Coca-Cola most common source of packaging pollution on UK beaches: study
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Even if something only lasts a couple years, do we still want biodegrading trash littering everything? (we have raw food products right now, I wouldn't want those on the beach either...)
It's abundantly clear that placing blame and expectation entirely on the shoulders of consumers is bollocks. Humans drop litter - just look at any festival, concert, or sports match. When it was your granddad it was mostly paper bags, maybe wrapped in newspaper, maybe a few crown corks. The glass got carefully taken home as there was a hefty deposit on those beer bottles! Now it's knee-deep single use everywhere.
That hasn't changed as you look at poorer countries, or back into the past. What has changed is extensive industry lobbying pretending it's not fucking obvious and working to abolish deposit and return schemes, and use of far more benign materials - like glass. It's as bad as tobacco or asbestos all over again.
The same plastic industry that fucking lobbied the government against suggestions that plastic packaging should contain a third recycled plastic.
Not only should it be outright illegal, countless industry's execs are deserving of lengthy spells in prison or a law that says you can chuck used plastic in their mansion's garden. :)
What is the difference between these places? I think it's the people, not the material their garbage is made of.
Of course as well as extreme and draconian legislation, like banning gum, they're a tiny city-state. Yet Singapore employs vast numbers of cleaners and street sweepers clearing up - which surely shouldn't be necessary? Far more per-capita than any Western city. So even they seem to recognise it will happen anyway.
When traveling, I've been impressed by the cleanliness of Zurich, Copenhagen, Helsinki, and several cities in Germany.
If as a society we can't do something as simple as not throw garbage on the ground, I think we have a very bleak future.
Britain is far and away the worst country I have ever been to for litter even though it is much better than it used to be.
Of course one thing that helps here is that every drinks bottle or can carries a deposit (roughly 10 to 20 pence sterling) that can be redeemed at any supermarket.
A vast transformation of the amount of packaging and type along with far fewer bins (who the hell thought that a good idea?) and cleaners, gardeners, and people mowing verges. All of which now seem to go by the benchmark "as little as we can get away with". Now add the disowning of any part of blame by business and producers as I mentioned originally. We certainly used to accept that some would always happen and employed enough to make sure the place stayed nice regardless, and the tidier places still seem to. We also presumed reuse far more often, and systems were built to expect that.
We also have a different attitude - more accepting of litter, though not as bad as in the eighties and early nineties when apparently no one in the UK gave a shit, and it was everywhere. Amsterdam, Stockholm and Paris have changed similarly, though none as much as here. Paris is perhaps worst of those.
There are still places that have a "don't give a shit" attitude about litter, and people are also reluctant to go out of their way to pick up litter without incentive. In my opinion, there is somewhat of an expectation that addressing litter is the task of some third-party to take care of (e.g. government, groundskeepers, trash company, etc) - so it doesn't directly fall on the individual. In other words, "somebody else will clean it up" mentality.
In those places that already have a lot of litter, some people are assholes and just say "fuck it, what's an extra unit of litter on top of the pile". Other times, litter unintentionally gets scattered about from the wind and such, yet it's mostly ignored as to not deal with it. As aesthetically awful as it looks and environmentally damaging, people put horse blinders on to tune it out of their lives even though it's all around.
If I had to compare with other countries:
- Japan doesn't even have trashcans throughout, and the onus is on the individual to 'do the right thing'. (Gold Standard)
- Germany has trashcans, and individuals will generally follow the instructions for disposal. (Silver Standard)
- US has trashcans, and as long as individuals get the trash in/on/near the trashcan it's 'good enough'. (Bronze Standard)
- India/SE Asia the trashcan is all around you.
Litter is inevitable. A lot or the time it isn't even conscious. You can just forget that you had set a bottle down next to you, and happen not to look back when you're leaving. Or it can fall out of your pocket or backpack unnoticed when you're retrieving something else. Or the wind can just blow it out of a trash can or vehicle.
I think it's important to tackle the issue from both ends.
I don't buy it. See CydeWeys's comments around this thread. Also, having lots of people cleaning the streets only makes it look like there's little littering.
> I think it's important to tackle the issue from both ends.
Sure. Thing is, tackling it from the corporate end will be ridiculously more effective than trying to instill new societal norms.
