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Comment by paultopia | Hacker News Reader

This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this.

"BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable." FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible.

"A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable." -- WTF does the size of the opening have to do with it?

"The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?!

This is not a consumer-level problem. It's completely ridiculous to expect millions of ordinary people to succeed at this kind of task on a daily or weekly basis. It needs to be solved further up the supply chain, or processors need to be centralized and standardized. Period.

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I found a simple 80% solution for home plastic: I avoid packaged food in favor of fresh, unwrapped fruits, vegetables, and foods from bulk bins.

Now I have a load of garbage to empty a little less than once a year and a load of metal and plastic recycling once or twice a year.

Plus my food tastes better and costs less.

Everyone is free to do what they want, and experience shows someone will have to tell me the solution doesn't work for someone, but I hope people do similar so the manufacturers' warehouses fill with plastic instead of the oceans and they stop producing it.

Yep. Not only do you avoid plastic but you eat better too because you have hard lines that are not to be crossed.

No more chocolate bars, ready meals, pot noodles, bags of crisps or whatever else.

Even if you end up buying a bag of rice in plastic you're cutting down the waste by a huge amount because even a small one gives you ten or more servings.

And larger containers have less surface area:volume —> less packaging.

Which is why I really hate it when manufacturers reduce pack sizes.

Small pack sizes are such a load of shite.

Some small number of people are travelling.

For the rest, 500g of rice is a pointlessly small amount. It lasts forever, is dense enough to stash, etc.

I’ve seen OJ go from 2L to 1.89, and now 1.75L.

Pasta: 1kg to 908g.

It’s bullshit.

They're going from metric to US measures?

They're increasing the price without changing the price tag.

A.k.a. shrinkflation. Search for it, right here on HN.

It goes the other way too. Pop used to be in 591mL bottles, now it’s 500. Jerks.

Juice tastes good, but it removes the fiber from the ingestion of that fructose that tells our body how to digest it. It is not healthful. Juice is basically a refined food, and I prefer raw food.

I once got a 10KG sack of rice from an Asian store once. After a year it got full of tiny bugs less than 1mm in size. Now I buy 1kg bags that I can more easily seal airtight with pegs.

But you're missing out on all that extra protein!

I divide the 10kg sack into a bunch of mason jars and avoid the pests.

Thats the correct way to go about it really. I will do it this way next time.

Buy a canning funnel!

For bulk foods, like grains, you can use aluminized polyester film bags, and blow in pure nitrogen or drop in an oxygen-absorber packets while sealing the bag. Then you put the bags in a food-grade bucket and seal it. The bags can have resealable zip-locks on them.

Yes, this uses plastic, but all of it is reusable when using certain bag-sealing methods.

I mean c'mon, individually plastic-wrapped apples? It's crazy how much unnecessary packaging there is at the grocery store.

But yeah, it is possible to avoid a lot of it. And if you're really dedicated, you can essentially get to zero waste. Here's someone that was able to fit 5 years of their trash into mason jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT0uqEPzbd0

Worse yet are styrofoam padded pears

I like the boiled eggs in plastic at Walmarts. As though it's just a stretch too far to expect someone to take eggs in their existing shells and boil them briefly!

I get those in the summer when too hot to cook.

You can even provide boiled eggs plastic free. In the UK and Germany I've seen eggs painted with a special paint that seals the cooked egg and lets you keep it outside a fridge for weeks.

What's worse than individually plastic-wrapped apples? Individually plastic-wrapped bananas or oranges. They do already have their own natural wrapping.

Been there. Complained about this very thing on HN, and got shot down. Apparently, individually plastic-wrapped fruits exist because of people with motor disabilities.

I accept that, and I understand that under our economy, it's better (cheaper) for people with such aliments that these fruits are just another item in grocery stores, and not specialty item in special stores (which would be sold for a much higher price). Still, I can't shake the feeling that this is wrong, there must be a better way of supporting people with motor problems than carpet-bombing shops with environmentally absurd individually packaged fruits, and exposing those to regular people without motor problems, some of which will start buying (and thus creating demand) out of convenience or false perception of quality...

