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Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

lumafield.com

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Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#41

Post by _cenw »

Ma8ee wrote: post #17
squokko wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recycling also doesn't achieve anything environmentally

The recycling reduces the amount of oil that goes into new plastic, which eventually will be incinerated and contribute to the climate crisis.

the demand for non-virgin plastic is practically zero, while the cost is higher

there are no economic incentives to use recycled plastic, and regulation mandating its use is minimal to non-existing. so most plastic that could be recycled isn't, and not because it isn't available/collected/sorted.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#42

Post by throwaway88409 »

dmitrygr wrote: post #5
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.

Plastic bottles weigh less and can be made thinner. Transportation costs dominate the cost of most consumables

Transport cost is one factor, but even in countries where glass bottles are sold alongside plastic ones they are unpopular to the end user themselves because of their inconvenience.

The common 2kg×6 PET bottles format is too heavy for glass bottles, so you end up paying more for heavier 1.5kgx6 bottles that are going to last you less.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#43

Post by londons_explore »

It does mean this cap is practically impossible to clean, and provides a lot of surface area and crevices for mould to grow or plasticizers to leak from the packaging into the product.

All engineering is a tradeoff, and I would be interested to see how those factors were considered when doing the redesign.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#44

Post by 7734128 »

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.

Glass is in no way environmentally friendly. It takes a huge amount of energy to produce glass, and a singel glass bottle requires a lot of it. PET bottle recycling is the closest we got to a functional plastic recycling system.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#46

Post by skriticos2 »

defrost wrote: post #27
4gotunameagain wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does Germany recycle 60% of its plastic waste? There is obviously hope, just not enough incentive because it costs.

Step one: virtually eliminate uneccesary plastic so there's far less waste and ideally most is of the type that can be recycled. I've not been in Germany for a long while, but I was impressed when last there by a near complete absence of excess packaging, nails in big boxes sold by weight rather than pre sorted into tiny plastic packets, etc. No idea if they kept that up. Addendum: Apparently so, and they have 5 type…

Yea, that's basic culture here. The bins are also sized according, and using the recycle bins is cheaper. There is still unsorted/compound waste, but plastics + metals go into the yellow/recycle bin automatically. Same for paper. Municipal waste centers are basically recycling sorters, where you have to declare waste type. You can offload recyclables for free and other waste costs you an arm and a leg, so there most certainly is incentive to follow.

Not that I'd take the recycling percentage at face value, there are certainly challenges. But the overall system is fairly solid.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#47

Post by seszett »

asdff wrote: post #31
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.

I go through a 64 gallon trash bin a week. By my back of the envelope calculation thats about 1.3 chevy tahoes worth of trash a year, and that's just me one American out of 400 million so all told we are dealing with maybe half a billion chevy tahoes of trash a year we need to do something with or put someplace if most Americans consume like I do.

> I go through a 64 gallon trash bin a week.

That seems absurdly large to me.

64 gallons is 250 litres. We're four and we use about one 30 litres (8 gallons) bag for "rest" trash per week (everything not recyclable, including diapers which take a lot of space, so hopefully soon we can at least halve that trash volume) one 30 litres bag for recyclable plastic/metal every two weeks and maybe one 30 litres bag for compostable stuff (mostly just vegetable and fruit peels from cooking) every two weeks or so.

That's about 60 litres or 15 gallons per week for a normal-sized family. I can see some of my neighbours having somewhat larger bags, some with smaller bags, but I feel like we are mostly average for our area (in Belgium).

In fact, a quick search tells me that Belgians have produced on average 683 kg of trash per year in 2022, which comes to 13 kg per week per person and seems rather consistent with my numbers.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#48

Post by ffgjgf1 »

7734128 wrote: post #44
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.

Glass is in no way environmentally friendly. It takes a huge amount of energy to produce glass, and a singel glass bottle requires a lot of it. PET bottle recycling is the closest we got to a functional plastic recycling system.

No micro plastics though which is quite nice.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#49

Post by soultrees »

robinwa wrote: post #16
obmelvin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until someone develops some sort of multi-spectral imaging that can reliably sort plastic based on it's composition there's little hope of recycling plastic. And then you still need different enzymes that can break down different compositions. It's sad, but realistically almost all plastic one disposes of needs to go in the trash can rather than recycling. You can't even rely on dedicated collection - https://abcnews…

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.

Re: Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

#50

Post by animal531 »

petepete wrote: post #8
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.

In the 80s in the UK we had milk delivered every morning in glass bottles by a huge fleet of electric vehicles. The empty bottles were left out, collected by the milkman, sterilised and reused. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_float

Same here in South Africa, albeit just with a normal truck. They also delivered Orange and/or Guava Juice depending on what tokens you'd put out.
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