2. There are countries where littering is both "illegal" and socially "unacceptable". (it's generally shameful to litter)
Which countries will have less litter if corporations are incentivized to change their products or make less stuff?
Some cultures expect people to litter. I witnessed people from these cultures, in my country, littering where it's illegal and socially disgraceful. These people were confronted and they still left their trash on the ground, the people that confronted them picked up their litter for them.
I hope this clarifies my statement.
Unless you are claiming there is not a single culture that doesn't expect people to litter?
http://japantravelcafe.com/japanese-culture-2/why-the-japane...
The all-around cleanliness of Japanese mega cities comes as culture shock to people coming from other big cities in the world. This tidiness is not due to millions of tax dollars spent on street cleaners and “Let’s-cleanup-our-city” campaigns. It’s not due to effective public works or community service. It’s due to one simple thing: They don’t throw their garbage on the floor.
Ever heard the rule, "pack it in, pack it out"? Or "leave the campground better than you left it"? That means not only do you not litter, you pick up any litter in case a previous person left something.
Teaching people this when they are kids makes a real impact. It has compounding effects over time.
That said, companies should also invest more in biodegradable packaging and using much less packaging generally. Since there will always be some litterbugs and trash that gets caught in the wind or falls off a truck, etc. It should be something we tackle from both the producer and consumer ends.
Yeah, in religious congregations of a particularly controlling near-Christian denomination.
> Or "leave the campground better than you left it"?
Yeah, in movies. I hear that Boy Scouts actually adhere to that rule.
I've only ever seen these two rules applied in a pretty top-down fashion as tight-knit community rules. It's not something I've seen random people invoking in generic situations, so I'm not sure if it scales to the level of a city or a country.
Really, it's just a simple common courtesy. And I say this as an atheist non-Boy Scout.
And, nonetheless, I am of the belief that macro changes have perhaps an order of magnitude more impact that micro changes in this area.
It's great that there are places where littering is much less due to social norms. But it's not zero. People litter. Period.
To a first approximation, humans can be modeled as points wandering around on a map, and at each timestep there is some nonzero probability they will just drop garbage on the ground. This is true the world over, in every single country I've been, on essentially every hiking trail, no matter how remote or inaccessible. If you were to have a heatmap of litter the world over, it would very closely approximate the simple heatmap of where people have been. Just look at any stretch of highway. Unless it has just been cleaned up by a very thorough cleanup crew, you will find trash. And this is where people are riding around in vehicles that could as well just keep their trash in the backseat. People go out of their way to throw that shit out the window. People can't even get trash into a fricking trash can. It will literally be sitting on the ground next to a trash can.
People are trash monkeys. You can knock one or two orders of magnitude off the litter problem with education, societal norms, fines, etc. But people are trash monkeys, and whereever they go, they fucking litter. It's as inescapable as nuclear decay. It's just a function of probability.
When you talk about large populations, a lot of things normally considered individual responsibility suddenly become a function of probability. That's why I believe in many cases we should shift responsibility from individuals to organizations at the other end of a transaction.
E.g. if you know that roughly 5% of casino gamblers end up addicted and in life-ruining debt, and 0.1% of gamblers end up dying or killing people because of that, you can't open a new casino and shield yourself behind "it's the people who can't control themselves". You knew the probabilistic model, you used it to profit, you're responsible for some deaths and for ruining people's lives.
That's IMO doubly important if the probabilistic models has incentive knobs that you control.
That statement is false. Not all humans drop litter. In the west it is widely taught as wrong, often punishable by fines. Find me the person who states they should have a right to litter please. Not to mention the fact that biogradable packagi\ ng does little to nothing by way of helping littered refuse. It will have to be collected anyway.
There is no philosophy whereby you can excuse the individual action in this case except when trying to justify a wide range of other things as the basis of a broken polemic. Your last sentiment in that post entirely confirms this.
> Not only should it be outright illegal, countless industry's execs are deserving of lengthy spells in prison or a law that says you can chuck used plastic in their mansion's garden. :)
Yes, of course people shouldn't litter. But some will anyway, and even in the unlikely event that no one on Earth litters ever again, plenty of trash will still escape from trash cans, trash trucks, etc., especially on windy days.
