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Comment by Ensorceled | Hacker News Reader

We need to focus on the second R, reuse.

I have mason jars that my grandmother and then my mother used for pickling. The only waste is the rubber ring which needs to be replaced occasionally and THAT could be recycled. Many of these bottles have been used for 80+ years now. I have a few Ball jars which my GREAT grandmother used 100+ years ago.

Beer bottles in Canada are reused dozens of times and are recyclable (brown glass) when broken or worn out.

The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy.

Plastics are not currently infinitely recyclable as the polymer chains break down. A lot of plastic is simply not recyclable at all in most of North America [1]

We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close.

[1] https://apps.npr.org/plastics-recycling/

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I found this article incredibly illuminating:

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...

The United States is seemingly uniquely bad at this, thanks to - you guessed it - corporate greed. Container deposit laws work:

> The United States' overall beverage container recycling rate is approximately 33%, while states with container deposit laws have a 70% average rate of beverage container recycling.

but, of course, only ten states in the US have them:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_deposit_legislatio...

A significant fraction of that 70% is collected by homeless individuals and others living below the poverty line, for whom recycling is a zero cost, zero training income source that can pay out the same day. If our (California) social safety nets were effective, I suspect the collection rate would be more in line with the national average.

I love this comment because it's a great example of how the exact same data can be used to support opposing narratives. The raw data here is that California sees a certain quantity of bottle recycling and has a certain level of social safety net.

* One narrative is that the high bottle recycling rate shows a problem with the social safety net.

* Another narrative is that recycling rate shows that it is itself functioning as part of the solution to the social safety net.

Sort of like how a high rate of airbag use could make a statement about how safe or unsafe driving is.

I don't know which of these narratives is closer to the truth, but I think it's good example to use to help train ourselves to realize that many narratives are possible and part of critical thinking is not jumping too quickly from raw data to any one particular interpretation.

> Another narrative is that recycling rate shows that it is itself functioning as part of the solution to the social safety net.

In my experience, no one in good faith argues that bottle deposits are a part of the social safety net, let alone a functional part.

Edit: to clarify, mine is a US centric experience. I think the argument for recycling collection as a tool of economic mobility is perfectly sound as long as it's not economically coercive (i.e. if the safety net is adequate without resorting to roaming the streets collecting recyclable material).

Doubling the bottle deposit to help the homeless was a suggestion made by the German satirical party „die PARTEI“.

Äh, 'Tschullijung? Sie ham de Pfandring verjesse!

https://duckduckgo.com/q=Pfandring

It is a part of the safety net, whether it was designed that way or not. Note that I'm not claiming that it should be.

Unfortunately it puts the collectors at risk, because it incentivizes them to root through garbage cans full of potentially dangerous material without any protective equipment. And in the end its a complete waste of their time. If the government wants to earmark that money for them, they should just do that, and let those people do something meaningful like job training, or raising grandchildren, or whatever, instead of being up to their elbows in broken glass and used condoms in the middle of the night. Most of the recyclable material was already in somebody's recycling bin already, so it's not like they're cleaning up the environment or any other social good.

The solution is more data. Let's see how CA rates compare to that of say... MA, which has a significantly less population of homeless.

In Oregon it is amazing how effective this program is. You never see cans or bottles as litter.

Another effect is it lowers your garbage/recycling bill as homeless will often rummage through your bins for cans/bottles freeing up bin space so you never really have an overflow problem of glass or cans.

The pickers in my neighborhood are a nuisance. If my recyling bin is full, then they move good recyclables from my recycling bin to my trash bin in order to try to find cans and bottles. Often, then don't move them back when they're done rummaging.

Yeah, in theory I have 0 problem with people picking through the dumpsters at my place. In practice though trash gets thrown around outside the dumpster for the wind to make a mess of the parking lot with. I wouldn't care at all if they would just pick up after themselves. But they don't - so I do care.

So why not provide a bin for them for the deposit recyclables? I'll tell you what, if you would like to pick out your preferred bin, show me it, and I'll pay for it for you. If that's really your problem then I can make the effort with a simple and easy solution.

lol same here. Homeless in DTLA kick the cans over when possible and leave the other refuse on the ground.

California hit a 110% plastic bottle recycling rate at one point. The California Highway Patrol has been stopping semitrailer trucks coming into the state with plastic bottles for recycling.

On board with mandating recycling and encouraging use of infinitely recyclable materials in container manufacturing.

A couple nits to pick, though.

– You have to be specific when advocating for reuse. Some like to keep using—for long periods of time—bottles made from cheap thin disposable plastic. That plastic, when repeatedly emptied, may quickly accumulate tiny cracks and leech chemicals, which in case of P(V)C may well be BPA. How harmful this could be depends on country’s regulations.

– Pure aluminum containers are rare, if exist. Aluminum cans & bottles contain plastic inside.

I personally advocate for glass, and if glass is not an option—recycle, don’t reuse disposable plastic or aluminum containers more than a couple of times for the sake of your and your descendants’ health.

It gives me the creeps every time I see someone heating up their lunch in an old plastic container. Old dairy containers with snap lids are very common. It must be leaching so much garbage into the food. I can’t tell if that’s phobia due to bad science or these people are actually gradually poisoning themselves.

Same, though it seems hard to determine just how risky it is.

I have drank water from thin plastic bottles that had been sitting out in the sun and elements for a quite a while. I don't know exactly how long, probably a year or two. The water was gross! I attribute it to the plastic breaking down and contaminating the water, but that's just a guess.

I have the same concern about the new plastic everyday (food delivery sends these). It feels that old plastics only diffuse components into a food once, and then gradually less, but new ones do that again and again. Idk if that is true or a phobia too.

I believe that. Contact time is a thing.

Kinda like how cars recommend a very short interval for the first oil change: because that’s when all the metal is flaking off. Once your engine is old, everything is smoothed out and there’s a lot less surface area.

PVC and BPA are not common in disposable thin plastic bottles nowadays. Reusing them is much more efficient than a metal water bottle (that also Typically has a plastic liner and other plastic parts, if your Amistics for some reason doesnt allow plastic) in terms of embodied energy and total mass of material.

I like mason jars because they actually do last a long time and are pretty cheap, but don’t hate on reusing cheap plastic bottles!

Thanks for the advice.

I use the same plastic bottle for months when going to the gym. Should I stop doing this?

Here's the case that makes me cringe: I know some families that don't think their tap water is clean enough to drink, and they reuse disposable plastic bottles for months to store spring water that the whole household drinks. That can't be good long term.

In your situation it's probably not worth stressing too much if your plastic bottle is built to be reusable or if it's not your primary source of water.

It's difficult to find reliable data on this, partially because how bad is the least durable kind of plastic legally allowed for drink containers depends on local (and changing) regulations. In presence of such uncertainty, personally for myself and loved ones I apply the following reasoning:

– If bottle’s plastic is thin and easily crumples, routine handling and refilling will cause plastic surface to degrade and microscopic cracks will make chemicals from the container more likely to seep into water.

– There is a well-publicized experiment from last year that found varying amounts of microplastics in newly purchased water bottled in plastic; I find it likely that after reusing a plastic container not designed to be reusable the amount of microplastics would only grow.

– Glass bottles are great!

Glass bottles are great, until you use them for the bottle flipping game.

That's actually the main reason I use a metal bottle. I am clumsy and inattentive enough of the time to make using glass on the go a dangerous proposition. Glass remains the container of choice when sitting at my desk or table though.

Yes. Get a stainless steel one and use it forever.

Since I’m literally talking about institutional reuse of glassware and institutional recycling of aluminum, and advocating not using plastic at all; I’m not sure what nit you are picking with me.

