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Comment by larrik | Hacker News Reader

Overall, I think this is a good idea. a Lawsuit creates a financial incentive to behave better. However,

> It’s likely that less than 5% of plastic produced today is getting recycled

I've seen this repeated elsewhere, but what I really want to know is the % of plastics sent for recycling actually being recycled. Anything that wasn't turned in for recycling just doesn't count here, in my opinion.

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Recycling is such a farce. Anything where you have mixed streams going into the recycling bin is quite likely to end up buried somewhere in a developing country. Even when they are recycled they end up being turned into insulation or some other secondary product.

Growing up in Scotland we had a recycling system which was great. Irn Bru bottles were glass bottles with metal lids. The lid proudly announced that you could get 20p back for returning it (in the form of credit towards other purchases). The same trucks delivering stock took the empty bottles back to the distribution centre when they were cleaned, inspected and reused.

Glass and metal are a nightmare on the beach and in parks. Plastic sucks bad, but going back to glass isn't much better.

The system has been in place for at least 50 years. In my mum's day it was a common past time for her and her brothers to go hunting for what they called "glass cheques". The idea is to avoid it ending up where it shouldn't by incentivising good behaviour. If people can return the glass for money then few of them end up on the beach.

I feel like that is a pretty insignificant issue compared with 8-20 million tons of plastics ending up in the sea.

It's much better in almost every way besides weight. Much more reusable, not leaking any chemicals in soil/water/our bodies, &c.

Not really. Both break down and are mostly inert.

Glass is inert and doesn't break down; anyone can pick up glass bottles that have been on the beach for decades, wash them out, and recycle them along with new glass.

Metal degrades slowly if it's ferrous (iron/steel), but that isn't environmentally harmful. And it can all be readily recycled.

I think the implication was what if some jackass smashes the bottles and you find them with your foot.

I grew up in Canada, several decades ago. At that time, everyone returned glass soft-drink bottles and beer bottles to the stores where the items were purchased. Milk was delivered in bottles, and the delivery person picked up the empty bottles we left on the porch the night before.

Nobody would have thought of throwing the glass into the trash, even if there were no refunds. I think part of this was that so many people had a memory of the great depression, and waste was viewed as sinful.

When plastic came in, the older folks washed plastic bags out so they could reuse them. You'd see them on the clothes lines, drying out. (Sure, people had indoor dryers, but clothes dried on the line not only saved on the electric bill but smelled so damned wonderful that it's hard to erase the memory of the delight in bringing things in off the line.)

Yes, we seem to have lost something in the last few generations. The mantra used to be reduce, reuse, recycle. The order is significant, recycling should be a last resort.

The problem is that environmental people bikeshed and argue about everything. They don’t like glass or reuse because water is used for washing and you need to haul the empty bottle.

Especially with the rise of e-commerce, there’s no reason why most consumer products couldn’t be delivered in reusable glass containers.

The problem is the return of the reusable containers. I've collaborating with several startups working on this problem. Shipping costs are 20-40% of COGS for many ecommerce catagories and you are basically doubling them when you require return for reuse and consumers don't want to pay the price premium that requires.

What number of items actually need rewashing?

Sure, foodstuffs. But why can we not refill our soaps, chemicals, etc. Laundry detergent? There is no need to wash those with water.

I used to buy things like that in bulk, back when I lived near a co-op that offered them. I haven't seen something like that in a long time, though, and I wonder if it's even still a thing.

I suspect that the real problem with packaging reduction is that it favors a consolidated product stream. One of those bulk "fill your own containers" of shampoo probably took up the same amount of space as 6 or 8 different products in individual packaging. Which in turn means that you can't offer your customers a dizzying variety of scents and textures and customizations for your hair type and brands and varying levels of organic or biodynamic or being insert_ingredient_here-free or whatever.

And everyone buying the same shampoo - making it effectively a commodity - probably does a number on your ability to boost profits through price discrimination, too.

Even on Amazon, there are bulk-size containers for stuff like soaps and bleach. 5 gallon is usually readily available, and sometimes more.

I wouldn't be surprised if shipping plastic containers and then incinerating them consumes less petroleum and releases less carbon than shipping glass containers twice.

Perhaps with standardized containers and regional distribution centers? Sort of like the old-school beverage bottling plants, but for all variety of consumer products, and not tied to just one brand or class of product. I've no idea how you'd get such a thing bootstrapped, though.

Zero-waste stores seem to be a recent development in Europe, I remember watching a DW segment on them:

https://wastelandrebel.com/en/the-first-zero-waste-bulk-stor...

https://www.bepakt.com/

Yeah, happy that even some major supermarkets in the US are even beginning to introduce bulk foods.

But I just don't see how waste reduction can be neatly reconciled with e-commerce. The typical situation seems to be that things are packed in retail-style packaging, then plastic wrapped, then placed in a plastic padded mailing envelope or placed in a cardboard box along with some plastic air pillows, and then shipped 2day, which, if it's not coming from Amazon, likely means jet fuel is being burned.

I'll say that for Amazon, they at least did an impressive job reducing the fuel waste inherent in ecommerce. It's too bad they're so happy to let the counterfeiters ruin it for us.

There is still a societal cost to producing plastic, even if it isn't turned in for recycling. The article draws a comparison to smoking, and to (loosely) extend the analogy this cost would be similar to second-hand smoke.

Some companies are starting to take responsibility for the full lifecycle of their products (Terracycle comes to mind, which helps companies reclaim and reuse their products at end-of-life). More businesses need to have this mindset if we are going to move towards a sustainable economy.

> More businesses need to have this mindset if we are going to move towards a sustainable economy.

Capitalism says they won't. Consumers as a whole favor cheaper products over sustainable ones.

Regulation is how you solve that problem. Tax companies that use disposable packaging or don't manage their waste streams properly (however you define that) and they'll stop doing it.

Recycling has always been the feel-good system to shift the blame for disposable packaging from companies to consumers. The term "littering" was literally invented to do just that, just like "jaywalking" was a way to shift the blame for traffic problems to pedestrians.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/05/origins-anti-li...

>Capitalism says they won't. Consumers as a whole favor cheaper products over sustainable ones.

I think we're seeing an increase of companies that are prioritizing sustainable practices, because both consumers and investors are demanding this. Not every company by any stretch of the imagination, but it's happening. See Blackrock's annual letter [1] for the investment side. One Percent for the Planet reports that Millennials are more willing to purchase products that have environmental or social benefits than the general public, which would suggest that this is a trend that's increasing[2].

>Regulation is how you solve that problem. Tax companies that use disposable packaging or don't manage their waste streams properly (however you define that) and they'll stop doing it.

Definitely agreed that this would solve things a lot quicker and more completely. But in the absence of fitting regulation, people need to decide to do the right thing within their companies and get progress started.

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/14/blackrocks-larry-fink-says-s... [2] https://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org/business-members

This is a good question given rampant fraud in the recycling industry. Things that should be recycled often end up in landfill or shipped abroad to South East Asia and dumped.

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