I think the pre cut/wrapped apple slices and oranges and such are arguably for disabled people (or children, or convenience, and priced at a 5-10x premium) but the individually wrapped whole fruit, which are sold in much higher volumes, make less sense.

My niece has now stopped eating meat... because of plastic. She started out avoiding plastic wrapped meats, and went to a butcher instead, only to find (due to food handling laws in my country) that they used one disposable glove per customer! I applaud her resilience in this aspect: we need to do what we can to stop buying stuff that uses plastic - especially when it doesn't need to.

Wouldn't the lost productivity of sick people due to lower hygiene be more harmful to the environment than the plastic gloves?

Yes

Plastics have helped a lot in the hygiene aspects of food, as much as some people think (very naively) that food can't make you sick. Especially if you live in a country with warmer temperatures and low infrastructure (hello Climate Change)

I ran a restaurant in college and had to become a certified food manager (a step up from the line food handler). So while I won’t prentend to have all the data, it was clear that simple processes prevent 99.99% of food borne illness, and not one law required plastic gloves! In fact they expressly warned NOT to use gloves if you were not sure they were food grade.

If you follow the simple rules, most illness is caused by tainted supply.

The most common infraction I saw was failing to wash hands, followed by not separating meats from other stations. (Work surface, knives, hand washing, etc)

In a busy kitchen, you would be shocked at how much cross contamination occurs every single day, plastic or not. Plastic is not the solution, training and oversight is the essential thing.

I don't disagree with the points you make, but you're thinking of "the last mile". Think of the steps before the food got to the restaurant or consumer:

For example: delivery of water to locations where the local source is suspected to be contaminated, packaging of meat products from market to consumer, handling of refrigerated or wet products, to name a few

Of course it's not the whole story, a lot of food-borne illnesses have their origin at the producing farm.

This assumes that:

- the plastic glove (and not e.g. hand washing) is the only way to solve this problem

- eating meat is necessary at all, as the OP states, it's not; certainly not in typically accepted volumes, anyway

I'm so glad to hear its not just me. If anyone else is reading this, I highly recommend these reusable mesh bags:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BW1DSMV

Way better than the plastic bags at the store.

I just found I have one of those bulk bin stores near my office. Its slightly more expensive and I have to bring my own containers but I will never again buy a single use packaged item that I could get packaging free from this store.

The insane amounts of damage we are doing with all this plastic needs to be controlled. Recycling is not the answer, reduce and reuse is.

One absolutely crazy problem, at least in the UK, is that supermarkets sell pre-packed fruits and vegetables cheaper than the equivalent weight loose. I can't think of any logical reason why.

I assume the prepackaged varieties take less time to check out.

Produce sold loose have to be nicer, bigger, with fewer flaws. The customers will pick those, and the less perfect produce is left to spoil. You have to remember that the retail prices of produce are as much function of the wholesale cost as it is of the spoilage rates.

Local farmers markets and reusable canvas bags. I know not everyone lives in areas with these options, though.

We were able to reduce our garbage and recycling in half.

But I also think taxing and or regulating packaging at the manufacturer for the rest is needed.

It's really pretty simple if you actually care about results.

Is it aluminum? Recycle it.

Is is not aluminum? Don't recycle it.

Plastic bottles are pretty much all included according to this site. There's no reason not to include them too.

It takes more energy to ship and reprocess them than you save. That's why you don't.

If you do, it's explicitly because it makes you feel good - it's worse for the planet.

Source?

Thomas Kinnaman was interviewed on Planet Money recently and mentioned roughly this conclusion based on his 2014 study. More details here: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/07/15/why_its_pro...

Plastic and Glass recycling can be borderline and it depends on the specific local implementation. Either way, the savings are never going to be massive and it is an open question if it is worth the effort. (Glass re-use is different)

Aluminum is completely different. Prices for aluminum recycling per ton is an order of magnitude higher than other recyclables.

This is what the big kerfuffle is all about.

All we’ve been doing is paying the Chinese and Malaysians to feed our plastics to the dolphins for us.

