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Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

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Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#391

Post by xnyan »

coryrc wrote: post #345
ArnoVW wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this will blow your mind, but where I do my shopping (France) this exists in many places and there are no queues. It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want. Perhaps you prefer the “old” way. Perhaps it is faster. But if we can not make tiny changes like that, how will we explain oursel…

Do you know why medicines have a seal on them in the USA? https://www.packaging-gateway.com/comment/tylenol-murders-fo... There are psychos all over America. Wanton violence and anti-social behaviour are cultural norm. You can get shot because someone else looked at another person. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Kansas_City_parade_shoo... We can't have nice things because we don't enforce any standard of conduc…

>Progressives are more concerned about git branch names than ensuring children actually learn something in school.

Source on this?

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#392

Post by asadotzler »

gs17 wrote: post #319
rekttrader wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My bet is that it is just cheaper to make without the silicone and as an added bonus it’s more recyclable. It’s just cost savings that can be greenwashed.

But is that so bad? Assuming it works about as well, it's likely more resource efficient to make in general, too.

But you don't know that. All the previous equipment obsoloeted and tosssed somewhere. All the previous workers retrained or fired. It could be far worse. Trusting plastic makers to tell you the truth about plastic recycling is like trusting WWE to tell you the truth about sport.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#393

Post by singleshot_ »

infecto wrote: post #315
singleshot_ wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair point, but I don’t store very much of my food in a tire and I rarely, if ever put food in a shirt before I microwave it. In the other hand, I probably have about a pound of Tupperware in my body. I guess my point is that you’re right about micro plastics in the environment, but I’m more concerned about the ones in me. (Strenuously agree that both are bad).

I don’t know the exact sources and that’s what we should be studying. For all we know it’s tires to roadways to rain runoff that makes it into ground water or bodies of water that we eventually treat for drinking.

Fair point. Needs more study before dummies like me make assumptions.

(Still not buying any Tupperware, though).

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#394

Post by asadotzler »

s_dev wrote: post #304
ccc3 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high. Also, I’d…

Yeah -- it's sort of like those people who complain about the plastic lining on compostable coffee cups making them pointless. Like if a 100% plastic and a 1% plastic end up in a landfill or elsewhere the 1% coffee cup is just going to two orders of magnitude less damage than the pure plastic one, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good but OP does have a point about the oil lobby push but that is a separate but re…

nah, it's all a scam and that they can get you back into the scam so easily with a little bit of marketing is a serious indictment of our education system and the ability of our population to reason effectively.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#395

Post by asadotzler »

juujian wrote: post #269
jrochkind1 wrote: post #223

> 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…

Yup. recyclable != will be recycled. If recyclers don't know that the cap specifically is recycable, it won't be recycled. In fact, if only this brands cup is recycable, the chance of it being recycled is probably 0

worse recyclable != recyclable most of the time .it's all a scam. wake up.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#396

Post by asadotzler »

buildsjets wrote: post #273
jrochkind1 wrote: post #223

> 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…

eli5: The bottle is PET and is easily and commonly recycled, if it actually makes it to the recycling facility. About 30% of PET sold in the US actually gets recycled. It's the clear soda bottle plastic. The cap was previously 99% PP and 1% Silicone and was not recyclable at all. The cap is now 100% PP and therefore recyclable in theory, but in practice there are limited facilities that can recycle PP.

but the 30% is the tip of the spear of a scam so fuck them because plastic recycling is a joke and they've put the burden and blame on us for failing when they never had the science or the tools to do it at scale and won't any time soon. that you're so easily sucked into their scam with selective statistics is sad but don't spread your imaginary industry to others. got an STD, keep it to yourself. this is no different.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#397

Post by asadotzler »

lp4vn wrote: post #4

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.

you got scammed by Big Oil. that's what happened.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#398

Post by robinwa »

soultrees wrote: post #49
robinwa wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conventional multispectral and hyperspectral can't keep up (and integrate well) into existing sorting lines. They induce a slow-down in conveyer belt speeds or you have to install splitters and buy multiple $100K cameras. (we're working to solve this problem though in the classic VC backed way - DM for more information!)

Ah, another factorio fan I see.

Got me there...

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#399

Post by asadotzler »

ezrast wrote: post #354
infecto wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I generally agree with a plastic tax but lets imagine there was one. I am honestly not even sure how you would set the price, my whole point is the externalities are hard to measure. I also suspect the cost of the implementation will be on the shoulders of the consumer. We can hand wave it away and say we can create more rules to prevent it but at the end of the day that is most likely what will happen.

There's no reason the tax needs to directly reflect the environmental impact. We figure out an amount that is enough to change corporate behavior without bankrupting them, maybe with some kind of sliding scale to put more responsibility on larger businesses who would otherwise benefit from regulatory capture, throw in some exceptions for the aforementioned medical devices, etc. "Pricing the externalities in" is a nic…

and when they jack up prices, we use the tax revenue to subsidize the poor so only the well off pay that assholery, we can do this for carbon in all forms.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#400

Post by treflop »

xyzzyz wrote: post #380
audunw wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we…

I mean your analysis isn’t taking into account the high cost of reducing entropy.

Picking damaged fruit from undamaged fruit or mixing a low-entropy fuel with a low-entropy additive to make a high entropy product is cheap.

Sorting through trash is much more expensive because the entropy in a trash stream is massive, and it only gets worse downstream in the chain. You’ve got all sorts of different types of things mixed together, some possibly dangerous.

And we already offload a lot of this sorting to third-world countries and this is not exactly an ethical solution.

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