To me it seemed you were talking about them as examples of the main point, reuse. I think the nit is not addressing plastics at all, and their caveats. I think it was meant less as a "you got this wrong" nit and more as a "we need to cover this too if talking about reuse" one.

I always found it fascinating that in the 70's and 80's everybody moved away from glass and paper to plastic. I mean literally anything that could be converted to plastic from paper or glass was.

Do you think we'll ever revert back to just paper and glass again?

We are making some good strides with paper straws and the like, and mandating people bring reusable bags to the grocery stores - but I still see many of the stores I shop at still use plastic bags.

Probably not as natural gas remains dirt cheap in parts of the world. Turning it into polyethylene is a way to export those low prices.

Most countries around the world do this by default.

For example, those big jugs of water that get delivered. In most places they are clean and reused. Where I'm living right now, in Turkey, those big bottles are made out of glass and it just gets replaced with a previously used glass jug.

Same with the beer, all the bottles are collected, cleaned, and reused.

Agreed. The “first world” really needs to get it’s act together on this.

The thing is we (the US) did do this at one point in time. When I was a kid you could buy a coke in a glass bottle and return it when done to be re-used by the manufacturer. For some reason we stopped. We should bring that back.

When I was in Mexico around the early 2000 they still did this. When you buy a drink you could return it for a few cents back from the vender.

The reason is money. Labor is a lot higher in the US over Mexico. Cheaper to trash and remake vs reuse. You would need a stick or carrot in the economic cost to shift behavior. Corporations are smart, they will choose the cheaper path.

"We" didn't stop, it was cheaper for Coca-Cola to use plastic. Coca-Cola did it.

Stop blaming consumers for corporate choices to slightly increase profits.

Like in the UK, Tesco have just inexplicably switched from using cardboard egg containers to plastic ones. Is that my fault?

The corporations only make those choices because they are allowed to(or rather, because they are not forced by the regulations to actually pay for the environmental cost of what they make). Yes, I recently noticed that with Tesco eggs, I have complained to them about it. And it's not our fault but we can definitely try to avoid these products as consumers. Telling companies why you avoid them is also a good thing to do.

We are responsible for our parliamentary representatives, and thereby our laws. It is absolutely our fault, as a society, as consumers.

Good doc here on how the plastic industry pushed for "recycling" laws so they could look like the good guys, but much of the stuff you see the recycling logo on can't in fact be recycled.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/plastic-wars/

I hate this attitude that treats corporations as having zero responsibility beyond what they are legally mandated to do. Yes, it is an observable fact that corporatism and market economics incentivize corporations to behave that way. But it is an unjustified leap to turn that into a moral claim that it is ethically acceptable for that to be true.

People are incentivized to commit package theft in the US today. The odds of being caught and prosecuted are very slim, and the upside is you get free stuff. As an economic action, it is very market efficient: low barrier of entry, large number of "sellers", few cabals or controls over prices. There definitely isn't perfect information on products, but given that the cost is near-zero, that doesn't matter much. As a business, "package theft" is a great one to get into, and the market highly rewards you for doing so.

However, we correctly consider people who do so as despicable shitwads who rightfully earn our scorn and condemnation. We publicly shame them, and certainly don't want to hang out with them and count them as friends.

We should do the same with businesses that do morally harmful acts, regardless of whether the act is technically illegal or incentivized by market forces. It is certainly the business's fault when they do a shitty thing. They have fully agency in the choice of whether or not do so.

Corporations aren't natural persons and have no ethics. They are abstract creations of law and the only legitimate expectations of corporations as corporations are their responses to structural incentives including enforced legal obligations.

We can talk about the ethics of the actions of corporate decision-makers, but only while keeping in mind that structural incentives mean that decision-makers who sacrifice the narrow interests of corporate investors for ethical reasons beyond the constraints forcibly externally imposed on corporations are likely to, over time, be replaced by those who do not.

If you want corporations to act consistently with some view of ethics, you aren't going to do it sustainably by moral persuasion directed at decision-makers, but only by shifting the structural incentives.

You're confusing their LEGAL status with their MORAL obligations.

Just because there's an easy way for a collective of people to absolve their moral responsibilities by getting a little certificate that says "We're a corporation" doesn't make it right. It's just a legal accident, a mummers farce, and you defending it is morally reprehensible too.

Worse still, it didn't used to be this way till some prat of an economist (probably American) starting saying so, and a bunch of people smelling easy money piled on. Companies used to care about their image, now their "care" about their shareholders (but actually their contractual bonuses and severance packages).

> You're confusing their LEGAL status with their MORAL obligations.

No, I'm saying that considering corporations to be subjects of morality at all is pointless, and that one ought to consider what they want corporations to do to acheive moral ends, and then work to establish structures to at least incentivize that, if not actually constrain them to it.

> Just because there's an easy way for a collective of people to absolve their moral responsibilities by getting a little certificate that says "We're a corporation" doesn't make it right.

I think you start from a false premise here; that it is of no value to analyze corporations as if they were moral actors does not in any way absolve any natural persons for the immorality of any actions they undertake in or around a corporate structure.

It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)

Why is it pointless? Corporations are simply a collective of people, working together.

There was a story on here today about the dilemma a roman consul faced because the laws were contradictory. It was fine to murder for revenge, in fact Roman law didn't get involved in revenge or murders really, but patricide was viewed as an absolute wrong, a no-no. The woman had murder her Mum in revenge as the Mum had killed her grand-children to spite her Daughter. It was a real dilemma, revenge is fine, and it was a good reason for revenge, but parricide is an absolute wrong.

Does that sound normal?

Of course not TO US.

I think that in the future, today's corporate law will be viewed just as asinine and bizarre. Corporations poisoning people by flooding chemicals into rivers or releasing gasses or toxins, murdering people with product defects they decided not recall or destroying society's common goods, but all the people involved were let free rather than incarcerated for 20 years as accessories to murder? Thousands of people colluding to murder people with cigarettes when they knew how lethal they were? Fine. Because they were "employees" and the "person" doing it was a legal figment called a corporation?

A bunch of black people in America get incarcerated for simply being friends/near the murderer, but a bunch of white people who all spent years or even decades covering up systematic mass-murder get to walk away? Man, when you actually think about it it's mind-blowing. White collar crime is so easy to get away with.

It's a convenient fabrication that makes sense only when you're inside the system.

I'm a pragmatist, it's not going to change, it's the way it is, but otoh you simply can't see the wood for the trees. You think, somehow, it's right.

> Why is it pointless? Corporations are simply a collective of people, working together.

They really are not, and the entire corporate form is structured and governed by law differently than partnerships to make them not like that.

I mean, unless you count the chartering government, it's constituents, and all the investors as part of the group, as well as all the managers and other employees. But its completely useless to talk about the collectively morality of the aggregate of such a heterogenous group of individual actors with different knowledge and constraints with regard to the actions of the corporations. It makes sense to talk about, in any given value framework, the desirability of corporate action, and the morality of any of the individual actors.

> Corporations poisoning people by flooding chemicals into rivers or releasing gasses or toxins, murdering people with product defects they decided not recall or destroying society's common goods, but all the people involved were let free rather than incarcerated for 20 years as accessories to murder?

That's the consequence of viewing the corporation as an independent moral actor, since that allows viewing the corporation as the responsible party.

> I'm a pragmatist, it's not going to change

I'm a pragmatist, and recognize that it needs to change, and that change starts with not viewing corporations as moral agents, but as tools.

