361–370 of 472 posts
Very nice. I live alone and often I'm baffled by the sheer amount of garbage that my urban lifestyle generates. I was not alive in the 80's but I was told that people used to use more environment-friendly packaging like glass bottles. Sometimes I wonder why this massive change to everything-should-be-packed-in-plastic happened.
In fairness, for ketchup specifically, glass bottles are an incredible nuisance.
> Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States, but it is becoming more widely accepted So now the relatively small amount of mass in the cap is just as recyclable as the bottle itself -- neither are actually going to be recycled. There's nothing to see here but marketing. And a an interesting engineering puzzle solved, sure. "How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Woul…
I went to a university job fair in 2014 and Heinz had a booth there. I remember asking the recruiter what kind of positions they were recruiting for, and her only response was "We are looking for top talent. Are you top talent?" I was pretty thrown off by that, so pressed her with "Top talent in what? I know statistics and programming, do you need anyone who can do that?" Her only response was "well, do you think you're top talent?" I think I tried to ask a couple more times what they were actually looking for, but she just kept repeating the top talent line. I think I eventually said something like "I think I'm pretty good" before dropping off my résumé, grabbing a pickle-shaped lapel pin, and walking away.
Totally weird experience, and very different from the usual job fair recruiter. If it wasn't for the lapel pin that I still have, I wouldn't even be sure it was a real memory.
I sometimes wonder if my life would've been different if I had had the self-esteem and confidence to look her right in the eye and say "yes, I am top talent".
I also wonder if Heinz is actually hiring and retaining "top talent". When I look at their ketchup bottle design innovations over the years, I wonder if maybe they really are!
Has anyone here ever interviewed there or worked there? Are you in fact top talent? Were you surrounded by top talent? Is a packaged food company secretly where all the really smart people go for jobs? That article about the Unilever ice cream factory the other day makes me think there's more to it than meets the eye.
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Where I grew up the reason stated when they replaced glass with plastic was that the weight of the glass alone caused more pollution from transport than the plastic bottles that replaced them
It's not just about emissions, though. Single-use plastics literally just accumulate in landfills until the end of time, while glass is highly recyclable (and one of the few economically viable ones).
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And we burn most of it anyways. It's not like Japan got plastics and glass recycling to work, some of us hoped around the turn of the century that with the rapid progress of technologies at the time we soon will and did the legal prepwork. At the end of the day it was a bit of a dedicated self driving lane.
Is that so? Do you have any sources for that? Honestly curious.
- 86% of plastics are "recycled", of which 56% is "thermally recycled", the rest 25% is only quoted as "chemical recycling and material recycling combined" in most PR materials, which I think is enough indication that it's not going back into bottles.[1][2]
- I was wrong about glasses: 70% of glass bottle source materials comes from recycled materials[3], and use of reusable bottles have declined over the years and converging into 50%[4](by numbers of bottles?).
- Papers and milk cartons[5] are fine as had always been; I think those were recycled to toilet papers.
0: https://www-cycle.nies.go.jp/magazine/kenkyu/202008.html
1: https://www.sustainability-hub.jp/column/learn/about-chemica...
2: https://www.wbsj.org/activity/conservation/law/plastic-pollu...
3: https://www.glass-3r.jp/data/
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Biologically it is. You could argue on long term effects of microplastics but it's clearly less of a risk than food poisoning.
We're seriously going to say that a substance that was very recently introduced to human society is as risky as food poisoning? How often do the commoners have to suffer through businesses ill-attempt to save money while poisoning us? Leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, asbestos, pet food laced with poisons and filler, baby food laced with heavy metals, opioids, cigarettes, campaigns about seat belts being unsafe,…
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In my local jurisdiction (a part of the US) the recycling bin is only allowed to be filled with cardboard and metal cans. Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash. Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump. Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip…
> Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump. It's reusable, sure. Glass milk bottles you return to be washed and refilled are great. Glass recycling though makes little sense in many areas of the world. You are basically trucking sand around. Just far less efficiently. Glass takes about 40% less energy to melt than sand does, so you need to have a rel…
Energy is not the only metric. We need metrics to roughly quantify ecological destruction due to mining, and account for those in our calculations.
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Its cheaper and easier to ensure sanitary products. We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be…
Glass is recycled infinitely more easily and more widely. Pasabahce sells upcycled and recycled products here, and mark them clearly. Also, we have glass collection bins which has different compartments for clear and colored glass. These are periodically emptied. Even if they are not recycled, a glass jar is used for more than five years in an household, only by replacing the caps in the process. If we don't need the…
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But PP is one of the plastics that CAN be recycled, and IS recycled, often at a much higher rate than in the US. One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful. The other problem USA has is poor edu…
In my local jurisdiction (a part of the US) the recycling bin is only allowed to be filled with cardboard and metal cans. Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash. Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump. Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip…
Mine even stops, gets out, and puts my bins away. Only for my neighbor and me, because we take care of him at the holidays.
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I've mostly switched to pressure cooker, bulk foods (25 lb bags of rice, beans, porridge), and the local produce stand (BYOB). Both my food and packaging waste is now minimal. Most of my plastic waste is from prescriptions. OMG so wasteful. Wax paper bags would be just fine. YMMV.
Remember that these days “waxed” paper is actually PFAS.
Last time I bought parchment paper, I settled on Costco/Kirkland brand, for that reason. I dimly recall it has a silicon-based coating for non-stick feature. Quick look at the box has no info.
I anticipate we'll learn that all this fancy new silicon is toxic as well.
FML.
I still think paper is preferable to plastic. IIRC, Amazon Rx is using paper now.