Now they won’t take it, and people here get upset if you feed the animals, we’re realise the whole deception for what it is.

Edit to add sources:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/whale...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-se...

Self evident that if it were economically & environmentally sound to recycle we wouldn’t be shipping it around the planet to do so.

Asian companies undercut all the domestic recyclers, putting them out of business. This is why you might not want to trust say Chinese companies with prices that are too good to be true (because they are probably cutting huge corners somewhere). The same thing happened with rare earths (very dirty to refine, but China didn’t really care about their environment giving them a huge price advantage that shut everyone in the developed world down).

Maybe it takes more energy because of the diversity of materials? If we used an order of magnitude less types of plastic than we currently do, it might become more economical because it wouldnt require as much mechanical labor to sort and process. Removing shipping from the equation seems like the removal of quite a bit of carbon.

When you melt plastic down, you get lower quality material than what you fed in. It's not a closed loop. Plus, the wide variety of available properties are what makes plastic so useful in the first place.

In my city, plastic bottles are shredded and converted into filament for 3D printers: https://www.greenbatch.com/

What's even better than putting your plastic bottle in recycle is not using plastic bottle at all. Is there any use case where plastic bottle is better or required?

Apparently manufacturing glass uses way more resources/energy and has a much bigger carbon footprint. (No source at hand, sorry.) It also weighs more so is more expensive to transport. Plastic is good for some things, no doubt about that.

I'm under the impression glass is worth recycling as well. Prove me wrong.

Depends on the area, or so I learned recently upon moving to Montana, where they don't recycle it. Apparently most recycled glass is crushed up and used as roadbase. In MT, gravel is dirt cheap, and so it's not economical to use glass for construction, so into the landfill it goes.

As for recycling glass into other glass, I can't say.

Making glass from scratch is incredibly energy intensive, and glass impurities can be handled (purified), so it always makes sense to recycle glass. Don't let your officials tell you any different.

Not in single stream recycling. The problem? Glass gets crushed and ruins other recyclable materials.

Also glass is very heavy when compared to a similar strength container made of plastic. That is why plastic took over the market.

I heard on a recent podcast from a Dutch recycler that recycling glas only saves ~10% of energy creating new glass. Melting the glass requires heat, and the raw material is not much more expensive than collecting used glass.

You're not filling a landfill and you're not gathering more raw material. Both seem like a win, especially if it's cheaper, even by just a little.

> Making glass from scratch is incredibly energy intensive

Not much more than melting existing glass. It's not like aluminum, where melting is much cheaper than refining in the first place.

> glass impurities can be handled (purified)

It's much easier to handle impurities when you start with clean sand.

Earlier this year, Arlington County, Virginia removed glass from their curbside recycling program, "A significant drop in the market value of glass recyclables means it is no longer economically or environmentally sustainable for the County to collect them via single-stream recycling."

They have two drop-of locations, where residents can drop off glass "for crushing and reuse as construction and landscaping material."

(https://newsroom.arlingtonva.us/release/arlington-shifting-g...)

The answer, unless you want to check the price of commodities each morning, is to recycle glass and bottles anyway and let the recycler decide if it’s economically efficient to send it to the landfill or to reprocessing.

That’s not an entirely terrible idea.

Could all(?) packaging intended for recycling by made from aluminium?

Well aluminum does take a whole lot of energy to manufacture, so if it doesn’t all get recycled there would likely be a lot of waste there.

Heaps of energy. Here in Tasmania the aluminium refinery consumes something like 56% of the states electricity.

This site https://www.aluminum.org/industries/production/recycling claims that 75% of all aluminium is recycled and that over 70% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use.

Also good quality cardboard or nice letter paper, I'm told. (Not junk mail & phone books)

Don't forget about steel ("tin") cans too.

Steel can be recycled many times with virtually no degradation.

I've noticed that people aren't actually fully capable of just sorting the recycling correctly. There's always stuff in the wrong bins in my building despite an ongoing education effort to fix that and helpful illustrated rules above the bins. Rules about lids and labels is a joke.

