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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'

#331

Post by nickff »

cogburnd02 wrote: post #311
chongli wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s where the first R comes in. Only buy as many Pringles cans as you can reuse. People don’t want to do that either, though, because Pringles are addictive. That may be the root problem. There’s no way they’ll sell Pringles in bags though; they’re way too delicate for anything but a purpose-built rigid container.

> a purpose-built rigid container. Why not Al cans?

It's probably a cost & manufacturing issue; I would guess that a draw that long is physically difficult to perform. It may be practical for something 1/2 or 1/3 the length of the pringles can.

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

#332

Post by FatalLogic »

adingus wrote: post #17
masklinn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I 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. Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw ca…

Maybe they can progressively make Pringles cans bigger so you can store your old cans inside your new cans.

This scenario inevitably ends up with the solar system inside a very big Pringles can

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

#333

Post by joedevon »

masklinn wrote: post #15
chongli wrote: post #6

I 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 l…

> I 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. Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw ca…

Since Pringles tastes like cardboard, why don't they start making the can out of Pringles?

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

#334

Post by mythrwy »

stx wrote: post #157
Ensorceled wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. The “first world” really needs to get it’s act together on this.

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.

I was in Guatemala in the early 90's on a bus and it stopped near a stand with people selling soda.

The procedure was open the soda bottle, pour the soda into a plastic bag, put a straw in the bag and tie it. The vendor kept the bottle (presumably you could keep the bottle yourself if you paid the deposit with your soda). I kept waiting to see a bag leak or some other disaster but it seemed to mostly work. You couldn't put your soda down though. Maybe it was a scheme to encourage rapid consumption or accidental loss and sell more sodas, not sure.

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

#335

Post by spaceribs »

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.

Honestly, how cool would it be if it popped open like a pillsbury crescent roll can?

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

#336

Post by parliament32 »

keepingscore wrote: post #254
parliament32 wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100% There's literally no way to do this. Any costs you try to pass on will just be passed to the customer, and there's no legal way to prevent that from happening. And no, the customer won't care about a 5c recycling tariff, which is about the most you could charge for this without getting sued to oblivion.

I don't understand the sued comment. Why can we heavily tax gas to pay for roads but taxing plastics to pay for recycling costs is a non starter?

Maybe I misunderstood the parent but "force manufacturers to bear the costs" is very different from taxing the end consumer goods, no?

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

#337

Post by WalterBright »

chongli wrote: post #19
masklinn wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I 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. Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw ca…

That’s where the first R comes in. Only buy as many Pringles cans as you can reuse. People don’t want to do that either, though, because Pringles are addictive. That may be the root problem. There’s no way they’ll sell Pringles in bags though; they’re way too delicate for anything but a purpose-built rigid container.

> Pringles are addictive

Pringles have nothing on Doritos.

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

#338

Post by tutanchamun »

kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #43
awiesenhofer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. Same here. Especially as someone from central europe where most recycling just works and noone even thinks twice about it. Heck, a lot of landfill dumping is even banned here already and anything dumped must be thermally threated first anyway.

Actually, I'm not sure how well recycling works in "Central Europe". In Czechia, at least, although waste sorting seems to work fairly well, as far as I'm aware, the share of plastic waste that gets recycled is negligible. Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity.

Yes, 1 or 2 years ago I saw a short piece about recycling plastics and what really is getting recycled in the end. Many products which would be easy to recycle didn't get recycled because they had fancy labels on them which made it hard or impossible for the machines which resulted in the plastics getting burned instead.

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

#340

Post by DFHippie »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #23

The thing is they don’t need that plastic lid. They say without it the food would be spoiled but if you have a big bag of crisps, you open them and eat them or they go off - this is no different. Kellogg’s seem to believe they have invented a type of crisp that can only be eaten over a period of time.

It's the Pringles brand, though: "once you pop you just can't stop" or something like that. They've built this story around the sound of the lid popping off.
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