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Comment by vfc1 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how much pollution will this new process of recycling plastic bring. There is so much unnecessary plastic going around in our society, let's start there first.

On my local supermarket, to buy 4 peaches they come in a plastic container fully covered with plastic sheet, I'm not kidding.

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No idea about those peaches specifically but wrapping vegetables in plastic generally reduces the environmental impact since it prevents them from spoiling.

Exactly.

> But research shows that a wrapped cucumber lasts more than three times as long as an unwrapped one. It will also lose just 1.5 per cent of its weight through evaporation after 14 days, compared with 3.5 per cent in just three days for an exposed cucumber. A longer life, Aldridge writes, means less frequent deliveries, with all their consequent energy costs, and, crucially, less waste. Globally, we throw out as much as 50 per cent of food, often when it perishes. It typically goes to landfill and gives off methane, a greenhouse gas.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...

It may reduce the environmental impact by preventing spoiling, but at the same time it increases the environmental impact because now the vegetable can (and are) shipped across vast distances.

Maybe we should be rethinking our entire food infrastructure and concentrate on delivering food to local markets, not markets 1000s of miles away.

Good luck telling people they can’t eat avocados because they don’t live close to where they grow.

How did people live without Avocados before they became a thing about like five years ago?

Where are you from that you think avocados "became a thing" recently?

It feels like in Germany they are somewhat "hip" only in the last 5 years or so. Barely heard anybody talking or eating some before, but nowadays they are quite popular.

Apparently (can't find a source) but it is actually better for the environment to ship stuff around in certain circumstances. E.g. apparently it is lower carbon to ship tomatoes to the UK from Spain than it is to grow them locally in the UK (due to the energy needed to grow them in the UK).

I know the inevitable kneejerk response that this will trigger: "people in the UK should not eat tomatoes". I don't think it is realistic to start insisting that people stop eating fruit and vegetables that have been a cheap and plentiful part of everyday life for the past couple of generations.

Perhaps it makes sense to do so (indeed perhaps we need to do so), but good luck trying to get people to agree to only eating what they can grow in their immediate 5-10 mile radius without artificial heating/cooling/lighting/watering/ventilation/fertiliser/etc (and only in season too!). I suspect it will just be too big an ask for huge swathes of the population to give up staple foods that our societies have been based on for several generations while container ships each generating the same amount of pollution as 50,000,000 cars (1) are still shipping in cheap rat from china

We don't need to go back to the stone age - instead I think we need to tackle the big polluters (eg. Container ships, home heating in the UK, diesel in cities, coal etc etc)

1 - https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/cargo-container-shipping...

Exactly, people can start simple like reusing their plastic bags for fruits, that's what I'm telling people at the supermarket. Most of the time, I just take some cardboard boxes or sheets in the supermarket and fill it with fruits, then later throw them in the recycle bin, or nothing at all for legumes

At least, people bring their own shopping bags, because plastic ones at the checkout are not free, a good thing. There many other more or less useless products, like soap/shampoo plastic bottles, a soap bar does the job so well, for everything

Recycling comes with a cost: energy, pollution, transports

Something that really stuck out to me in Japan was seeing the bananas at the supermarket wrapped in plastic. If only bananas had some NATURAL WAY of protecting themselves from the elements...

they even remove the skin?

no, they wrapped the skin in plastic

It is more complex than that.

Japan is not a producer of fruits. They come from far away. This means they have to transport it economically, that means they are transported by sea.

That means bananas are green when collected and sent to Japan, because transporting it by sea takes a long time.

Bananas naturally release CH4 that actually makes the fruit mature and spoils it. So they have to absorb it or diffuse during transport, then add it in Japan.

But if they add it in Japan, the fruit does not mature entirely, only the external side, so it is a good idea to add an artificial atmosphere of some kind.

Thank you for this info - very interesting.

Nitpick: it's C2H4, ethene. CH4 is methane. You can power rockets with that, but not ripen bananas.

In the UK they come in large boxes by ship unwrapped. They are green when they arrive. I’m sure japan can manage that.

I suspect it’s a social thing rather than a necessity.

I work at a big box home improvement store (Lowe's). We throw away more plastic in a day at work then I go through at home in probably a year. Fridges are some of the worst offenders (except GE which uses mostly cardboard). As much as I try and reduce my plastic consumption and pick up the trash people throw out on my street, it doesn't matter one bit. I find that it's much more important to get these companies to change than any number of individuals.

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