Since lids and labels and such seem to actually matter, the only sensible solution is for the governments of the world to legislate to mandate specific shapes and material compositions for things like drink containers. Standardize it all.

I've been thinking about this more and more, and it just makes so much sense. No one cares what shape a beer bottle is, the label is enough to tell them apart. Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging, but less of them isn't something to worry about either

> Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging

Cigarette companies have already fought and lost legal battles forcing them to use standard plain packaging, so complaining is about all they can do.

I’m in total agreement. We give corporations a lot of freedom even when that freedom is unnecessary and leads to significant environmental and societal harm. We’ve got to get some power back for the people so we can say “no, you don’t get any shape. You have to agree to a limited number of shapes and they have to be totally recyclable.”

Have the mfr pay a small fee when their wrappers end up in the garbage. A little like the deposit on cans but the consumer doesn't have to do anything.

I think in general the government should mandate that companies take care of their goods from start to end including negative externalities. If you produce something in plastic packaging then you have to make sure it's recyclable in the markets where is sold or pay an environmental impact fee. Ditto if you sell oil that produces CO2. Buy equivalent carbon credits. If it means no body can afford your product anymore, you shouldn't be selling it anyway.

Recycling bins at my office are always particularly effective at demonstrating this. Single stream recycling makes things easy!.. Or so I thought, before witnessing an endless stream of banana peels in the recycling bins and plastic bags in the compost bins.

The rules are just insanely complicated and depend entirely on what suburb you are in. There are countless different kinds of plastics which all have the recycling triangle on them but you have to actually check the number inside and remember all the kinds of plastics there are and which ones your local council can recycle as well as keeping up to date if this changes. And then you have to deal with the fact that loads of products use 2-3 different kinds of plastics on one product so you have to sit there breaking it up in to its basic materials.

And then you're supposed to wash the plastic if it's a food container, which completely defeats the point of recycling. There's no way individuals hand-washing plastic bottles with hot water and detergent aren't wasting significantly more water and energy in total than a centralized solution would, and you can't rely on people doing it anyway, because it makes dealing with trash two orders of magnitude more complicated.

I actually suspect that even with actually recyclable materials, if individuals have to wash them before giving for recycling, it would be a net benefit for the planet for them to just throw that trash into a landfill.

I love the bottles that have the recycling symbol, but the number is so small an ill defined you can't actually read it.

> FFS. Have you ever tried to remove [beverage bottle] labels? It's impossible.

As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle.

So, agreed on your final point. It can be done easily, and not necessarily at additional cost. Manufacturers just haven't been motivated to do so.

> As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle.

OTOH Japan wraps pretty much everything in plastic, usually multiple times over.

And they burn their garbage, turning thin-film plastics into fuel pretty much as cleanly as the stock used to make the plastic. I much prefer that to making a huge hill with poorly-compacted trash, covering with soil and claiming "problem solved".

Their usage of plastic is higher in some specific instances (omiyage, cookie or snack packages, and convenience stores come to mind), but equivalent to North America in others (standard meat comes in a shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray, vegetables/fruit come loose or a single layer of packaging, grocery stores charge for plastic bags). Despite the meme, I don't think their plastic usage is all that significantly higher outside a few specific instances.

> "The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?!

I don't think 2500 variations is actually excessive, when you look at how the labels actually work.

The label has four parts [1]:

• One part tells what preparation is needed, such as whether you need to rinse the item before recycling, whether you need to remove the label, and things like that. There are 13 possible options for this part.

• The next part tells you if the item is widely recycled, not yet recycled, requires store drop off, or varies from place to place. There are 4 possible options for this part.

• The next part lists the type of material the item is made from, such as paper or glass. There are 6 options.

• Finally, the last part tells what part of the item the label applies to. Values include bottle, tray, insert, and 6 others, for a total of 9 options.

13 x 4 x 6 x 9 = 2808.

Also, a given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in.

[1] https://www.how2recycle.info/labels

It's still ridiculous to make this a problem of every individual, though.

> last part tells what part of the item the label applies to (...) given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in.

