machine in store which could clean them fast in safe ways before r…

For reference, this is what we do with beer bottles in Germany. There’s two standard bottle types which you can return to shops, which take any brand, as long as it’s the standard type. They return them to a cleaning facility which distributes them back to the breweries (extremely simplified, there’s lots of details like a mandatory deposit on reusable bottles consumers pay to incentivise returning them to stores). B…

Nopetynope. I don't remember where exactly anymore because I rarely buy beer, but I think it was Lidl where I returned some Tsingtao bottles and heard the machine crushing them, thinking WTF?!

Edit: I know this isn't true for every glass bottle, but it happens. There are one way glass bottles in .de

Which you still have to return, to get the 8 or 15 cents(don't know exactly) back if you care.

Re: Food Packaging

#106

Post by simondotau »

V1ndaar wrote: post #85
simondotau wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinatingly, single use plastic bags are so impossibly thin that you'd have to reuse a reusable bag more times than they're likely to last. I have not seen any data, but I'm willing to bet that our consumption of plastic has increased, with any reduction in single use plastic bags more than offset by an increase in "reusable" bags. If instead of normalising the use of reusable bags, we normalised soft plastics (LDP…

It's unfortunate you're being downvoted. Your intuition is spot on. Here's [0] a report from the Danish Environmental Protection Agency about life cycle analysis of different shopping bags. See table 4 on page 18 in the summary. A cotton bag needs to be reused 7,100 times and an organic cotton one even 21,000 times to reach parity in its environmental impact compared to a single use plastic bag that's reused as a tra…

For what it’s worth, I come back to check on my reply after 8 hours to find it has a score of 1. So if there has been any downvotes they have been perfectly balanced out by upvotes.

I’m not a fan on indiscriminate use of petroleum products but I really think people underestimate just how thin a single use bag is. Next time you finish a plastic bottle of milk or juice, weigh the container and see how many single use bags it takes to match that weight.

Single use plastic bags are a problem, but like plastic straws, they’re not even in the top 100 of culprits. People pick on them because they’re easy and because they’re symbolic.

Re: Food Packaging

#107

Post by bluedino »

adewinter wrote: post #10

It's weird that CT scans cost hundreds (thousands?) of dollars when used in medicine but at the airport everyone's baggage is routinely scanned for approx. $free. Is the hardware and software needed for CT scans really that expensive or not?

I had a scan done a few months ago and marveled a bit at the machine. It was 20 years old but the room it was in was probably very expensive to build. There was a considerable amount of electrical power going to the room. And you can't just let a newbie run the machine. The liability alone of having a patient with a metal sliver in their eye or piercing still installed must be insane.

Re: Food Packaging

#108

Post by amelius »

> Every time you open the refrigerator, a heroic engineering effort looks back at you.

Yeah but the biggest effort went into making it cheap.

Re: Food Packaging

#109

Post by bluedino »

Semaphor wrote: post #57
ramraj07 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are saying it’s not the same but counterpoint: An MRI scan in a state of the art facility in Chennai India in at least 50 different facilities costs 2000-4000 Rupees or $26. The machines cost the same if not more here due to import duties. Labor is cheap but these labs truly compete with each other and that’s what drives the price down. So please acknowledge that the healthcare system in the US and other place…

A pure CT Scan in Germany (paid for by public health insurance unless you do one for fun), without anything else (consultation, contrast materials, etc.) is billed 110-170 € (USD 120-190). Considering labor is more expensive here, that sounds comparable.

But what is the 'real cost'? Is it that much higher in Germany than the USA? What does the CT tech make, how much was the machine to buy, how expensive is the rent where the machine is installed, what are electricity costs...

Re: Food Packaging

#110

Post by declanjscott »

amelius wrote: post #108

> Every time you open the refrigerator, a heroic engineering effort looks back at you. Yeah but the biggest effort went into making it cheap.

Second paragraph: “Behind each plastic bottle cap is a careful engineering process that balances cost, user experience, and manufacturability at massive scale.”
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