So the answer is we need defense in depth against litter. Littering should of course be curtailed to the maximum extent possible, but the litter itself should not last indefinitely upon escaping into the environment. It should degrade in a reasonable amount of time, or at least be totally inert and non-disruptive to animals and the environment (which plastic is not).
So you're both right. All available measures should be taken, so that combined, the optimal result is achieved.
We will continue to have litter no matter how much teaching, fining or visible policing there is. See Singapore - highly developed laws on littering, fines, and very visible policing. Yet they still employ a more than average amount of people to keep the place looking spick and span. That should simply not be necessary if it's down to attitude or teaching alone. It would all be in the bin back at home or hotel.
Seems like that statement is still very true globally, and will remain so - despite best efforts of teaching, legislature and culture.
What has changed, and changed markedly, is single use packaging on the back of industry pressure and lobbying. No longer do business seem to feel part of the problem or the solution, or even of society and the problems they create within it. Just call it an externality and be done. Hence the rise of lobbying pushing it away and onto the customer, as it's cheaper and easier - for them alone. You end up with armfuls more waste just from a single takeaway, including the always useless plastic or wood coffee stirrer.
To solve the problem that part of responsibility has to be pushed back to source, where it was created. Whilst society again employ enough people to keep cities and tourist spots looking attractive - as well as expecting individuals to act well. Placing it entirely on recipient alone is indeed bollocks, as is giving industry an ever bigger free-pass to produce more and more regardless.
But they aren't. Would you pay twice the price for the same coke, but in a glass bottle?
It's the consumers demand for cheaper products, and subsequent disposal, that's the issue.
We could regulate away plastic bottles and prices would jump, and some portion of the population would rightly protest that it's the poor who suffer.
I was taught from a young age not to litter, so are my kids.
It's a simple idea that's "free" and can be used everywhere to stop litter today.
What if every person had been issued a certain limited credit amount for a lifetime? And then they can decide what to do:
- drink from plastic bottles - have children - have a personal car - wear cotton t-shirts - go some retail therapy - have a large lawn - fly to exotic vacations - ...
The list continues....
Wait, we already have that. It's called money and doesn't help all that much for polution from single use, forever trash items. Maybe they are just priced wrong?
I think if government just cleaned up the oceans and sent bill to Coca-Cola for each bottle, market would solve things fairly quickly.
But are they? Isn't this shifting the blame from the end user that improperly disposes of their trash to the company? Sure, they could do more to reduce packaging issues, but in the end, it is the consumer that is tossing these things out rather than recycling them.
...in the end, the users are wrong in the moment, but the real problem is that your app allows a behavior that has negative outcomes, and the proper fix isn't to educate people, but to make it impossible for people to click that delete button so easily, or maybe make the deletion recoverable.
Maybe the users of coca-cola bottles are the problem, but maybe coca-cola should be made to not make products that have a propensity to be misused.
Lesson learned: plan ahead and get something convenient to carry.
There is clear evidence that littering is societal. See how clean Japanese cities are despite almost everything being wrapped in plastic.
As such you’re somewhat less likely to see cigarette butts on the street in Japan in any case.
Yeah, those are all over Japan outside (albeit not air-tight ones). You only see people smoking in them or in buildings where smoking is allowed, commonly bars.
It's a pretty great way of controlling cigarette butt litter, actually.
Anyway, the example still works. Even if littering was purely societal, on the timescale of years society is fixed. It doesn't change. You can't suddenly convince people to pretty please change social norms. Your options are either a) get a law in place that directly addresses undesired behavior, which is not free and works only to the degree you'll enforce it, or b) stop playing off the obvious failure mode of your society for your personal gains.
The best was an old man pulling a map out of the mouth of a Nara deer that was eating it, then scolding the deer like it was a dog. So yeah, even the deer are taking care of litter, even if they shouldn't be. I also saw a bunch of them eating the paper ribbons that the deer crackers come packaged in.
That said, I remember being in mexico and when you buy a coke "to go", they don't want to bottle to walk away. So they helpfully pour it in a plastic bag, stick a straw in it and seal the plastic bag to the straw with a rubber band.
I don't know about the economics or logistical feasibility of returning to the same setup, but to suggest it's not possible (while still ensuring product safety) is inaccurate.