This alone cuts down on amount of useful/correct sorting done. The worst is packaging you actually have to disassemble yourself - e.g. something that looks like cardboard (but probably has a thin layer of plastic on top of it; you can't easily tell), but has inserts of thin transparent plastic.

> whether you need to rinse the item before recycling

And this, I believe, essentially kills of recycling as an idea. Not only most people won't bother (and it's a coin toss whether they'll throw the dirty container into general/non-recyclable or recyclable bin), individuals cleaning plastic packaging is a ridiculously inefficient use of water, energy for heating that water, and likely detergent too. I don't have numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the resource use delta between individuals cleaning and doing the cleaning at recycling plant is actually greater than recycling process itself saves.

It's only ludicrous because the plastics industry wants to pretend that plastics are recyclable when, mostly, they're not (because it's impractical or uneconomic).

The rules for recycling when you exclude all plastics are pretty simple.

Yes it's pretty bad. What it comes down to is: follow the local rules. If you don't know the local rules or are unsure, err on the side of keeping the recycling clean and throw it out.

(Landfills are quite good at keeping plastic out of the environment. It's the stuff that doesn't make it into the landfill that you have to worry about.)

Then keep checking, as local rules keep evolving so that products they used to consider acceptable stop being so. Sometimes new items become acceptable, but our experience is mostly of things being removed from recycling over the years.

It's insane.

Yes, someone needs to write a really good web app, like those that exist for transit.

But also some regulations to keep the permutations down would be super helpful. Mandating that all the things are recyclable would be super helpful.

reduce and reuse are much easier than doing taxes, but they're not in speculative shareholder corporate interest

Hey, you should see how they do it in Japan (there are about 20 containers for recycling, everything must be disassembled). And...people actually do it.

In Japan like anywhere else, recycling depends on the municipality.

Where I live, we have like 6 different containers (PET bottles, other plastic, glass+cans, cardboard/paper, burnable garbage, unburnable garbage).

Coming from Sweden, it's actually a bit easier here (e.g. in Sweden cans, clear glass, colored glass were all separate, and aluminum drink cans had a deposit so you took them to the supermarket)

Absolutely 100% what you said.

But now the question is: why pretty much NO government has ever succeeded in this?

My view is that the only hope is an EU-wide requirement to change packaging, etc to be able to still sell to the EU. That would be a big enough market for every single company to comply.

Belgium allegedly had an 85+% recycling rate, though I have no idea what all this stuff gets recycled to, and I suspect it gets downcycled to useless garbage.

"Recycling is harder than doing your taxes"

Living in a country where the majority, including me doesnt have to deal with their taxes, I cant help thinking maybe that's the solution. Whether the onus is put on manufacturers to make things trivially recyclable, or on recyclers to sort of a big bag of mixed waste, or some combination I don't know. Does seem silly for everyone to have to become domain experts in recycling though.

Instead of raging against. Perhaps consider solutions.

Example: In Japan, the plastic film label is perforated no glue is utilized. It is fairly easily removed.

More difficult simply tossing a bottle, sure.

Think for a moment instead of raging. 2500 variations does not mean 2500 different recycling rules. There are more than 2500 variations of your potential mate, that doesn't mean there's 2500 different ways to mate.

It is a consumer problem, consumers will have to deal with the results.

You just suggested a way that manufacturers can make it easier for consumers to recycle, did you not? You seem to be confirming the OP's point, which is that the current state of recycling is rage-inducing.

The sorting absolutely should be done downstream, ideally with robots doing the vast majority of the work.

It is done that way. Thats how you can put a aluminum can and cardboard in the same bin. But what does a robot do when a tictac container comes in with a Polyethylene body and a Polypropylene lid. Does it sit there with high precision fingers trying to pick the glued in lid off?

It uses its fricking lasers, obviously!

regarding the size of the bottle opening, my understanding is that the automatic sorting machines at the recyclery 'work better' on bottles with a narrow opening because they are easier to push around with jets of air, but they could also be concerned that other items will get trapped inside a wide mouth plastic container and confound the sorting machine...

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