Maybe as more people become aware of recycling inefficiencies, we'll start diverting dollars go businesses that focus on longevity and reusability of their products?
Perhaps they'd actually be happier. There's at least the beginnings of a body of research that suggests that owning a mountain of toys in childhood is associated with a lifelong increased risk of mood disorders.
It's all correlational, of course, so it's not like this is a scientific certainty. But still, interesting to see.
And yeah, agree. I'm looking at you, enormous steam games list.
Shit, as far as games go I'm still trying to catch up on top-tier or just-under-top-tier games from the 90s I missed the first time around, and I played quite a few games back then. Now that I have less time, a bunch of excellent-looking games I'd probably love slip by and land on the "to do... someday, maybe" list. Even for a medium that new, I'm overwhelmed with great options.
Doesn't seem to have done them any harm, from what I recall.
Not really. Plastic was the more hygenic alternative and that was the main reason why it replaced the older packaging techniques.
Sounds good to me in theory, but the confusion for me has always been: how do you overhaul the packaging of all these small consumable items (like Pepsi and Coke) so they're either more easily recyclable or reusable and also benefit the manufacturer at the same time? I'm sure the government can create incentives but will that be enough? Will people be willing to pay more money for a more environmentally friendly option if a less environmentally friendly but more affordable option exists?
If the government passed laws/regulation that mandated certain packaging requirements for companies like Coca Cola, that would be a top-down solution and Coca Cola would have to comply, lest they wish to face steep fines and litigation.
In regards to soda, you're right - consumption taxes have proven effective. I believe cigarette taxes have proven effective in the same way. But an environmentally effective top-down solution would of course apply to many more consumables that just soda, sugar cakes and other generally unhealthy items. It's possible that top down regulation could push costs higher for smaller companies that offer healthy options in environmentally unfriendly packages. If costs are too high for smaller companies like these, then there may be fewer healthy alternative options (because we know Little Debbie and Coca Cola aren't going anywhere, regulations or not). This is obviously a very generalized example - in reality, many of the healthy/organic foods items already come in environmentally-friendly packaging.
If people start having to pay for garbage processing by weight or volume, people would change their tune pretty quickly, in the same fashion that instituting small charges on bottles and cans boost recycling of those products.
The downside is that those that are charged directly often dump wherever they won't be caught. Example: mattresses, they're a dumping problem, often, bulk items are even included in curbside pickup with the minium effort of scheduling a pickup.
Other than that, I do think some level of optimizations should happen in the space of recycling... either similar to what I understand German regulations are on recycling what you produce... and/or going back to glass bottles.
Then again, I'm not sure how bad plastics are in general, other than what gets dumped into the oceans, for the most part, my understanding is plastics in modern waste facilities aren't so bad and mfg is mostly a petroleum byproduct of what would otherwise be waste anyway.
The argument always goes that people want to feel good while doing very little. But what I hear mostly are people who want to do nothing but still complain.
It’s the 30 mile commutes, single person occupied SUVs, flying for vacations, and living driving distance to everything in suburbs and exurbs causing exponentially greater than necessary usage of fuel to move mass that is the vast majority of our problem.
The only solution to the issue is to increase the cost of fuel. If we don’t accomplish that, all the other efforts are a waste of time and energy. If we do accomplish raising the cost of fuel, then everything else will fall in line, including costs of disposable plastic goods which will go up and cause people to consume less.
Except, of course, this is politically untenable because of all the investment assumptions requiring 10% ROI to meet debt obligations.
The noise of the streets, neighbors, an even other residents in the same apartment (if sharing, because there's not enough single / studio places at good value) invade. The smells from neighbors and others invade. The shared garbage chute, elevator or stairwell where you interface with the lingering smoking, pet, or messes invades personal space as well.
The building code (at least in the US) in the cities isn't high enough to provide actual solitude and escape from being so close to everyone else.
Inside cities the rent seeking keeps rents there too high.
Outside of cities, rent seeking helps to prevent new home ownership (rather than temporary rental), while the lack of regulations and taxation for infrastructure (like transport of goods and people) undervalues and under-taxes the opportunity cost.
Much like many of the other social ills in the US the problems require a national framework and local solutions; but the balance and distribution of planning is out of scale and stuck decades if not a hundred years or more in the past when the speed of transportation provided pressures that made local management good enough.
Source: Sustainable energy, without the hot air. This book dives into the bigs that need to be tackled before the smalls.
Plus, penalizing fuel hurts the poor more than the rich. The poor are the ones driving long distances from cheap housing to city centres for work. They are the personal support workers, caregivers and Uber drivers. The rich can afford to live within 10 mins walking distance of work, and can also afford to move when changing jobs to maintain walkability.
I don’t think sustainable fuel (non fossil fuel) is realistic on the timescale that humans need it to be. Fossil fuel is just so convenient with its portability and ease of use, that it will remain preferred for many uses.
There is no plastic without fossil fuels. All goods are dependent on plastic in some form or another; many goods are made entirely of plastic. Eliminating plastic requires anywhere from minor to major redesign of a given good and a correspondingly increased bill of materials, both for the cost of redesign and cost of sourcing the alternative, and these costs will be passed directly onto the customer, thereby raising the prices of everything. Put those two together, it will become apparent that living in a modern western society with the abundance we are used to becomes quickly unsustainable for everyone except the very wealthy. You may think you can bear the cost on an SV salary but most people in America cannot. You are asking people in America to accept a non-trivial downgrade in their standard of living and they will fight you tooth and nail to preserve it, at the ballot box and elsewhere. That’s just how human beings are wired. In terms of other countries, they are all looking to attain the same standard of life available in the west and will happily consume more fossil fuels to get there. Any lack of demand on the west’s side results in cheaper prices, spurring increased consumption in emerging markets.
