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Comment by ptah | Hacker News Reader

I am starting to think I need an app or something that can tell me if a product's packaging can be recycled or not

Or maybe a way to quickly tell a product's total environmental impact over its life cycle including post usage? Maybe even have that information available as an comparable index so you can easily compare similar products? Here in Sweden, many grocery stores display the product price per measurement unit, making it easier to understand, for example, how much your pasta is costing per kg across different brands.

Can you give an example to make it clear for me please

EDIT: example of measurement unit shown

If you take a look at this online Swedish grocery store where I searched for pasta [0], you can see the price for each product but also the cost per kg ("jmf pris"):

* Jmf pris 21:27 /kg

* Jmf pris 38:55 /kg

* Jmf pris 16:95 /kg

[0] https://www.mathem.se/sok?q=snabbmakaroner&page=1&pageSize=4...

You can certainly get an estimate but the exact impact depends upon information that doesn't exist yet and metrics will easily be misread even without any active deception or conscious metric gaming. Say consumers either treating cheap reusables as disposables or reusing nominal disposables woule throw it out of wack and even accurate accounting could have perverse impacts.

Not to mention that there is also a difference in environmental impact of the same resource consumption that differs by location - brewing using great lakes water vs a depleting aquifer. Or power usage in aluminum from solar or geothermal vs burning coal to do it.

and with the right legislation regarding externalities, we could prefix this comparable index with the '$' symbol :)

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