411–420 of 472 posts
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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).
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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.
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Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it. We most definitely need to fully study the impacts of plastics on the human body. We don’t know the full extent of what it’s doing and it’s important we figure it out. It’s a complicated equation that we do not fully understand. It’s easy to say just ban it but there is are a lot of other negative consequences that will come out of that decisi…
> Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it. Politics is the struggle to gain, retain, and use power. The use of plastics creates a huge amount of wealth and power for many, by definition anything that could affect this is political.
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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…
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.
Ale-8-One[0] sold their feature soda/pop/coke/soft drink in some areas in returnable bottles at least as late as 2010. Word was that if their bottle washing and sanitizing machine died, they'd have to stop that. It turns out nobody's making parts for those machines any more. [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale-8-One
EDIT: The bottles for sale on the website are specifically "non-returnable", not sure if that implies no more returns, or only store-purchased bottles are returnable.
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Most microplastics in your environment are from tires and textiles. Blow molded PE is way down the list on what I'm worried about.
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You along with others have no issue saying plastic is evil, we should ban it, we should tax it, but have done no critical thinking on how to make that actually work.
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The only genuine path to sustainability is reduction. There is no sustainable way to have disposable single-use packaging that you throw away when the bottle empties. Glass bottles with a deposit to incentivize bottle return, following which they are washed and refilled with new product (ideally locally, with fresh ketchup arriving to local distribution centers in bulk), is a much more reasonable approach.
There's a cost associated with bottle return as well. Consumers also may feel weird about buying used packaging. What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.
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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.
Do we honestly with a straight face tell ourselves that consumers are going to remove this cap before recycling and place them in the right bins or there is a recycling facility somewhere with workers removing caps from ketchup bottles? It’s a ludicrous greenwashing idea from the get go. I love the idea of recycling but I just don’t do it anymore when I realized my city’s single stream recycling was likely just endin…
A glass bottle/jar with a metal cap is far superior if the goal was sustainability. Maybe the user experience isn't as desirable but more plastic that isn't going to get recycled doesn't' seem great...
How is packaging that weighs hundreds of times as much, requiring burning hundreds of times as much fuel to transport, more sustainable?
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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…
No. This is what the bargaining stage of grief looks like. We - all of us - want to believe that life can continue on as it has if we just take the right special steps in our kitchen . In fact, the rituals of modern consumers straining to be “sustainable” is reminiscent of a rain dance - and about as effective.
The application of ridicule and dimissal to everything associated with progressivism is a common pattern these days. Effectively, it's reactionary; the reactionaries have done a great job at spreading their messaging and demonizing their perceived enemies, and at the same time making people argue for their own powerlessness.
Demonization, despair (powerlessness), and ridicule are tools for people whose agenda loses on the merits.