But glass bottles are heavy, and I'm sure that makes shipping more expensive and increases CO2 emissions.
this is the kind of thinking that kills apps for power-users, and leads to dark patterns.
You're not wrong, but I don't really like to think about how those kind of practices could be applied to social problems and government.
"We don't want X people doing Y, so let's subtly make it harder for X people to continue doing Y, without wholeheartedly admitting our intent." seems like a really slippery slope.
Not necessarily. Well-applied, this thinking is what gave you --no-preserve-root in rm command. You still can delete your entire drive, you just won't do it by accident anymore.
I agree with your anxiety here though, some people do take this idea and turn it into "this feature is too dangerous; let's remove it for your own good", and nerf an otherwise useful tool.
> "We don't want X people doing Y, so let's subtly make it harder for X people to continue doing Y, without wholeheartedly admitting our intent." seems like a really slippery slope.
That this work is at this point a Nobel-winning insight (the "nudge"), so it's a matter of who's doing it and for what. It turns out that "free will" is a concept with little meaning at scale - large populations behave predictably.
Throwing trash on the ground is not comparable to clicking the wrong button.
There is no confusion going on here, only laziness.
And let's call out recycling for the sham that it is. Recycling is a lie for plastics, plastics can not be economically recycled. They must be banned and the polluters made to internalize the externality.
The USA will probably get something like that when it catches up in 100 years.
This was also about the time we started getting 2 liter plastic bottles.
Glass bottles are not perfect. They are lots heavier, which leads to transportation pollution. They also break and hurt people.
As to plastics - You are correct, they do not recycle and when you try to do it, even with a very low ratio of recycled to new plastics you end up with crappy weak plastic - think laundry baskets that have handles that break easily.
i think we should just learn to burn plastics - efficiently and cleanly.
Having said that glass bottles were a nightmare when I was a kid because of littering assholes who would toss them anywhere. Littering is less of an issue these days but I think going back to glass would need to both reward recycling and shame litter bugs. Walking home from the local swimming hole after slicing the bottom of your foot open is no fun.
The other downside (as others have already pointed out) is the weight of heavy glass containers built for reuse. It raises the cost of distribution.
What about something akin to soda stream, either at home or in store?
It seems to me that if CO2 emissions for distributing heavier, reusable glass containers is a significant problem for our society, I can't imagine what we'll do with all the other (unrelated) things we have (and do) that have much bigger problems with emissions.
That is simply not true, just go to most of Europe. In Switzerland 83% of PET bottles get recycled. 0% ends up directly in landfills.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/fact-check_is-switzerland-the-w...
For the rest, plastic contains a good amount of energy. You can burn it and recover some energy from it. It also reduces the volume of the waste by 80%.
Considering recycling can mean shipping trash to a poor country, it's not the ultimate environment rescuer. (Doesn't mean we should stop doing it, obviously)
Most plastic packaging is not recycled.
Most "segregated" bins look about the same inside. (Personal experience, I'm a freegan.)
Most "recyclable" shit is just shipped to another country.
Yeah, I have to agree with you there.
Its insanely wasteful when you view it like that.
Why shouldn't we shift blame back to the idiots what created it - for a bit more profit - once again?
It's infuriating to me how so many Hacker Newsites refuse to hold corporations accountable for their design flaws.
I have a silent hope that each thread like this means some commenters who haven't thought about this much before will achieve the crucial insights, like: (per GP) assigning blame isn't productive, effective solutions are; (per you) there's no easy way to just make people "be better", at scale people are predictable and follow incentives, so the main points of intervention should be these incentives and systems that create them.
I found this sentiment echoed in an RSA video, just this morning: https://youtu.be/o5CTxckRywg
So, in the future, you can attribute it to Dan Lyons, author of "Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us".
I bet that accidental litter, for which no one person is "to blame", is more than 1%.
This is stuff like a bag tearing open, a trash can falling over, stuff falling off the truck.
Ironically even the island hopping boat carried a tray of bottled water for anyone to take. Not sure what % of bottles gets left behind at the end of the day.
Maybe a small deposit on each bottle would help to essentially pay people to collect them.
1. https://www.opb.org/news/article/oregon-bottle-deposit-redem...
