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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'

#341

Post by crazygringo »

morsch wrote: post #107
crazygringo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but all the glass that gets used for reuse is for liquids , which are also all heavy to begin with. Do you have examples of successful packaging reuse for solid dry food such as Pringles? Or cereal? Or sugar? Or chocolate? (And that's before even getting into packaging of meat, fish, etc.)

Paper can be used for some of these. E.g. sugar and flour are usually sold in plain paper (not even cardboard) packaging[1] in Germany and, from a cursory check, in some other European countries. It doesn't work for everything because it's not airtight. [1] https://www.amazon.de/S%C3%BCdzucker-Feinzucker-10er-Pack-10...

Of course... but to clarify, I was asking about reuse specifically. I can't think of anything you'd reuse the paper packaging used with sugar or flour for...

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

#342

Post by Mirioron »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #122
Mirioron wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The natural progression of this is to create large plastic bootle/container deposits. Again this will never happen because it obviously stops the current externalization of costs in the plastic business. We already have that in a lot of EU countries. Every soda bottle has an additional deposit cost (10 cents) on top of the soda itself. You pay that when you purchase it and get the 10 cents back when you take the bo…

> We already have that in a lot of EU countries Citation needed? There are many glass deposit schemes, but apart from Norway and maybe Germany, other EU countries' _plastic_ deposit schemes to my knowledge are either draft proposals or rejected draft proposals? What exactly do you mean by a _lot_ of EU countries?

>In Europe, 10 countries have implemented programs, with return rates ranging between 82% in Estonia and 98% in Germany.

https://plasticsmartcities.org/products/deposit-return-progr...

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

#343

Post by DoingIsLearning »

jacknews wrote: post #55

The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil. But IMHO manufacturers should be on the hook for the lifecycle of their products. Either through taxes, or some kind of market-driven bidding mechanism, they should have financial penalties (or even rewards), based on product environmental impact. The whole recycling movement seems to me…

> The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil.

This is incredibly uninformed and misleading. Burying it will not solve any problems, a PET bootle takes something like 450 years to fully breakdown, on top of that the particles released as it breaks down will be washed away into the subsoil and end up in ground water, then rivers, water supply, and eventually then back into the oceans.

Most plastics also have a hazardous health side effect they act as hormone disruptors, effectively mimicking estrogen. Having any additional plastic purposefully break down and leak in even greater concentrations, into our water supply, sounds like a remarkably poor idea.

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

#344

Post by crazygringo »

gmueckl wrote: post #104
crazygringo wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but all the glass that gets used for reuse is for liquids , which are also all heavy to begin with. Do you have examples of successful packaging reuse for solid dry food such as Pringles? Or cereal? Or sugar? Or chocolate? (And that's before even getting into packaging of meat, fish, etc.)

There are more and more stores that sell dry food without packaging. The customers have to bring their packaging (jars, etc..) required to take the goods home.

Wow really? I live in NYC and I've never seen any of that in any regular grocery store.

I suppose you might be able to do that in Chinatown or at some specialty spice or coffee stores... and maybe this is a dumb question, but: how do they weigh it?

Because with paper/plastic the weight is negligible so it doesn't really make a difference. But if you bring your own heavy mason jars then you need to tare it... and if you're doing it yourself then what, you need to affix the labels it prints to your jars? (Which would be annoying to have to scrape off every time.) Or if the cashier does it when you check out then you don't have an empty one to tare with... how does it work in practice? I'm genuinely curious how this gets solved.

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

#345

Post by vasco »

chongli wrote: post #199
learnstats2 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you use Pringles cans for that makes them so useful: say you were buying one per week?

I don’t buy one per week. Maybe a few cans per year. I use them for storing sleeves of soda crackers (they fit perfectly even though the crackers are squares). They’re also good for storing snacks of various kinds, dry spaghetti noodles (or any pasta, really). Pretty much any dry goods that you don’t want crushed are a great fit!

Don't all those things come in packaging already? Aren't you just switching one package for another? What's the difference in keeping pasta in the plastic wrapping it comes in?

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

#346

Post by JoeAltmaier »

fredophile wrote: post #325
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool! I'll have to go out and buy some Pringles, I need those things done. Normally I don't buy Pringles at all, not in decades. Because, honestly, they're the consistency of pasteboard and taste of mostly salt. The bottom rung on the snack ladder. I snack on nothing instead of Pringles if that's the only option. But the can! That seems worthwhile now that you call out its many uses.