> No, I'm saying that considering corporations to be subjects of morality at all is pointless

Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality? Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."? If so, what is meaningfully different between a political party, a corporation, or any other kind of organized collective activity?

> It just removes the ability to pass blame for immorality off on to an abstraction, and focuses it on the people responsible for the abstraction (which, for creatures of law, in addition to any others includes those responsible for the law, either as lawmakers or as electors thereof.)

I think I get what you're saying. We should focus on the people, not the group, because the people can be punished. But I think that's an ineffective mindset.

The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals.

If we don't allow our moral code to also operate at the group level, then it will always be at a disadvantage compared to the people whose organized behavior has moral outcomes with strong economies of scale.

We should treat individuals and groups as moral actors. We should be willing to say, "this corporation as an emergent behavior of its otherwise moral individuals did a bad thing, so should thus be dissolved."

> Is it pointless to consider political parties to be subjects of morality?

Yes, though perhaps somewhat less so (I'll address the “perhaps somewhat less so” part later.) What I said further down a sibling thread about corporations applies exactly to political parties as well: “It makes sense to talk about, in any given value framework, the desirability of corporate action, and the morality of any of the individual actors.”

> Is it meaningless to say "The Nazi Party is bad."?

No, if by “is bad” you mean “tends to produce bad outcomes”. In the general sense this is distinct from though correlated with the morality of the persons comprising the party.

> The entire reason individuals organize into groups is because they can do more as a group than they could have accomplished as individuals.

Yes, groups are tools of individuals, not moral actors. It is no more sensible to talk about their morality than it is to talk about the morality of other tools. You can talk about the morality of the people who are using the tool. In some types of groups, many actions of the group are a fairly direct reflection of a moral consensus of the members, and in the case of those actions of those groups one can refer to the morality of the group as a useful shorthand for the morality of the shared position of the membership that is behind the action. This is true of political parties generally in a simplified, idealized view, and frequently enough in a realistic view that it's not always completely pointless to talk about the morality of political parties.

It's almost never true of the complex set of stakeholders with different structural roles that are behind business corporations, especially large and/or broadly held corporations. For any given action of a particular corporation, there might be some group of it's constituents whose morality it fairly directly reflects, but even for actions for which this is the case it won't necessarily be the same group (or even a similarly situated group) from action to action.

> Tesco have just inexplicably switched from using cardboard egg containers to plastic ones.

They've only switched because they've run out of the pulp used to make the cardboard egg containers. It's a temporary switch, although not ideal.

I'm sure the disruption to UK recycling collections due to Covid can't have helped much with that.

> Like in the UK, Tesco have just inexplicably switched from using cardboard egg containers to plastic ones. Is that my fault?

If you keep buying them, yes. Tesco's beancounters (who are legion) are certainly going to keep track of the overall cost and revenue structure. Assuming the plastic containers cost less and are sold in equal amounts, they will push forward to roll out plastic over cardboard where they can.

If they want price signals, give them price signals. Vote with your wallet.

We buy our eggs from a nearby farm. Tray of 30 is good for a week, and sometimes two. Better quality than what Tesco or Sainsbury's offers, too.

EDIT: we also return our cardboard trays to the farm shop when we buy a new batch. Reuse >> recycle.

Slightly OT: I may be a bit unfair picking on Tesco as it turns out the pulp used to make egg cartons has run out because of the demand for eggs from the covid home-baking upswing, they do plan to switch back.

But only because the last time they pulled this stunt back in 2011 or so claiming it was eco-friendly to use "recyclable" plastic it blew up in their face (most of which isn't recycled) .

Fair enough. Now that you mention it, I remember how during the height of the lockdown cardboard pretty much ran out. People bought more stuff online (lots of cardboard in packaging), while there was no waste paper collection to fill the demand from the supply side.

There still isn't enough waste paper collection happening, really. The communal large containers are emptied at most once a week - and they have capacity for less than two days. People have a lot more cardboard packaging to get rid of, but with collection points hitting their capacity in 1/3 of the pre-covid time, there's a constant backlog to get through.

> last time they pulled this stunt back in 2011 or so

Wasn't aware of this historical detail. Thanks.

A plastic tax would solve this. Make plastic containers at least as expensive as cardboard or aluminium cans through added taxes.

Maybe the reason is because of stronger food safety laws and tort law.

If some guy used his bottle as a hammer for several months before turning it in for recycling, then someone cuts their hand on a jagged edge or drinks a glass sliver, that's a multi-million dollar lawsuit. Unlikely maybe but at Coca-Cola scale I imagine things like that will happen eventually.

These companies would have to have sophisticated QA processes, or melt down and re-cast the bottles to ensure the food safety of their supply chain against millions of chaos monkeys.

Edit: Here I just did a Google search for the butthurt downvoters that proves there is extra QA that needs to be done. From an Oregon glass bottling reuse program:[1]

> Among other attributes, the machinery features an electronic sensor that uses X-ray equipment to image each bottle, detecting flaws in the glass, as well as mold and other contaminants, Bailey said. That step will reject any bottles that are chipped or contaminated.

[1]: https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/03/13/oregon-e...

That's quite a hypothetical - if there were a rash of lawsuits the lead up to Coke being sold in 2 liter plastic bottles, that would be indicative, but I am not aware of anything like that - and you'd expect there'd be no glass bottles of anything (beer, mustard, maple syrup) if that was the case.

> you'd expect there'd be no glass bottles of anything (beer, mustard, maple syrup) if that was the case

That's completely different - you're confusing recycling with reuse. The bottles you're referring to are made anew from glass that has been smashed into cullet and re-cast into new glass.

What the commenters above are advocating are thicker glass bottles that are washed and reused as-is, i.e. reuse.

Different QA concerns when you're manufacturing fresh glass versus collecting it from randos

Bullshit. The Club Mate I'm drinking right now came in a reused glass bottle. Some of these bottles have more wear on the outside, some of them look pristine.

Why should laws to protect people be deleted and laws added to protect corporations?

You base laws that protect the well being of the citizenry into a tort reform call. Protecting corporations that abuse the public does not improve the lives of the public. It just improves the profit margin.

The basis of "tort reform" is a panic assessment that lawsuits run wild and the only solution is to indemnify the rich and powerful. This lets them abuse the public even more.

Your link implies this is for liability, but it could just as easily be a filtering step so that the bottles provided are up to a certain quality standard to be readily reused.

The root problem is the bottles are cheaper to make out of disposable material. The cost burden is shifted to The People over a longer term. This is the tragedy of the commons.

A bunch of states have bottle deposit laws. Stuff goes to recycling rather than direct reuse, but still, the concept is to use the deposit as an incentive to reduce litter and increase recycling rates.

At the end of the day, if we want companies to do more sustainable things than using single use packages that cost nearly nothing to dump in a landfill (or litter), then we need to start charging them enough to incentive sustainable behavior. And sadly few politicians want to be the person that raises prices on bottles of milk or racks of beer.

There's at least one company in the west (US) that still does this. Have you tried Strauss farms milk? The creamtop is absolutely delicious. There's a $2 bottle deposit which encourages the bottles to be returned. Only problem is you can only get this milk at higher end grocery stores or fancy co-ops.

Yeah, Strauss is great. Sadly it's getting harder to find their cream. Everyone seems to carry the ice cream tho.

Strauss is great but they need to use amber glass bottles to protect their delicious milk from light.

Personal anecdote time, I guess. My state has a bottle deposit law. I don't return anything but it still goes into recycling. We buy very few individually packaged things, I honestly can't be bothered to collect large bulky containers and bring it back to a redemption center for a lousy $5 or less.

