Industry spent millions selling recycling, to sell more plastic
npr.org
npr.org
(I'm also very nervous about "biodegradable" plastic which appears to break down granularly, but persists microscopically in the environment.)
As much as I applaud the effort to use cloth bags at the grocery store, the vast majority of the products we place in them are still wrapped in huge quantities of single-use plastic. While metal cans and glass jars are at least somewhat more recyclable/reusable, I'm not even sure we have a good replacement for the necessary evil of food-safe containers.
If someone more knowledgable than myself had suggestions on how to look for safer/greener plastic varieties, or general strategies to reduce their use, I'd love to hear them.
Maybe it's unrealistic, but in light of the efficiency and innovation created by standard-sized shipping containers, I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try to push manufacturers to standardize on various glass bottle shapes and sizes, to make them easy to reuse directly across different products and locations.
I remember visiting Japan and being blown away when I walked into a bookstore - almost every book was a standard size. This means bookshelves can be a standard size. This means people can fit books into their small homes efficiently. Boxes are designed to fit the books perfectly. Cloth book-covers fit library books perfectly. Coming back to North America, it felt that bookshelves were a war between publishers to produce the most awkwardly shaped book that would stick out from the shelf more than any others.
In an age where Amazon will ship you a toothbrush in a 1' box stuffed with paper, where a lot of consumers don't even see the product on a shelf so the attractiveness of the box doesn't matter, think of the benefits that package standardization could have.
Apparently the USSR would wash and reuse glass bottles, and the container shape would be the same whether it contained pickles or whatever. I've only heard this anecdotally though.
* Standardized size (holds 0,7 l)
* Can withstand pressure, therefore suitable for sparkling water
* Can be used roughly 50 times: the bottle develops a matte ring through repeated handling indicating the approximate number of refills
* Any nearby retailer can take it back, and
* Any nearby bottling company can then use it for their own beverages
The important takeaway here is that it's REUSE, not RECYCLE, that might have the potential to reduce plastic production. Legally, producers and retailers (!) have to clearly indicate which beverage containers are reusable (Mehrweg) and which ones are single-use (Einweg). [2] This is a great example of nudging people into environmentally positive behavior. Single-use deposits are higher than reusable deposits.
[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normbrunnenflasche [2]: https://www.volle-pulle-umweltschutz.de/ by the BMU
https://www.buildinggreen.com/blog/foamglas---my-new-favorit...
Always just assumed that was the only practical recyclable container. Apparently even those have plastic? Wow.
Great video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ
Analogy isn't perfect, but it's a material we saw as benign that could end up having untold impact on our bodies.
It's important to always think about both the positive and the negative impacts of anything we humans use, not just the negative or positive.
As a defensive human however, I think it assumes something about my original comment that is not there.
There are many positives that can be said about plastics, but it has shifted us into a "throwaway lifestyle", i.e. packaging, containers. Many plastics are used in a very ephemeral manor, which is great if you want to consumerism. But i suspect this obsolescence is baked into plastics.
I totally get the "war on plastic" tendencies when you see how it's hurting our oceans but it's very important to separate that which is something that can be fixed with some underlying idea that plastic in itself is a problem. It's not. It's literally right now saving lives through the ability creating single use masks, gloves, medical instruments, part of ventilators and I could go on.
We are getting a taste of what the world would look like without consumerism and the use of fossil fuels etc. I don't know about you but I prefer consumerism to what we have now.
I worry more about the economic impact this will have in the long run. Hopefully, it's a hiccup.
If you just think this is a short break before we get back to normal you are in for a rude awakening.
This will change everything both for us, our children and their children.
Millions of companies are going to go bankrupt and people are going to get poorer which means more people are going to die from this not the least from famine.
> more people are going to die from this not the least from famine.
That didn't happen in the last recession - mortality rates apparently went down overall[1], though suicides were up[2]. And farm work isn't going to stop, so it isn't clear why there would be a famine.
Anyway, stay safe and take care. It's obviously a tense time for everyone, and I hope you and your family and friends are all well.
1. https://www.npr.org/2018/01/09/576669311/hidden-brain-great-...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_Great_Recession
I am not outraged, i just pointed to the consequences of what you are enjoying so much.
