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Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

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Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#141

Post by Gud »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #16

To everyone blaming consumers: I encourage you to take a solution driven mindset here. Consumers won't change. There's far too many people, some of which don't care about the environment. Tight regulations and additional tax on single use plastics can reduce plastic waste.

> To everyone blaming consumers: I encourage you to take a solution driven mindset here. Consumers won't change. There's far too many people, some of which don't care about the environment.

Sorry, but this is absolutely not true. I routinely travel between Liverpool and Zürich, you can take a guess which one looks like a pristine modern city and which one looks like a junkyard/dump. Let me tell you, it's not just because there are more bins in one of those cities.

Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#142

Post by sn9 »

blitzar wrote: post #50
strogonoff wrote: post #5

Thinking that recycling would address the problem of plastic pollution is wishful thinking. Plastic recycles very poorly. Companies like plastic because it means thicker margins for them, environment be damned; the proper solution is not to buy into the “consumers should be recycling” narrative but to thin out their margins so that using more sustainable and recyclable materials is financially attractive again.

> Thinking that recycling would address the problem of plastic pollution is wishful thinking People putting their rubbish in the bin rather than throwing it in the nearest gutter / river / garden would get us 90% of the way there.

Using glass containers would get us 100% there regardless.

Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#143

Post by sn9 »

gadders wrote: post #139
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glass, metal, etc. You forgot paper, actually. All are better than the plastic crap forced down our throats.

Yes, paper straws are great.

You can get biodegradable straws that don't suck.

Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#144

Post by Freak_NL »

olejorgenb wrote: post #136
Freak_NL wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glass and aluminium are recycled. This works quite well. Plastic (and clothing) on the other hand, is now mostly just collected and afterwards discarded (burned, shipped overseas to dumping grounds, etc.). Plastic recycling factories are going bankrupt (five in the tiny Netherlands in the space of one year), because they can't compete with new plastic. Textile processors are stuck with warehouses full of unusable dis…

> Plastic (and clothing) on the other hand, is now mostly just collected and afterwards discarded (burned, shipped overseas to dumping grounds, etc.). This is not true for drink bottles. (though they are not 100% recyclable due to material degradation, and there might be safety challenges for products made of recycled feedstock) I can't claim nothing is burned/etc, but it's most certainly not "mostly" for countries w…

They are collected — this is probably good, it means that at least it doesn't end up in the (local) environment — and a part of that is certainly reused, but have a look at the reporting digging into the actual numbers from the past few years. What do you think happens with those plastic recyclers who file for bankruptcy? In one case a local municipality is now stuck with thousands of bales of shredded PET left on the facility's grounds that no one other recycler wants to have, not even for free.

In part, it is the oil industry itself which kept the myth of plastic recycling going:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/climate/california-exxon-...

Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#145

Post by eru »

silisili wrote: post #138
eru wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm even more fortunate: I have fresh water that comes out of a tap. Very convenient. > Single use plastics should have been outlawed years ago. Or at least taxed to high heaven. Tax, don't ban. And make the tax proportional to the estimated damage.

Sure, maybe water was a poor example. Let's look at milk, assuming we don't all have cows at hand here. In most places, you can only buy it in plastic and sometimes paper carton, though that seems to be dwindling. There are no other options, so people just grab the plastic one. There's a local place by me that sells their milk in beautiful glass jugs. They charge $5 a jug, but you get that back if you return it unbro…

That's an interesting example.

Keep in mind that single use items like plastic or paper cartons also only have a finite cost in terms of resources and environmental impact. So you'd have to weigh that against the potentially more annoying logistics of having to go back to the store to return your glass jug; especially if you do that journey by car. (Recycling glass is about as resource intensive as making new glass. And both take a lot more than making a tetrapak.)

I grew up in Germany, where re-using glass bottles is widespread, most iconically for beer. So on the consumer side there's unlikely to be extra journeys for that: most stores take bake used bottles.

Aluminum and steel cans are widely recycled around the world as far as I can tell. So much so that you can actually get (small amounts of) money for collecting aluminum cans. No extra law or tax required there: if you don't recycle your can, in many places someone else will.

Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#146

Post by strogonoff »

olejorgenb wrote: post #134
abdullahkhalids wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is glass too heavy? For decades, when average income was lower, it was the standard container in which soft drinks came in. Its just that plastic is cheaper, and replaced glass. But surely richer people can afford glass now. Interestingly, both have different environmental externalities, and not sure how those have changed over the decades and will in the future.

"too heavy" is of course relative, but the addition cost/energy-use of the heavier transportation surely is non-trivial? If the bottles are to be reused, volume become an challenge. I admit I don't have any references at hand, but I'm quite sure I've seen articles claiming plastic bottles "win" by a comfortable margin from an energy perspective. Of course - energy is not everything.

I’ve seen analyses showing that aluminium actually is less energy-expensive than even plastic when it comes to transportation[0]. Initial aluminium is pricey, but recycled is cheap and unlike plastic it’s infinitely recyclable. But then yes, there is the inner layer of plastic in today’s aluminium cans, and proper glass beats both in terms of cleanness when it comes to the food it contains.

Additionally, the energy needed to produce even the initial, energy-intensive glass or aluminium could perhaps come from renewables and perhaps some emissions can be captured given enough motivation. (And when it comes to transportation perhaps today’s approach of lugging finished bottles around the globe can evolve towards moving source material and packaging it locally.)

The math is not straightforward.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/plastic-bottles-vs-alu...

Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#147

Post by strogonoff »

sn9 wrote: post #143
gadders wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, paper straws are great.

You can get biodegradable straws that don't suck.

I’m afraid “don’t suck” may be a technical term describing a fatal flaw when it comes to straw manufacturing… ;)

Re: Five Companies Produce Nearly 25 Percent of All Plastic Waste Worldwide

#148

Post by anonzzzies »

eek04_ wrote: post #52
anonzzzies wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try to get stuff in glass/aluminium bottles that I clean and reuse myself. It's not easy. Supermarkets is an immediate no-go (when I was young, our village supermarket sold Coke and Milk and other stuff from taps , so you just brought your own); now it's something impossible. But for local farmers, local springs etc it works well. Same for veg, fruit, meat, eggs etc; no plastic needed. Allows us to throw almost all…

Back in the day, my father worked as a researcher for a large, old dairy company. He was tasked with finding out what was environmentally friendly for packaging milk; whether they should start offering milk in washable glass bottles instead of their current cartons, for environmental reasons. He found that the environmental impact created by the washing of the glass bottles was worse than the impact of the entire pro…

Yes, but we aren't going back to this anyway. Also ; it's not only about drinks; everything comes packaged in plastic in supermarket. Now more reusable bags and paper bags are used over here, but you fill them with plastic nonetheless. It seems hard to believe that me being able to throw everything in the yard and it being gone vs throwing away bags of plastic is worse. And need to take into account that plastic recycling isn't great to begin with.

But agreed: all factors have to be taken into account. Maybe there are better plastics that are reusable easier and faster.

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