Wouldn't it be better to find someone that likes Pringles and take their can when they're done? Buying something you don't enjoy so you can reuse the packaging, that most people throw away, seems like a poor solution.

Yeah but would I store food in a paperboard can that somebody else had grubbed their hands around in? Maybe its not dooable.

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

#347

Post by korethr »

nickff wrote: post #331
cogburnd02 wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I agree that it's probably a manufacturing cost issue, but I disagree that a draw that long is necessarily difficult to perform. One can buy extruded aluminum in various shapes, in very thin wall thicknesses, in lengths measured in meters or more. At a previous job, I semi-regularly worked with aluminum angle with about about 1mm wall thickness, several feet long. And note that the length of a typical energy drink is something like 2/3 of the length of a Pringles can.

Now, I doubt an aluminum Pringles can would need 1mm wall thickness for sufficient strength to deal with the usual rigors of being handled by a minimum wage shipping or shelf-stocking employee. However, I will concede that something with say, the typical .01-.02 wall thickness of a soda/beer can may be harder to produce with a workflow of cutting can-lengths from a large piece of extruded stock. Depending on how the stock was cut, you risk crushing it. At that thickness, you'd do better to stamp the final can size & shape from crude blanks. Now, at high enough volume, it could be worth it to in-house the can-stamping operation; beer companies are an example. I could see Pringles having enough volume to justify in-house production of their cans.

But I don't think a .01-.02 wall thickness would be enough for a Pringles can. Yes, soda cans are strong enough to endure shipping and handling, but most of that strength comes from the fact that their contents are under pressure; significantly moreso than a pringles can, I'd bet. Witness how easy it becomes to crush a soda can once it is opened, even when it is still partially full. So .01-02mm wouldn't do. I'd guess .1-2mm would, however. But at a 10x wall thickness you're using 10x the material if my math is right, so an all-aluminum Pringles can with a .1mm wall thickness would cost at least 10x to produce as a soda can of equal length.

So yeah, manufacturing cost issue is probably at least one factor. But I'm willing to be wrong about that.

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

#348

Post by kbenson »

Nasrudith wrote: post #297
kbenson wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times. I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut down because a vendor in a different country offered such good pricing for a while that nobody could/wanted to compete, but has since greatly raised they prices. Weight does matter quite a bit when shipping something literally halfway around the world, but we don'…

Weight matters less than you would think for long distance shipping - look at ore and crude oil for one both could have /major/ weight savings by in situ refining but the economics confirm shipping it to be refined is the winner. Global shipping's sheer scale tends to snap people's intuitions in two compared to the actual numbers as it feels like it really shouldn't be this efficient by cost or carbon. The reality is…

The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clean stuff" to "we don't want certain materials at all". Unfortunately, since they were such a reliable vendor for so long, many of the local recycling plants shut down, here and elsewhere in the world, and a lot of stuff we used to recycle ends up in the landfill, but there's also a lot of stuff that's right on the edge, so some recycling centers store it for a period hoping the economics make sense in the near future as markets fluctuate.

Now, global shipping is cheap, but I'm sure for large portions of the country there's also a portion of the cost which is even getting the goods to a large port, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Localized recycling helps not only with the the global shipping, but also a portion of the local shipping, as well as likely bringing back capacity to recycle goods that we just can't feasibly do economically right now. Some of that is shipping cost, some of it is just rectifying the mistakes of depending almost wholly on an outside vendor that then cut off service.

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

#349

Post by war1025 »

FatalLogic wrote: post #332
adingus wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Universal Pringles Cans!

(A play on Universal Paperclips [1], which was featured on here earlier this week)

[1] https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/index2.html

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

#350

Post by gmueckl »

crazygringo wrote: post #344
gmueckl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are more and more stores that sell dry food without packaging. The customers have to bring their packaging (jars, etc..) required to take the goods home.

Wow really? I live in NYC and I've never seen any of that in any regular grocery store. I suppose you might be able to do that in Chinatown or at some specialty spice or coffee stores... and maybe this is a dumb question, but: how do they weigh it? Because with paper/plastic the weight is negligible so it doesn't really make a difference. But if you bring your own heavy mason jars then you need to tare it... and if y…

I don't recall seeing one in the US yet, but they are getting more numerous in Germany. I haven't shopped there yet, but from what I read you are expected to tare the scale. How they handle that at the checkout I don't know.
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