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Comment by yodon | Hacker News Reader

When my kids were young, they went on a field trip to a recycling plant. As a parent, the most interesting discovery was the sorting facility we visited didn't sort plastic by type because you can't expect people earning minimum wage to sort LDPE from HDPE from etc. So what did the big commercial recycling facility do? They sorted plastic by shape. Things shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as trash, things not shaped like cups and bowls were sorted as recyclable. It was pretty clear at that point recycling plastic was just a for show activity.

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But plastic is effectively recycled in lots of places in the world. Just because that plant sucked it doesn't mean all do. Add to that the commercial plastic waste, pallet wrap for instance is already separated when it is sold to the recyclers.

Better than all that of course is re-use. When I was a child, in the UK, large glass bottles of lemonade had a 20p deposit, refundable on return. I believe I believe it is still common in Germany. This went away in the UK because large super-markets didn't want the hassle of dealing with returns, IIRC

I’d like to see fewer plastic items all around. There’s no reason a store must sell me a container in addition to the goods I buy.

It complicates transportation to sell all goods in bulk. I'm glad that stores don't charge an extra 1.5 cents for the plastic bag around every gallon of milk and pound of rice.

You, yourself, might have enough responsibility and self-control to prioritize cleaning your containers, but this is not true for all humans. The store would lose business if their competitor sold milk already in bags or boxes, but you had to bring your own milk bag to their store. And someone's bags might have bacterial or other contaminants and get them sick, then they blame the store and get the health department to shut them down. (Tangent: Why is most milk still sold in boxes, and not in plastic?)

Glass is fragile, metals cause unexpected chemical reactions, wood is permeable & requires additional materials (wax, glue) to seal properly, and cardboard has poor durability.

I think he might be referencing things like shrink wrapped banannas, or plastic boxes around Tupperware containers, or when you buy a bag of something and every single individual piece has it's own wrapping inside the bag.

There is a lot of completely unnecessary packaging that companies use because it gets them a 0.02% increase in profit and they don't have to pay the actual costs of the plastic pollution they are creating

There’s not going to be one solution to all things. That’s a strawman argument.

I’m for allowing for ways to not use so much plastic. The technology exists - for instance, the oatmeal cubes I buy at Trader Joe’s could be charged to me one at a time and at the time they leave their container. It’d take take some doing, but it’s doable. For people not willing or able to provide a container then sell them the old plastic covered cubes of oatmeal in boxes two at a time. And charge them more.

> the oatmeal cubes I buy at Trader Joe’s could be charged to me one at a time and at the time they leave their container.

The Internet of Things can help this to become a reality, with sensors on the box lid and an internet connection. Why charge a customer only once when you can charge them twice?

I’ll rephrase:

could be charged to me one at a time when they leave their container

When you buy the box of oatmeal cubes, you're buying the right to buy oatmeal cubes. When you remove them from the container is when you actually purchase the cubes.

Similar to a Costco card, or buying a phone to access apps in the app store.

Exactly. In the UK right now there is a push to sell wine and gin in plastic kegs. Take your own bottle and fill up for less. Packaging these products in bulk significantly simplifies distribution and reduces cost.

I didn't get the impression he was arguing, just trying to bring clarity.

Exactly. Supermarket have added a lot of plastic packaging supposedly for our 'convenience', like adding separator sheets between slices of cheese, or strawberries in a plastic container instead of the cardboard they used to be packaged with (so you can judge the quality better?).

Or the convenience of the cashier, so they can see you packed the right vegetables in the sack.

And probably they use plastics instead of paper because its cheaper, and they can scrape a penny off the price.

A lot of the power on what packaging is used is still in the consumer's hands, though. Just don't buy those cookies that are individually wrapped.

You might not see the container cost on the receipt but the balance is there. The balance to society to clean up your spent containers are not on your bill. Tell me how you’d solve that problem without generic containers and then I’ll entertain your suggestion(s).

Milk has been sold in glass multiuse bottles for far longer than in plastic single-use.

Why did we switch?

Spoilage. Glass breaks, and is also thick and heavy = higher shipping costs.

And they used to be delivered to your doorstep each morning. You’d leave the empties out for them to reuse.

What would the dairy do if someone broke a glass bottle - who pays for it? What if some ignoble soul starts stealing these glass bottles from customer porches to get recycling money for them?

i'd really like amazon to get rid of all possible packaging. I wonder if Walmart, Target and Amazon could agree to only sell products without cosmetic packaging, or upcharge for them, if that would make a dent or just a drop in the bucket...

I've always thought we should put responsibility of recycling on the seller, the incentive is not there for them unless they have to manage the waste. Walmart should have giant bins that accept our product packaging waste: styrofoam, plastics, cellophane, all of it goes to a single bin, and now they have to sort and recycle it. Then the incentive would change. Maybe we can't do it with bins, but a recycle Tax paid directly by the marketing assholes.

It wouldn't take long for Walmart to start demanding more simpler recyclable paper packaging over plastic if they took responsibility for the waste they generate for their packaging.

Many places in the US have an either 5 cent or 10 cent deposit on bottles (glass and plastic) and cans.

And a healthy smuggling market...

> Alvarado and Sanchez were arrested and charged with felony recycling fraud, attempted grand theft, filing a false or forged document, and conspiracy, officials said.

https://www.ajc.com/news/national/men-smuggle-000-empty-bott...

Michigan is one of the 10 cent states. But only on carbonated beverages. So there's a bunch of aluminum containers that don't carry a deposit.

Efficient plastic recycling is very hard to do cost-efficiently due to the many types of plastic that are typically mixed together. But there is much research and innovation in this field.

One method that looks quite promising in this regard is Magnetic Density Separation (MDS) under development at Technical University Delft:

https://materialdistrict.com/article/innovations-plastic-rec...

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