Furthermore, lets say you do succeed in increased fuel costs, thus reducing our collective standard of living. It will probably backfire when that happens, as your SV salary depends on their high standard of living. If the avg person’s purchasing power plummets, their demand for tech goods also plummets. After all, the overwhelming majority of tech goods satisfy wants, not needs, and discretionary purchases of new phones, Alexas and Sonos speakers are the first things to go out the window when survival is at stake. There goes that large salary and vested stocks. Now you’re stuck fighting for survival too. It’s a race to the bottom.
There are only two real solutions: A source of energy more dense or portable than gasoline, or some form of population control. The first is difficult, the second is currently unthinkable for most people.
Reducing consumption by increased taxes (worldwide), and/or by reduced population, and finding an alternate source of fuel are the only solutions. But I doubt an alternative to fossil fuels with equivalent properties can be discovered in sufficient time.
Hell, I think that in an ideal world something similar would happen to traffic and parking tickets. More people parking illegally or speeding? More money goes to buses and trains.
In all I bet someone has done or could do a detailed study on this. My internet comment isn’t going to make this a law so you needn’t worry about my lack of research, but a real proposal should examine these factors.
Ok, so how much extra fuel is used by trucking all this glass back to a handful of bottling plants that are hundreds of miles away? I guess the deposit fee thing might work.
Personally, I really wonder if using aluminum isn't more environmentally friendly than this. Aluminum cans/bottles are extremely thin and lightweight, and can be easily recycled, and are one of the few things we actually do recycle effectively today, even paying people for used cans. Of course, some people complain that aluminum cans add a flavor to the drink, and there's also the issue of the plastic coating used inside modern cans.
Personally, it seems to me that most of these issues would go away if we as a society actually committed to developing serious recycling infrastructure and using it, even if it means extra taxes somewhere (whether it's directly on end-users, or on producers of plastic products).
I have seen 24 ounce aluminum cans for beer though so we could see large American sodas in big cans. Not resealable though.
I think if we are willing to commit to building infrastructure, there is a lot to like about washing glass bottles. In at least one of the Nordic countries they require the use of a standard glass bottle with paper labels that wash off. With this, bottles can be returned to the closest bottler even if it’s a different brand. This keeps travel low. If bottling plants are near population centers the carbon cost of bottle transportation can be kept low.
The thing about standard glass bottles sounds pretty good, but I can't imagine that ever being legislated here in the US. It would have to be Federal, and there's no way you'll get Congresspeople from across the country to agree to something like that. It can't be state-based because then it wouldn't work: you wouldn't be able to get the standard bottle adopted even within a single city, because part of the city is in one state and part is in another state or two.
When you visit less wealthy countries, you see people reducing and re-using. They either don't have as easy of access to all these goods, or the cost of them makes the people re-use the stuff around the house.
For example, I could use empty beer cans to start seedlings for my garden, but I've instead bought those nice black gardening pots. I have the money to and it's easier than keeping beer cans around then modifying them to drain right.
- Reduce and reuse are individual efforts that collectively mean a lot at scale.
- Recycling is something that we pay the city to do and then we don't have to think about it. Out of sight, out of mind, we've barely had to change our behavior.
But it turns out that when we abdicate individual responsibility to government and elected officials, we learn that most aren't recycling and never were. Oops.
So really if you want to effectively cut e.g. plastic use or increase its re-use you have to make it expensive, but that's kinda contrary to the whole point of using plastic in the first place.
Similarly, as industry's really gotten good at minimizing use of materials as a cost-saving measure (I assume CAD or something has enabled this? It's very noticeable since especially the late 90s) it's made re-use harder. I've seen those good, thick old department store plastic bags live for decades as a container for occasionally-accessed stuff in storage, and plastic bottles used to be so tough you could use them for all kinds of things that modern ones would be very bad at. Old plastic storage bins may have used a lot more plastic and been more expensive but they didn't crack if you looked at them funny like the modern ones. Stuff like that. So we got "reduce" in a way, but it just made stuff even cheaper so we use more of it, and made "re-use" much less practical.
TL;DR: buy industrial boxes. Proper German KLT https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euro_container are really nice. I recommend R-KLT in blue (they don't look as bland as the grey ones).
You know what? I wish Amazon had really durable boxes, like these but maybe even a bit sturdier, that you could add to an order, used as the shipping container for the rest of the stuff you ordered but also intended for re-use after arrival.
I do still plan to get a lifting arm/manually-operated crane. It would be nice to not have to lift them with my spine, and these are made for reliably grabbing by a robot. Both from the sides and even from the top (when tightly packed).
(There are 4 access holes on the top that go down next to the grips on the short sides. A grabber uses one hook each to lock the box when unloading e.g. a pallet.)
You should be able to order from a company like Auer Packaging or a local alternative. Thankfully these are specified precisely, so manufacturers can't cheat on stability to save materials.
They actually recycle well, btw. When broken/used-up, they'll get shredded and turned back into new boxes. It works because they're pure PP and only one of a few fixed colors.