Not everyone is so fortunate to have gainful employment, especially not as gainful as the normal user of this site.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation
Littering is a douche thing to do. There should be some social stigma attached to it.
https://www.standard.co.uk/futurelondon/theplasticfreeprojec...
Culturally, people are only willing to put up with so much. There's a Penn and Teller BS clip where he has like 10 unique recycling bins and is explaining sorting to them. I've been to towns where you have to haul all of your trash out, but at Disney they found that people aren't willing to carry trash more than 30ft.
I feel like I do more than most. I set aside batteries, and hoard the few single use bags I use. I drove to a Best Buy because I saw they had battery recycling, but when I arrived they excluded alkalines. I'm honestly not sure which plastics my curb-side accepts. I know that's what the number in the logo is for, but I have trouble finding it and I'm not sure what's accepted. I wish there was a simpler system, like the plastics were dyed blue, had a blue stripe, or something distinguishing.
Is their program successful because of the $0.10 redemption? Or is it because they have a lot of redemption centers? No city I've lived in honor redemptions for curb-side, which is often a large percentage.
i believe you are correct. note my response to another poster about returning bottles and cans here in oregon.
We need something national. And just bottles isn't going to cover it - single use plastic products are cheap enough, and companies have no incentive not to use them, so of course everyone else ends up dealing with them.
Edit: same here in Norway, Swedish and Danish bottles are not redeemable here but it is definitely not a big enough problem to matter.
Ultimately 100% of deposits were collected, the aim should be to pay out 100% again. That's the aim, that's what success looks like. Now I have no idea how these systems are usually funded, and this probably is quite usual. But you can't complain when your system does what its supposed to. When the return rate reaches 100% then you can celebrate success and start complaining about imports.
However it doesn’t stop people throwing away plastic stuff. What it _does_ do, is create a job for the army of homeless people to go around collecting bottles so they can claim that sweet cashback.
It’s effectively a very strange way of employing people at far below minimum wage to keep the streets clean. Very odd.
We also have a 10c charge on plastic bags at supermarkets and you rarely see those floating around anymore and people use them multiple times now.
Coffee cups and fast food boxes are all over the side of the street unfortunately.
Its amazing what a massive difference such a tiny fee can make.
I had a real littering problem around an area I used to live in, council installed a recycling station that people could bring bottles to for a cash reward (10c a bottle).
It worked. Not only did people stop throwing the bottles on the ground as much, we had people driving around the area trying to find discarded plastic bottles, and there was a noticeable improvement on the amount of discarded bottles around the area within months.
The only real problem was people rifling through recycling bins trying to make a buck.
There are homeless people who survive on the income from collecting bottles in the city-center, in parks, and even from rubbish-bins. It's not unusual to see a small group of people with large plastic-bags containing hundreds of empty cans/bottles.
One interesting result of this program is you may find people scrounging around neighbourhoods and trash cans to collect the recyclables so they can collect the deposit on them :)
At first it felt weird, but then I realized how much better it is for everyone and for the environment to reuse glass bottles. The bottles are washed and reused and even if they ended up in the ocean, we’ll, the world was none the worst for it.
It made me sad we moved away from this. I’d love to see glass used more often again for drinks.
I remember that years ago a project at the University of Arizona was doing archaeological work on landfills. It turned out that surprising amount of the non-degrading material found once you dug down a bit was telephone books.
Amazing.
I imagine if the paper were shredded and mixed with organic matter it might brake down more rapidly, but layered and trapped away underground evidently not.
According to the interwebs, it wasn't until the 1960's that plastic bottles became popular in the United States, but I don't remember them until the early 80's.
Before then, soda always came in cans with pull-tabs that would slice your toes open at the beach.
I live next to a shop that squeezes fresh juice, but I mix it with at least three parts carbonated water. Otherwise it's such an easy way to overconsume calories. And possibly the least fulfilling way, as well.
It's not at all hard and as prviously stated, fruit juices contain at least as much sugars naturally.
When I lived in Seattle, I always found it amusing that soccer moms would brag about buying Mexican Coke at Whole Foods like it was something special. They could just drive an hour north and buy Canadian Coke, which is also made with sugar, for half the price!