Generally speaking, our recycling outweighs our trash and (commercial) compost put together. Mostly the bottle deposit doesn't change my recycling or purchasing behavior and it only annoys me that I'm "throwing money away". I think the biggest reason to keep it is because it's a perverted form of social welfare for homeless trash pickers who have a different tradeoff of time for money than myself.

Part of the problem is that nickel deposits were introduced in the '70s but have not been adjusted for inflation. The inflation-adjusted value of a nickel in the '70s is closer to a quarter, and if the deposit on the bottle was a quarter people would certainly feel more strongly about collecting said deposit back.

Moving to plastic significantly reduced the cost of transportation and the resulting CO2 emissions (but increased CO2 through production of plastic - net?).

Better to haul a trailer full of coke that 98% product and 2% plastic than one that’s 90% product and 10% glass.

You can fit more plastic-packaged product too. Still waiting for them to sell it in cubes though.

I was in Guatemala in the early 90's on a bus and it stopped near a stand with people selling soda.

The procedure was open the soda bottle, pour the soda into a plastic bag, put a straw in the bag and tie it. The vendor kept the bottle (presumably you could keep the bottle yourself if you paid the deposit with your soda). I kept waiting to see a bag leak or some other disaster but it seemed to mostly work. You couldn't put your soda down though. Maybe it was a scheme to encourage rapid consumption or accidental loss and sell more sodas, not sure.

Exactly, we take the “reuse” and repurpose parts of three R’s very seriously in Turkey. Our flower pots are usually used empty cheese containers and all the plastic bottles are reused for containment of homemade stuff, tomato paste/olives etc...

We do not recycle although.

Which is not necessarily safe depending on the type of plastic (not sure how it goes in Turkey though).

... and depending on the type of food. IIRC acidic foods should not be mixed with some plastics (and also not with aluminium foil).

Huh I'd be interested to know more about the aluminum foil, since at a place I regularly get takeout from they wrap some of the items in aluminum foil (to keep it warm)...

For short times it's not that problematic IMO, but for long term storage? Rather avoid it: https://www.rd.com/article/cooking-with-aluminum-foil/

Additionally, salty foods seem to be problematic too: https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/22133/why-did-...

It's well established that some trace amount of aluminum leaches into your food when using foil, and it's more pronounced with acidic foods.

As far as I'm aware there's no evidence of any health effects of this (still trace) amount. The main hypothesis is aluminum may somehow be linked to Alzheimer's, and dietary aluminum may be the source of that.

The Alzheimer's Association rather definitively says there is no known link and most current evidence doesn't support this: https://www.alzheimers.org.uk/about-dementia/risk-factors-an...

Every other health effect I've seen hypothesized seems even more fringe.

I know a lot of people are conditioned to not drink tap water, however, we need a world where tap water is not only clean enough to drink but also seen as the definitive clean water that you would want to drink.

I live in the UK and never buy water. All mine comes through the tap. There is no lorry delivering water for me although the water supply does have lots of big pumps and processes that mean it isn't arriving in my house by gravity alone and it does have a carbon footprint.

If you are living 50 miles out in the desert then you are going to need a lorry to fill up a big tank rather than bring lots of little glass or plastic bottles. Otherwise, tap water rules and needs to be kept clean. Drinking bought bottled water should be discouraged.

One of the key issues with using bottles is the cost, weight and the fact that there is a lot of breakage. The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times.

One key invention which could really help here is flexible glass packaging. Interestingly, one of the lost technologies from the Roman era is flexible glass:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexible_glass

Corning does have flexible glass, but used primarily for interiors and not for packaging: https://www.corning.com/in/en/innovation/corning-emerging-in...

The story of flexible glass had contemporary doubters. My guess is it’s likely apocryphal but created as a fable with political and economic undertones.

Yes, there are some doubts about the veracity of that claim

Let the costs increase then.

All food containers must be recyclable or compostable. This should be a rule across the globe.

We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.

That's real easy to say when you work in an air conditioned office and shop at whole foods. Sure the demographics most represented here could absorb the cost but these demographics are a minority in the first word and a tiny minority globally.

Economic stability is what permits people to have the free time to care about abstract things like "the environment". Raise the cost of food, raise the cost of fuel, "internalize the externalities" or whatever the doublespeak of the day is, and you're gonna have a hell of a lot more people living on the edge and those people are gonna care a hell of a lot more about their immediate needs than about the environment (and they'll vote accordingly). These changes might look small at a micro level but at a macro level anything that decreases standard of living makes people prioritize their short term needs over the long term.

We're in an era of companies worth trillions and their owners worth billions. It's silly to say we have too few resources to provide enough economic stability for people to care about the environment, meanwhile mega yachts are being made and islands are being purchased by an uber wealthy elite class, and there are people who will defend that behavior, all because they have a lot of money, so it must be okay.

Market driven economies that do not take into account environmental destruction and which cannot come to terms with wealth inequalities will be a huge danger to the future plight of humanity. Waiting for the market to "naturally" react by raising prices due to resource scarcity and destruction of supply chains due to environmental hazards will be too slow, and too little too late.

Those that buy yachts and islands are a lot less frequent though. It's obscene, I agree, but it's not like everybody was well-off if you just nationalized Jeff Bezoz' wealth.

You don't have to wait for the market, you just need to make sure that proposed policies aren't massively affecting the lower classes. Food insecurity isn't a good foundation for a stable and peaceful society. When you're artificially generating it, you might want to take care of the poverty first, not the other way around.

The problem is that we're wringing our hands over prices rising due to taking the environment into account, we do not wring our hands much when prices rise to fatten up the paydays for elite classes. Food scarcity is already an issue, and excess at the top, is already an issue. A lot of the economy is based on things being disposable, even in some cases to the point of humans being disposable objects(factory towns, sweatshops, "essential workers"). We'll eventually need to come to terms with ways to handle environmental damage better, and not in a passive way that just socializes that debt and damage onto the poor and the future generations, like we're doing now. The endless consumption/growth economy needs to evolve into a sustainable economy. Obviously there are entrenched interests that want to maintain the status quo until the world is on fire.

>Those that buy yachts and islands are a lot less frequent though.

I dunno, there's a whole site devoted to renting and buying islands around the world

https://www.privateislandsonline.com/

Some of the prices aren't too over the top.

Seriously, something like 50 of them cost in the $2-3M range, which is less than a lot of houses in the Bay Area. (Google says that Zillow says that the median price of a house sold in Palo Alto is $2.6M.) There are also three currently listed from $59k-$68k.

Degrading environment is leading to economic in-stability. The chickens will come home to roost.

I agree. But an average human won't. A perceived cost increase or to put it more generally a perceived life standard decrease incurs a strong emotion in humans. Let earth and our future be be damned, I want more dopamine in my brain as soon as possible. This is the reason why most people live in debt, instead of an obviously optimal alternative of saving up for your purchases. We evolved in an unstable world, where future was uncertain and happiness now was worth a lot more than the possibility of happiness in the future.

It doesn't matter if people like it or not, you just make it so companies or people have to pay for the negative externalities through taxes or regulation and the problem is solved. The market will naturally rebalance and innovate under the new constraints.

If only we had responsible, effective government with the balls to do what has to be done to protect the future. This business of short term thinking and to hell with the future is not only ruining things it is very literally current generations stealing from future generations.

I think we should make a law to compensate for that. Those social security obligations where the current working generations pay for past generations retirement? Let's reduce that considerably. Let's also raise estate taxes. It's fair, they created and benefited from this mess and then left it to us to bear.

> It doesn't matter if people like it or not,

Does if you want it done by elected politicians in a properly functioning democracy.