Obviously people dying is horrible, and the economic damage could be problematic, but I do hope that whenever this is all over, some good may come of it.
In the broader sense, human thinking has shifted to this mode. We can't fix this start over, it reduces the pride of ownership and being accountable for your things. When you have no pride of your material possession, why would you develop pride for culture, institutions, countries. These are all things that we can just make to our pleasing.
I would argue that this might not be a global pandemic if it were not for global trade/consumerism.
Absence of opportunity is poverty. If the opportunities go away so does the prospect of getting out of your situation.
Not being able to pay your bills
And even the safe uses of asbestos are now (mostly) off-limits because of the taboo.
Synthetic fabrics could be an issue due to micro-plastics; however, unfortunately there just aren't good alternatives for many applications; particularly for vegans. For example, for cold weather gear you basically have synthetics or wool. For rain gear the only non-synthetic options that I can think of are leather, oil-skin, and waxed cotton.
Maybe that's worth a little less applause during a pandemic. E.g. the governor of Massachusetts just reversed the ban on plastic bags ... and banned reusable shopping bans, during the emergency. Fear of pollution is getting pushed back by fear of germs.
https://www.wcvb.com/article/gov-baker-grocery-store-pharmac...
I don't know if that means that "BPA-free" is often deceptive advertising, or it's referring to different additive that's technically not BPA but problematic for other reasons, or what. (Bear in mind, as a layman, my mindset on this stuff is that the burden of proof should be on proving safety, not on proving harm.)
It is also true that many plastics are active biologically, mimic hormones, etc. etc. BUT to temper this fear you have to realize that nearly everything is. Many foods, "essential oils", and natural plant and animal exposures have the same sort of hormone mimicry or other biological drug-like interactions which are poorly understood at best.
The point I am trying to get across is that your body is not an impenetrable fortress that new and evil synthetic compounds are attacking. Instead, biological interactions with small effects are everywhere, and while concern about some of them isn't unwarranted, it should be tempered by the idea that these influences abound.
21st century medicine (and many other fields), in my prediction, will be the century of small effects. The broad strokes are out of the way, mostly, and it's now time for the less glamorous and more numerous small details and ever more complex interactions.
Some harms are subtle or situation dependent, and small effects will only show up under widespread or frequent use.
Perhaps deliberately slowed or phased rollout could help.
It would also make materials science and the chemical industries "feel" a lot more like medicine. Companies would have to spend billions on studies to get new chemical formulations or materials to market which could have similar effects on innovation (and monopoly) to those we see in the drug market.
Not necessarily bad depending on what you value but the effects would be very far reaching.
Or you can drop the binary label and start developing statistics about known effects and outcome ranges. These things can be done; further understanding of bio-chemical systems and simulation makes discovery by widespread experiment less and less extant.
The issue isn't that looking for and finding effects positive or negative is hard, the issue is that few are trying and few are interested in the effort. (i.e. most people either have the conservative, 'everything is safe' attitude or the luddite 'everything is bad for you' attitude, and neither involve much discovery)
If the only statement is “we should generally be studying everything more, in an undirected manner with no stated purpose aside from the inherent value of simply knowing more about everything and letting each individual draw their own conclusions”, then yeah sure, but there’s nothing stopping this from happening now, aside from the fact that such a mission statement doesn’t provide particularly strong incentives.
Until we have better science on the subject[1], it seems reasonable to me to assume that our bodies have had time to evolve and adapt to naturally occurring substances in a way that they haven't to man made chemicals. Of course I'm sure this doesn't apply perfectly, but it seems like a reasonable heuristic.
[1] An additional problem is that, even when there is "science", I am often not equipped to determine if it was a sham funded by industry, whether a given chemical is just some functionally identical variant of a potentially unsafe substance, etc.
> I am often not equipped to determine if it was a sham funded by industry
Yeah, this is a problem. :( While I trust that there are good actors in most subfields of scientific inquiry, many domains (health in particular) are exorbitantly expensive to empirically research, inevitably leading to perverse incentives, or at least the absence of incentives to do thorough and holistic research.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Chesterton%27s_fence
They use PLA in dissolvable stitches (one of a few options) and those thin fibers are dissolved within a few days to a few months. It depends much on environment.