This is true. That's why in baking, sugar is considered a liquid, not a solid.
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/11/11/nyregion/mcdonald-s-is-ur...
Glass bottles are reuseable.
Hang on, why not use glass?
Finally, somebody with some clout is pointing fingers at the largest contributor to garbage... the corporations who produce it.
I live in Canada and Tim Horton's cups literally litter every street corner in every big city in our country.
I have always thought that they should be responsible for the cleanup of those cups.
It is absolutely their fault that their customers are throwing their products onto our ground.
Why should our overburdened local governments carry the cost of picking up a profitable business' garbage?
But unfortunately, it's infeasible to penalize them directly. And the panopticon required to do so would cause more harm than benefit. Ergo, we target upstream as the least bad solution.
For example, Coke could offer to refill their drink bottles, but the truth is, if you're out and about and want another pint of coke, you need to buy another container with it, which ultimately will need to be dealt with by your areas waste management system etc etc.
As a company they contribute so much to waste, and draw such significant profits that they must at least be somewhat implicated for the production of this pollution.
Another angle: if cars are being marketed to everyone left right and centre, and lots of people buy cars that ultimately produce tonnes of greenhouse gasses, who do you hold ultimately accountable for the pollution? the consumer who has had adverts/dreams rammed down their throat or the chaps selling the cars?
Any plan to deal with waste is going to be entirely thwarted by people who choose to litter. The lifecycle of Coca Cola packaging could become 100% waste free, but litter would still be created any time somebody chooses the throw the packaging on the ground. People have an individual responsibility to not litter, and it really doesn’t have to do much with the discussion on sustainable packaging. If your starting premise to solving any problem is ‘people are 100% not responsible for their choices’, then you’re never going to solve anything.
And that government, knowing that relying on individuals hasn't worked, still needs to find a way to solve the problem. A possible solution is to make the corporation responsible for the trash they produce. Once this happens, the corporation will begin to explore options such as rewarding customers for returning used cups, providing reusable cups, and even employing people to pick up any of their cups littered throughout the city.
[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xd573w/japans-excessive-p...
[1]: https://jpninfo.com/54373
[2]: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/07/why-japanese-dont-lit...
She cleaned and readied everything inside, swept the front curb of her shop, then proceeded to perfectly sweep the ~10' wide sidewalk in front of her place to the street's edge.
How Tokyo lives with its hyperdensity suddenly made sense.
Man I'd love that here in the US
As an outsider looking in, perhaps because local governments are largely funded by taxpayers, and taxpayers are ultimately the root cause of the litter?
Consider the status quo of litter in countries like Japan and Singapore.
I think if the problem is to be effectively solved, things need to happen on 3 fronts: local government that establishes effective law/infrastructure, companies with cognizance that take meaningful action, and a population with the right cultural values.
A company is not responsible for it's irresponsible consumers!
Also their no scapegoat for irresponsible people who litter. That is the crux of the issue here.
Rallying against a large corporation because people litter with their product is effectively excusing people who litter. That is wrong - don't go there.
No but they are responsible for foisting externalities onto society in order to save a few cents per transaction.
If they only sold coffee in steel thermal capped mugs, for $5 each, then the litter problem would evaporate. But that would require more expensive logistics and storage and transactional overhad.
I’m not on the side of big business, ever really. But this is insane logic (today it’s all to common too). The PEOPLE doing the littering are the problem, if it’s not a coke can it’s something else. Assign responsibility where it’s deserved. It easy to blame big money and business these days for the shortcomings of people.
Make it a crime with not only a hefty fine, but demanded personal time on community service. Some people don’t care about money, but everyone cares about their time.
It works just fine for the Japanese and in Singapore.
It wouldn't slow down drive throughs at all, because unlike using your own re-usable cups, deposit cups can be filled before you get to the window. They would need to develop some standard language to make ordering simple, but people would get used to it fast enough, especially if they make deposit cups the default after a while.
Tim Hortons is on every street corner, so it already has a strong network effect, making something like this feasible (I bet most Tims customers are regulars).
The cups would be standard, so an automated cup washer wouldn't be too difficult. They could also be semi-insulated, which would be a huge improvement over those flimsy cardboard sleeves or double cups (which is usually what happens).