I don't think that policies like carbon taxes are that terribly unpopular (depends on the location.)

But even then democratic governments do things that are unpopular all the time. I don't think it's untenable. But even if it cost politicians their re-election, it's still the right thing to do.

Gillet jaunes disagree very strongly. Even if an idea is popular in principle and is a good idea there can be tons of anger over whose particular ox is gored by it, regardless of how skewed the priorities may be in the grand scheme of things if it is perceived as "unfair".

From barely visible offshore wind turbine complaints in Martha's Vineyard, to reluctance of former coal miners to retrain to less lucrative industries to the original luddites solving problems can piss /a lot/ of people off.

It doesn't make them non-viable but it isn't as easy as you would think from superficial popularity.

But isn't the whole thing "now oil and oil-based-products are bad" kind of unfair to all the developing nations? We, the rich western countries, we're able to profit of the non-sustainable benefits we got from fossil fuels and their products, while a large part of the earth's population didn't profit nearly as much as we have. This is a line of thinking I've seen underrepresented in a lot of the discussions about the environment and the future of our planet and species in general.

They are also stuck for better or worse as "technological vassals" as not driving research and development. This isn't a slight on their intellectual capabilities at all but an acknowledgement of realities and scales - they are just as human as us. Third world nations don't develop their own novel weapons systems beyond guerilla repurposing like technical trucks - they don't have the budget for it. Clever individuals can still come up with something new but they lack the institutional support for it to be "big".

One silver lining they get is R&D of others can help them skip the step some steps compared to the past west's development paths. Cell phones connected the third world in absense of wires and individual autorouting compared to party lines and operator based dispatches. Something similar is happening to a degree with renewables.

Renewables are a nice fit to them in several ways, the storage and grid free unreliability is unfortunately nothing new to them. It is a bit of a situational dubious blessing like "We don't need to worry about chemo being carcogenic - you already have stage 3 cancer". Not ideal but few things are for the third world even if they are improving.

> We should also ban single-use plastic. If costs need to go up, then let them go up. Consumers need to understand the costs of their consumption and we can’t destroy our planet so that corporations can be more profitable.

The hitch is affordability for people with lower incomes. While it is easy to be critical about single serving beverages and over packages potato chips, the vast majority of goods found in most grocery stores are packaged.

> While it is easy to be critical about single serving beverages and over packages potato chips, the vast majority of goods found in most grocery stores are packaged.

I don't think anyone is suggesting that we need to do away with packaged foods entirely. the fundamental relationship between surface area and volume means we can improve things substantially just by using bigger containers. a plastic quart-sized container of apple sauce still uses a lot less plastic than two four packs of single-serving cups. once you're buying and selling food in larger containers, the material cost of the container contributes less to the total cost of the product, leaving some headroom to use more expensive materials.

That makes sense, and I was thinking along similar lines in terms of the cost of food, but it is also something that has to be driven by consumers. Government regulation may help, but it may not.

Getting ride of single serving packaging cannot really be done through the initiative of individual businesses. Consumers will simply switch to products providing single serving packages if that is what they desire. What has to be changed is the desire. You also have to consider that there are cases when small package sizes are legitimate, such as when someone uses very little of a product.

Regulation may not solve the problem either. Some people simply prefer single use packaging over cleaning and reusing smaller containers. Consider something like school lunches. When schools ask families to pack lunches using reusable containers, there is often a backlash and a few who simply don't understand the concept of reusable packaging. Quite often, things get sent in baggies or plastic wrap or inexpensive containers that are only used a handful of times before being tossed. This is ignoring the world of adult lunches, where adults often do the same or worse (e.g. ordering food in disposable packaging).

As simple as the solutions may sound, getting people to go along with it is a difficult problem.

It's easily solvable for liquids, the only issue is upfront cost.

https://interestingengineering.com/drug-store-in-czechia-bri...

One of the costs is weight, which means that transporting glass bottles releases more CO2. We also shouldn’t underestimate how dangerous glass can be when dropped.

It's not so corporations can be more profitable. It's so poor people can eat. Raise the price of food 20% for heavy but recyclable containers and suddenly 1 of 5 poor kids doesn't get enough to eat.

This is why finding sustainable solutions that lower costs, not raise them is the dream solution.

Syringes, urine cups, stool sample collection cups, catheters, condoms - these days nobody wants to go through the hassle of washing and sanitizing certain items for reuse. A single-use plastic ban would make dealing with biohazards an energy and chemically intensive cleaning nightmare.

Flexible glass isn't a lost ancient mystery. We call it "silicone."

Silocone is used for food packaging but, as far as I know, I do not know any company shipping food in silicone bottles. However, silicone food packaging bags exist:

https://www.stasherbag.com/blogs/stasher-life/food-grade-sil...

> The weight alone increases the cost of the supply chain by several times.

I suspect that matters a lot more when all the local recycling plants have shut down because a vendor in a different country offered such good pricing for a while that nobody could/wanted to compete, but has since greatly raised they prices.

Weight does matter quite a bit when shipping something literally halfway around the world, but we don't have to ship it around the world. We need to get our own capacity to recycle locally built up again.

Weight matters less than you would think for long distance shipping - look at ore and crude oil for one both could have /major/ weight savings by in situ refining but the economics confirm shipping it to be refined is the winner.

Global shipping's sheer scale tends to snap people's intuitions in two compared to the actual numbers as it feels like it really shouldn't be this efficient by cost or carbon. The reality is that when you keep on getting bigger and bigger container ships the efficency when fully loaded keeps going up. Think of it like how a diesel train is more efficent than a highway of commuters despite the tonnage difference between one car and a full train.

The current situation with recycling is that China used to take almost everything, and then over the last few years it's gone from that to first "only very clean stuff" to "we don't want certain materials at all". Unfortunately, since they were such a reliable vendor for so long, many of the local recycling plants shut down, here and elsewhere in the world, and a lot of stuff we used to recycle ends up in the landfill, but there's also a lot of stuff that's right on the edge, so some recycling centers store it for a period hoping the economics make sense in the near future as markets fluctuate.

Now, global shipping is cheap, but I'm sure for large portions of the country there's also a portion of the cost which is even getting the goods to a large port, which may be hundreds or thousands of miles away. Localized recycling helps not only with the the global shipping, but also a portion of the local shipping, as well as likely bringing back capacity to recycle goods that we just can't feasibly do economically right now. Some of that is shipping cost, some of it is just rectifying the mistakes of depending almost wholly on an outside vendor that then cut off service.

one of the reasons the cost and weight of glass is such a problem is because the supply chains have consolidated around huge centralized bottling plants that require the transport of individually-packaged goods clear across the country.

bottling isn't a specialized task, it can be done anywhere. If companies were forced to pay the true cost of their plastic packaging, we might see a return to a system where bottling plants were set up locally, provided local jobs in smaller communities, and customers could return their used glass bottles directly to the local bottling plant for sterilization and re-use.

I thought the Romans were known to outright despise glass, although that was in architectural contexts. Flexible glass sounds very unlike them given references to pottery and wineskins instead.

Those are really good points. A good approach to incentivize everyone to do the right thing is to make it the least expensive option. That either requires some lucky tech breakthrough (super unlikely) or a strong government.

A recyclability tax, where the producer pays a tax that corresponds to how much it will cost to recycle their product. Maybe collect data of how much of their product is actually recycled. That would force producers to consider reuse, recycling, etc.

Banning disposable packaging. Want potato chips? Bring a special reusable (and relatively expensive) bag to the dispenser, have it unload some chips and do whatever trick is necessary to keep the chips dehydrated and crisp.