So the Oil industry will still have massive demand for new plastics if every piece of existing plastic got recycled only once. For recycling to work, we need a solution that makes it easy to re-use many many times.
This is why recycling really isn't the answer to solving the plastics crisis anyway
So the thin water bottles (PET) might be reused only once, but advanced plastic required by medicine containers, infant food packaging, or even thicker bottles, may get recycled multiple times.
"Reduce" comes before "recycle" in the old marketing adage, but unfortunately it seems they're genuinely at odds.
Well, the point of the aluminum drinking straws is that you don't throw them. What's the point if you're gonna throw them in the end anyways? Just wash it, like the rest of utensils that you use.
Anyways, I think we can all survive without straws. McDonals where I live has started just not giving you straws at all, and the cup has a message that if you want straws, ask the people working there for one. Looking around me when eating there, most people seems to be able to drink their sodas just fine without straws.
Guess the next step is to replace the paper/plastic (not sure what material it is, guessing a mix) cups with actual glasses that gets washed instead of thrown.
Yip, and that's somewhat the point. But for whatever reason we keep getting lulled into the idea that we can fix the problem of consuming too many resources without actually consuming fewer resources.
At least according to my dentist you should always drink sodas with straw.
This is not a technology problem it is a very simple externality problem. We have the technology to solve it it just costs a little more and the people that are creating the problem are not bearing the costs so they do not care.
It turns out that plastics recycling (at least at the consumer level) is not that beneficial and probably just an elaborate marketing campaign. If Penn and Teller dug in and did their research and outed plastics recycling as a marketing campaign I would say they are great public intellectuals and forward thinking visionaries. Instead they just recycled (get it?) some long refuted right wing lies about all recycling and thus ensured nobody would take them seriously. And if part of their argument was correct that was completely coincidental.
They also admitted that despite their findings they found it very difficult to personally give up on recycling. That's what makes the lie so effective. We want to believe we are helping, that we are doing something effective that makes up for our wastefulness and excess consumption. We aren't.
News flash: they're wrong about that. They lost all of their credibility to me with one episode
For example, if we eliminate paper and glass entirely from recycling programs and all recycling was plastic and metal. Would this help?
I know a some amount of paper is carbon neutral at this point because planting is required which offsets use.
And a deposit could be charged for glass which would help that.
If we focused on metal, which is profitable and plastic which seems to be most problematic would we be better off?
Paper is a huge problem, too. It's one of the most polluting industries, up there with mining. And, I believe, that is just the production of paper- not including the forestry that is also required.
The reasons for removing glass in particular seem to be: 1) it's the heaviest component, so removing it decreases transportation/processing costs, 2) after China stopped accepting exported glass, there's a lack of processors who will take it, and 3) broken glass shards contaminate more valuable things in the stream, plus damage machinery.
Plastic isn't really cost-effective either and has low recovery rates, but it's at least lighter than glass and doesn't break into shards as easily, so a lot of places still take it, if only to make people feel good.
Links: https://wamu.org/story/19/04/26/arlington-ends-curbside-glas..., https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/news2/glass-containers-no-long..., https://www.recyclingtoday.com/article/recycling-programs-ph...
I think plastic should be a priority because it seems to be the most disasterous of recyclables when it comes to environmental contamination. Taxing plastic packaging to include externalities would probably fix this.
I can speculate, that more and more products in the stores will be wrapped to create safety feeling for the buyers. “Buy here, our food is well packed and clean!”
"Reducing" requires proper pricing, that is it
But the 3Rs are hierarchical, with the first one being the most important: reduce your waste output. Then: buy used instead of new, avoid single-use items.
You can start with a reusable shopping bag, mug, water bottle, bowl, utensils, cloth napkin.
Just to drive the point home, recycling bins are largely land-filled in the USA. They're only recycled if the municipality can strike a deal with private recycling contractors. Often they just say no, or ask to be paid to handle it. So off to the landfill.
The bins sure make people feel good, though.