The Era of Easy Recycling May Be Coming to an End

I feel like this is just one aspect of environmental awareness that has degraded since the 90s. Packaging has become more wasteful, and there's more of it too, because everything is individually shipped in a box in a truck now (from Amazon etc.) Cars have become bigger and more wasteful than ever (the SUV trend). All the new architecture is full of huge glass windows & curtain walls... one of the most energy-permeable and wasteful barriers (to the extent that a wall is supposed to be a barrier) you could possibly design. But it looks great! As does that hermetically sealed pre-packaged salad in the plastic clamshell. I dunno, we seem to be responding to the problem by pretending all the more ferociously that it doesn't exist.

It doesn't make economic sense to use a different material which is more recyclable because, by the definition of this problem, they're much more expensive.

Perhaps the answer is re-usable plastic containers - maybe some system where you can post them back to the manufacturer for cleaning and re-use.

It might just be that once oil drilling for energy goes away, so does some of this problem - at least in that plastics would cease to be so cheap.

Yet, isn’t that what automation provides? It has been two decades since supermarkets in the Nordic countries have whizbang bottle-return machines that take back plastic, aluminium, and glass bottles as long as the barcode is still legible. Is there really no way to make a machine that scans the barcode of various other forms of plastic packaging (like yoghurt containers, ketchup bottles, etc.) and then directs the item to the appropriate container? Since the machine will know the exact categorization of the packaging on the basis of the barcode, then consumers would not be required to correctly sort plastic rubbish themselves.

They have, they just don't care. It's not directly their problem that you can't recycle their waste until people stop buying there or start returning their waste to them.

We have knit plastic bags that we can put veggies in. Super light (no tare needed) and can hold a lot... Yet we've used them hundreds of times.

Now think of that crappy flimsy plastic bag, or plastic wrapping. It's used once, and "thrown away" (please: define where away is..). That's the problem - single use and nearly impossible to use for anything else.

Oddly they saw no need to market on this.

Any type of plastic used in consumer products needs to be recyclable easily, otherwise outlaw it.

Any food containers need to be compostable.

I'm willing to pay much higher food and product costs so that the waste we create can be easily recycled. If it makes the product economically unviable then maybe the product isn't that useful.

I think a lot actually do realize it. At least where I live, the garbage bins at residences are about 1/2-3/4 the size as the recycle bins (glass has a separate bin). A lot just use it as a garbage bin, because the recycle bin is usually "free" and some pizza boxes don't even fit in the actual garbage bin (without taking time to break it down). A pizza box can take up a lot of room in the actual smaller trash bin, and they'd rather fill it with other trash. I'd attribute it more to laziness and convenience.

Get your authorized Tide refill at Target instead of having Amazon ship it. People don’t like glass because of the energy used to produce it, but it’s always seemed like a no brainer to me.

The big problem in my eyes are trash bags. Don't know how to replace those.

Something like https://www.c2ccertified.org/ being applicable to every usage of plastic, essentially.

Those "flimsy" plastic bags in particular have a ~65% re-use rate in the US, whereas the heavy duty "reusable" bags often take far more plastic and energy to product, so you have to re-use them at far higher rates than the flimsy ones to make up for the cost to produce them.

40% of shoppers who have those bags forget them, so there's a world where we are actually producing more plastic and incurring food born illness from people not washing out their re-usable bags.

People not even trying to recycle is a huge pet peeve of mine, but I think the plastic bag bans tend to be kind of stupid. Nevermind that now people have to buy garbage liners instead of just re-using the bags.

https://reason.com/archives/2015/09/01/plastic-bags-are-good...

I would like to see something to get the soda industry back to aluminum, but even moving to glass the costs of it all are not very easy to track, because the significantly higher impact on energy required to move glass in bulk vs. plastic.

One good move you can make is do things like purchase bar-form soaps and shampoos for your bathroom… but ultimately we've got to get people off of K-Cups and buying so much plastic bottled water when they can just re-fill something, or bring your own container to a coffee shop.

And maybe give up on 2-day shipping from Amazon, or try to bulk-ship your order instead of placing a new one for every item you think of 30 minutes apart…

The closest solution will probably come from some kind of plastic-consuming bio engineering, or energy-harvesting incinerators like in parts of Europe and Africa: https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/21/africa/reppie-waste-to-energy...

That, and maybe move away from the "big blue bin" which has made people think they can just throw anything in there which has had the unintended consequence of causing recycling to cost much more and have way more contaminants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_torch

There was uproar when we moved to this from weekly rubbish and recycling collection, but most of the time it really seems to work - we recycle far more than I thought we would.