You can also only ban disposable packaging that could have negative environmental effect. Maybe something made out of some fungi or hay or something could just be treated like compost waste.

The beer bottle consortium in Ontario is a good model, the beer bottles have been shared among all the brewers for decades and returned for deposit to common locations. This monopoly has a few issues of course but it's a good template.

We have something like what you propose in germany [1]. Basically it causes the producers of packaging to end up paying for the disposal of the corresponding trash. This creates an incentitive for producers to make the packaging less wasteful.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dot_(symbol)#German_dual...

Do German manufacturers still pull tricks like selling a slightly smaller amount of pasta/sauce/cheese/crisps/juice in the same sized container at the same price?

Happens all the time in Canada/USA. Funny how they switch to the common metric or imperial sizes where it fits their interests. E.g. a lot of pastas went from 1kg to 908g, while pop bottles went from 560mL to 500mL.

This is known as shrinkflation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrinkflation

Kinda bullshit though, it's been around for ages and in many regions there's no proper waste management.

Where I live you have to collect it separately and bring it somewhere on your own. The smaller towns next to my town oftn have this as a third/fourth bin next to general waste/paper/biological.

Despite this, Germans seem to use a lot of bottles. Most German people seem to prefer to drink bottled water rather than tap water, even though tap water is of very high quality. They also don't have the concentrated drinks available in other countries (cordial/squash) and insist on shipping around diluted drinks in heavy glass bottles.

Yes, due to the insane amount of single-use plastic bottles being being wasted without recycling, we nowadays have to pay deposit for most bottles, which we then get back by returning the spent bottles to special collecting stations that use some computer-vision to check each bottle one by one for eligibility of deposit return.

So whatever you drink at home, you usually quickly start amassing lots of empty bottles at home that rot and wait for being returned to the supermarket.

Your "chips model" works perfectly well for thousands of products. Want detergent? Bring a bottle to a machine that fills it up rather than taking home a brand new plastic bottle every time. Ditto for fruits and vegetables. Biscuits. Candy. Anything that doesn't need a plastic bag for health and safety reasons.

How would fill-your-own-bottle work with online shopping and home delivery, which more and more people are doing even for groceries?

You could do it like the milk men where you put out your old container and they bring you a new one. Instead of refilling it yourself the used one goes back to be refilled at the factory or whatever.

Put a deposit on the bottle that it comes in, similar to how states like Michigan have a bottle deposit. Make it large enough that the consumer would be incentivized to return the bottle, even if they themselves don't actually re-use it. This way they could simply return the empty bottle, even if they don't plan on refilling it.

What you are describing is simply a bottle recycling program as it already exists in a number of European countries. But the OP was talking about the need for alternatives to bottle-recycling programs.

1. A factory ships a product to the seller in a durable container. Puts $1 into a smart contract to resolve on that container's return.

2. I buy $5 worth of product in durable container from seller and pay $7.

3. Seller gets $5, remaining $2 goes into smart contract from step 1.

So now there's three incentives to get the container back to the factory (each is $1 in this example, but would be a parameter in reality).

4. If the container shows up at the factory at all, whoever delivers it gets $1 for facilitating the delivery and the factory gets their $1 back because they didn't contribute to litter.

5. If it arrives back at the factory clean and in good condition, I get $1 back for not contributing to litter and for doing my part to ensure that the container is reusable rather than merely recyclable.

If you find a durable container in the wild that doesn't have a bounty on it, it's proof that the factory is cheating and the government gives you a $1 for it, and takes that $1 out of the factory's taxes.

If you find a bottle with the factory's bounty but not the consumer's bounty, it's evidence that the seller or buyer is cheating. The government gives you $2 for it and collaborates with the factory to take $2 out of the seller's taxes.

If you find a container with both bounties on it, it's evidence that I was too lazy to take it back to the factory, so you give it to the factory and get the $1 reward.

If I keep the container and repurpose it, the factory doesn't get their $1 back, but whatever I'm using it for hopefully counts as good advertising for them. Also, I can always just return it much later when it's done with the reuse purpose.

If you find a damaged container in the wild, recycle it with society's thanks and know that whoever let that happen paid $1 for their crime.

are you familiar with deposits in parts of the world? The aluminum cans have 10c stamped on the lid, and the bottles have it printed on their labels.

I couldn't be bothered going to a recycling depot so I would leave my recyclables outside next to the bins. People would walk around afternoon/night collecting all the recyclables with deposits from people's bins (recycling and trash).

It seems far simpler than your proposal.

I am, they seem like a great idea and I wish they were common in my part of the world.

But they only motivate manufacturers' packaging choices in the rare case where it's more cost effective to recycle the material than to purchase it new. If it's cheaper to use something that ends up in a landfill, most companies just will.

I think we need something that motivates them to want it back no matter what it's made out of.

---

I make beer and I've been reusing the same bottles for years. The trick is to rinse them right away, otherwise it's a pain to get the dried beer gunk off the bottom. Bottle return programs don't motivate users to clean the bottles, so they need to be recycled rather than merely sanitized and reused (I think).

Recycling is unfortunately not a guarantee even when consumers do everything right. Plenty of curbside recyclables end up in landfills.

One thing to consider is that plenty of packaged foods seal their bags with pure nitrogen to keep the humidity under control and eliminate oxygen ageing the food in storage. It's the same reason why a bag of chips can have some quite lengthy expiration date and still taste fresh when you open them but leave them sitting in your cupboards for a while and now they're noticeably less fresh. Having some sort of chip dispenser (or cereal, goldfish, whatever) would make that quite a bit harder to deal with.

I was thinking of this when I said "some trick to keep chips crisp". I think you could have the dispenser nitrogen-seal it for you, or maybe there are more appropriate alternatives.

> We need to focus on the second R, reuse.

That means you need to end both single-use containers and selling stuff in containers entirely.

There’s only do much of one type of reusable container you even can have a use for, and that’s assuming you do even have a use for them in the first place: I don’t make jam at home, I buy it, I don’t have a use for a new jam jar a month, and every jam-making friend has more jars than they could ever use (seriously, I used to stock jars for my parents until they stopped canning, then tried giving my stock away, about a third of which found I interest, the rest went to recycling).

Why couldn't jam manufacturers just use returnable bottles? The beer companies in Ontario do, soda bottles are returnable and reusable in many places.

They could, but no one wants to pay extra effort and energy cost when it's easier to make new glass from dirt.

No one wants to breath polluted air or drink polluted after, yet here we are. Rich producers just keep moving further away from the problems they create. Or they maintain their ignorance through a delicately balanced series of mental gymnastics.

Corporations don't have feelings... negative externalities need to be priced or there's no reason to expect a corporation to pay attention to them.

Then this is a perfect case for regulation, to make it cost more to make new glass than re-use existing containers. It worked in the past just fine. But the first world incentivized energy production so much that we drove down the need to be efficient.

For glass bottles, I don't see the point. There's no glass shortage, and glass debris doesn't kill anything or leech into the soil from landfills.

The environmental cost of collection, transport, inspection and cleaning, and transport to be filled would outweigh the cost of manufacture and transport to be filled. So that regulation would make jam more expensive and/or the environment worse.

Glass is actually the most recyclable material with the highest difference in energy put in between new and reclaimed. I think the issue is not many plants are set up for recycling, and it is extra work to make pretty glass from reclaim glass.

I expect most of them are large companies unconcerned with that in the first place (so it'd have to be mandated), but more importantly jam containers tend to have pretty thin walls and somewhat odd shapes.

They're solid enough when full and sealed but I expect they're much weaker when empty, so I don't know that the cost/benefit would break even unless the cost of the alternative was way increased.

