451–460 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.
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You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container. And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.
While I’m a big fan of being able to buy quantities in bulk, it’s worth remembering we did just go through a 3 year period that should illuminate why “every Tom, Dick and Harry brings their likely barely washed if not fully contaminated packaging from home and uses the community ladle to scoop out of the community bin into their bag” might not be the best default. At least with factory -> sanitized individual wrappin…
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Interesting, I wonder how they process them and what they become after recycling. Here in Antwerp diapers are explicitly supposed to be put in the rest[0] though. [0] https://www.antwerpen.be/info/restafval
If you search for "luier recycling" you can find out how it's done.
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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…
But we should keep producing more year on year until it's studied properly? Studied by whom? Petrochemical companies have studies on their stuff back for decades. They'd never endanger the public to improve their bottom line. Plastics are fine, dontchaknow?
I personally am excited for the coming years and hopefully us having a better idea how we can use plastic more efficiently. In the near term we should be able to get a better idea of major contributors to microplastics and maybe be able to reduce those.
> 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…
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.
Reduce, reuse, recycle. If they really want to make an impact, they should sell ketchup in bulk at grocery stores, with us bringing in our own reusable ketchup bottle to refill. Disposable packaging creates unnecessary waste.
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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The number is greenwashing because it's including "thermal Recycling" aka burning. https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/ressourcen-abfall/verwe...
How is that even allowed to be called recycling? As in, is it genuinely a term defined legally and, if so, who allowed this to happen? Because burning is most certainly not recycling.
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How is that even allowed to be called recycling? As in, is it genuinely a term defined legally and, if so, who allowed this to happen? Because burning is most certainly not recycling.
Recycled as fuel. Its not that bad energy-wise. We have power plants running off that stuff.
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Do bottles shed microplastics? Manufacturer > store > pantry > garbage can > dump. Isn’t the majority of this buried in the ground in dumps that are sealed off from groundwater? I suspect our clothes, cars/tires, houses, and other things that live outside contribute more to microplastics than food containers.
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).