> The beer companies in Ontario do, soda bottles are returnable and reusable in many places.

Reusing beer bottles is much more traditional so I expect they're designed for this specifically, and there's usually either an incentive scheme to encourage or outright legislation to mandate container deposits (germany even has legislation for single-use container deposits).

> That means you need to end...selling stuff in containers entirely.

If we energy-cost-accounted for all externalities, then I wonder how returning the containers to the factory to automatically sanitize and re-use compares to recycling. Land filling is not an option: say you're in a closed loop environment like on a generation ship trip to Proxima Centauri b, and the concept of a land fill as we know it is obscenely wasteful.

What's most interesting to me about this comment is the use of an example of a closed loop environment, despite the fact that _we're already in a closed loop environment_. We just pretend otherwise with landfill and the convenience of throwing things into a bin.

Glad you saw that. I already treat us as living in a closed loop environment, but very few people share and act upon that sentiment with me, so I find it easier to illustrate by analogy.

Generally speaking, our human organizational psychology is extremely vulnerable to the principal agent problem throughout the body of the organization when timelines and scales are larger than an individual can internalize. MEGO is the usual response I get when I speak with most people about timelines exceeding a human lifespan (their human lifespan to be specific), or resource quantities at industrial and global scales.

Until we can solve the problem of shifting on the order of 3e8 metric tons of mass off-planet without ruinous side effects, we're really stuck on our cradle world, and should plan (including actively researching how to get off world at that scale) accordingly.

> If we energy-cost-accounted for all externalities, then I wonder how returning the containers to the factory to automatically sanitize and re-use compares to recycling.

That would be interesting, but it's very difficult to price externalities, and the very same people who are against any form of recycling mandate are also against pricing externalities (just look at who killed Australia's carbon tax, and which party's blocking any sort of cap-and-trade or carbon tax in the US).

Container waste needs to be considered with its inversely correlated counterpart, content waste and contamination damage. A single food poisoning case has far more impact than just tossing a non-biodegradable container in a landfill. Especially if they die - every investment in them from vaccinations to education becomes for naught in the future.

In the case of processed foods like Pringles, I would suggest focusing on the first R, reduce. Not only good for the environment, but good for your health too.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order. A lot of things don't need so much packaging in the first place.

We need a www.packagingdisasters.com which name and shame the worst packaging disasters.

We need legislation with teeth.

Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle, Composting, Energy from waste, Incineration, Landfill - that was the basics of the Waste Hierarchy when I worked on the Waste Strategy for England back in the late 1990s. I don't know if the order has shifted much over the past couple of decades.

The EU Packaging Directive seems to be getting more robust - I remember the first Directive was a bit weak and too open to national interpretation so it's good to see they seem to have introduced hard recycling targets and put a lot more emphasis on the need for producer responsibility schemes for packaging - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15958382...

Reduce is a consumer focused, it's a failing strategy. Reducing to 1% of what we currently throw away would still destroy the planet. Making reuse the centre point forces reduce to also happen, if your product has to ship in reusable containers, they are going to be smaller anyway. Products that don't need containers will stop using them again.

Reducing to 1% would destroy the planet a hundred times slower, which is not bad. I agree that the correct strategy is not encouraging consumers to choose products with less packaging, but instead we need to strongly incentivize producers to reduce packaging. Appropriate laws need to be written and the costs of packaging completely internalized via taxes.

Sure, but all the glass that gets used for reuse is for liquids, which are also all heavy to begin with.

Do you have examples of successful packaging reuse for solid dry food such as Pringles? Or cereal? Or sugar? Or chocolate?

(And that's before even getting into packaging of meat, fish, etc.)

Sure, here in Vermont we have lots of dry good options (cereal, dry tea, spices, etc) that are bulk into reusable containers. Pringles aren't conducive to that but I'd certainly scoop tortilla chips, goldfish, etc if I could.

Goldfish yes, but the store would have to accept a loss due to crumbification of the chips from people jabbing the scoop into the pile of chips all the time

Heck I think that with a barrel of tortilla chips, most of them would simply crush under its own weight.

Fun fact, this is why berries are sold in clamshells too. You can't buy "bulk" strawberries because they'd just compress into goo. They're actually placed in the clamshells as they're being picked in the fields.

There are more and more stores that sell dry food without packaging. The customers have to bring their packaging (jars, etc..) required to take the goods home.

Wow really? I live in NYC and I've never seen any of that in any regular grocery store.

I suppose you might be able to do that in Chinatown or at some specialty spice or coffee stores... and maybe this is a dumb question, but: how do they weigh it?

Because with paper/plastic the weight is negligible so it doesn't really make a difference. But if you bring your own heavy mason jars then you need to tare it... and if you're doing it yourself then what, you need to affix the labels it prints to your jars? (Which would be annoying to have to scrape off every time.) Or if the cashier does it when you check out then you don't have an empty one to tare with... how does it work in practice? I'm genuinely curious how this gets solved.

I don't recall seeing one in the US yet, but they are getting more numerous in Germany. I haven't shopped there yet, but from what I read you are expected to tare the scale. How they handle that at the checkout I don't know.

Paper can be used for some of these. E.g. sugar and flour are usually sold in plain paper (not even cardboard) packaging[1] in Germany and, from a cursory check, in some other European countries. It doesn't work for everything because it's not airtight.

[1] https://www.amazon.de/S%C3%BCdzucker-Feinzucker-10er-Pack-10...

They're also sold in paper sacks in the US. You do have to be quite careful with the sack to avoid puffing flour out of pinholes when you set it down.

I'm rather fond of the packaging on Wasa crackers, which appears to be waxed paper... but of course with Wasa crackers, how would you even know if they had gone stale? ;)

Of course... but to clarify, I was asking about reuse specifically. I can't think of anything you'd reuse the paper packaging used with sugar or flour for...

Right. Re-reading the thread that suddenly seems obvious and my comment a bit pointless.

To add something more substantive: Every large city here has a couple of "zero packaging" store that lets you bring your own containers for all kind of dry goods, like sibling posts mentioned. Sometimes you have to use containers you bought in the store (so they know the weight), often you just weigh the containers going in, so they can subtract the weight going out. I still have two containers with the weight written on them in a marker pen.

Note that these are tiny stores, and the prices are fairly high (obviously the produce tends to be organic and regionally produced, where possible). This is not yet a mass phenomenon. It might be getting there, though, since I've seen regular supermarkets with a small selection of dry goods available in that way. Or maybe it's just a fad.

In a similar vein, some supermarket chains let you bring reusable containers to the meat/deli counter: they weigh the product on a little slip of plastic (like they usually do already), but instead of packing everything in one or two additional bags of plastic, they use your tupperware. Employees are not allowed to touch your containers, though (food safety). I'm sure they love that. I've never seen it done in practice.

For some reason, there's often a big hubbub about the plastic bags you get at those counters as well as in the fruits & veggie aisles. For things like onions and bananas (come with their own packaging) or apples and peaches (gotta rinse them thoroughly anyway) I usually simply don't use any extra packaging (no, cashiers don't mind). And it seems a bit farcical to worry about an extremely thin plastic bag when you're buying meat. I guess every bit helps. At the same time, the waste created by those bags, which weigh so little you need specialist equipment to get an estimate, always seemed trivial compared to almost all the prepackaged stuff in the supermarket. It's probably because those plastic bags are particularly harmful if they reach rivers or the ocean, though I'm not sure if this is a widespread problem here.

When you bring your own cup to the coffee to go place, you usually get a 5-10% discount; this is true for most places, especially the chains who realize that this is cheap way to get good publicity and customer retention. While also not the norm, I think this is something that some people actually do.

I bring mason jars and reusable produce bags to the store to buy coffee, rice, green beans and other solids. The store even ran a promotion to give away the produce bags, so a lot of people in the neighborhood have them. I agree, this might not work too well for meat, but as they say, "perfect is the enemy of good enough".

For meat, butcher paper is a thing that exists.

To this day, the majority of wide mouth glass jars you see at the grocery store have the same diameter and thread pitch of one of the mason jar lid sizes. Which means you can find a clean replacement lid for most of them, and use it to store other food or non food items.

Classico pasta sauces literally come in a tall Mason jar, with volume marks on the side.

Such efforts have popular support, but a lot of lobbying opposition:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/01/20/plastic-bags-have-l...

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/18/coca-cola-recycling-plas...

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/09/20/how-to-recycle-pl...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/10/plastics...

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/government-...

> The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy.

I've heard people say that the environmental cost of producing the clean water necessary to wash bottles for reuse is also harmful. I'd really like to see a side-by-side comparison of the environmental cost of the different available "obvious" options.

> We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close.

I entirely agree. I think manufacturers who produce in bulk products intended for consumers should be required to pay for regular environmental assessments, and then pay the total cost for responsible disposal or recycling of their entire product - including the packaging as well as the item itself when it reaches the end of its useful life. Then environmental harm would be priced into every consumer product.

> I've heard people say that the environmental cost of producing the clean water necessary to wash bottles for reuse is also harmful.

If this is true, wouldn't it be more environmentally friendly to use disposable plates, bowls, and utensils? That doesn't seem right.

It sometimes is, at least for packaging. Glass containers may be reusable, but they’re heavier, often a lot heavier (even after decades of technological progress), than plastic containers, and transporting them to consumers and back costs energy and produces waste, too.

Also, some plastic packaging decreases food waste. That plastic cucumber packaging, for example, may seem wasteful, but makes them last three times as long and, because of that, decreases the fraction that gets thrown away (https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...)

Now, individual stickers on bananas and kiwis, those should, IMO, be banned, but what do I know? Maybe they’re an essential part of tracking where fruit comes from (doesn’t look like it from my view, though)

Energy is only an issue because we burn fossil fuels to generate energy, move bottles, etc.

Clean energy is already our most important goal from a "survival of the species" point of view.

If energy use doesn't matter then neither does the whole recycling thing. If energy efficiency doesn't matter then we could simply build machines that comb through the environment to collect garbage, sort it, and make it reusable. But that would be insanely wasteful from an energy perspective. It's easier to preempt those challenges.

Part of me finds this really appealing.

it only requires getting everyone on the planet to accept that things cost 10x what they do now.

which is a hard pill to swallow when you are living paycheck to paycheck, which is most of the world's population.

It could be done gradually. The first step is to introduce the assessment and remittance infrastructure. Governments could then choose to start with a 95% discount on the fee for example, and ramp it up over time. It could also choose to reduce the fee or entirely exempt certain products. You could see these as "environmental subsidies" on things that we consider important. The important thing is that costing in the environmental economic externality[1] would become the norm, rather than the exception.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

A lot of countries seem to have had a system for reusing old glassware. And stuff they were used for like milk, beer, carbonated water weren't 10x more expensive. Nowadays it's recycled if you're lucky, or it ends up in a landfill.

Indeed, you need to look at total impact, not just the impact of switching a raw material.

A college prof did an analysis of plastic versus biodegradable “plastic”.

The biodegradable plastic took far more energy and released much more CO2 than just regular plastic.

Releasing more CO2 alone is no surprise since by definition if it isn't burnt the non-biodegradable technically sequesters it - but that has other environmental issues not covered by the metric.

One hypothetical that highlights issues with non-nuanced single issue environmentalism: producing non-biodegradable plastic that doesn't release more carbon filling and dumping it in the ocean to produce carbon credits.

They are reusable! A Pringles can makes a great directional antenna ... but I only need so many of those.

There's a Classico pasta sauce line that uses jars molded with Atlas Mason on them and fit Mason jar lids but are not designed to be reused for canning. Just for marketing.

I've found a way to upcycle those, they make excellent drinking glasses. My home is an old farmhouse in a semi-rural area, so it fits the aesthetic perfectly. I grew up poor, with my family reusing Mason and Bell jars as drinking glasses between canning seasons, so I'm comfortable with it. With the opening narrower than the body, they also prevent ice cubes from invading our mouths when we consume iced drinks.

As an added bonus they seem to be far more durable than our regular glasses and tumblers; we end up breaking one of those every couple of months. They have been almost completely replaced by "free" pasta jars at this point and we have yet to break any of those.

Yes! I love those jars.

You just brought back a memory to me of a restaurant I went to as a kid, where the drinks were served in mason jars and the straws were uncooked pasta. This must have been 25 years ago at least... Talk about ahead of their time!

But a canning funnel can turn those into a good food saving option. Soup, pasta sauce, anything really that isn’t a firm shape.

The problem is, if the jars last over a century you don't sell many jars.

That’s only a problem for very very few people aka the shareholders. Everyone else wins.

It’s the standard modus operandi for most companies by now. Internalized profits, externalized costs. And there are very few products for which full lifecycle costs are included in the price.

It's something that needs to be addressed. If the ROI for an action is very low nobody is going to investigate doing that action.

Demanding infinite growth is not compatible with not incinerating the planet. You can't have both.

as far as reuse is concerned, removing the foil lining it takes away the value of the can for anything such as a 2.4 GHz waveguide. when you get an old school pringles can together with some sma co-ax and a custom flashed router the signal gain is tremendous but unidirectional

e.g. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out...

I saw a report on the news that garden centers were offering to collect used plastic plant pots. I thought "Great idea, just rinse out the pots, peel off the labels and put them back into use for new plants."

The report went on to show all of the returned pots being crushed and turned into pellets.

I think I screamed into a cushion.

I’m picturing a bulk Pringles tube at the grocery store, soaring up to the ceiling. Then you place your reusable glass Pringles tube under it, pull a lever, and a fresh stack of Pringles drops into your container. I like it!

Silly question: what plastics cannot be recycled?

Can they not just be broken down into simpler hydrocarbons and reformulated? Cannot most plastics be melted into simpler products ala preciousplastic.com ?

What makes colored glass more able to be recycled than clear glass? I'm curious, my intuition says it would be the opposite as I assume colored glass has other stuff in the glass to make it colored.

As I understand it, it's hard to keep coloured glass and other impurities out of the clear glass recycling stream, so the clear glass isn't clear any more. Coloured glass is just mixed together, which is why it's brown.

I would love to hear from someone who knows more.

I can see that. It's a good enough reason for me.

In my head, I imagined it like boiling impurities out of liquid. Get the glass hot and melty, the impurities and glass separate due to different melting points, blah blah, blah.

But if that doesn't happen and it doesn't affect the integrity of the glass too much, I can see the "Screw it" attitude of just letting it be.

The crux of your line of thinking lies in the definition of "costs of recycling". If something like the idea of a cost of recycling was represented in the cost to the consumer, how would you translate the same idea to a developing country? They have to pay an artificially increased price (compared what the population of "developed" countries paid for) for something we didn't have to pay for until now? That sounds kind of unfair.

edit: Just to make clear, I'm not arguing against a concept as "cost of recycling"; my point is that the whole argument is more complicated than just comparing realistic solutions for the US or europe.

100% recycling would be a disaster since recycling almost everything other than aluminum has a larger carbon footprint than making new. Additionally it would do almost nothing for plastic pollution since microplastics come from textile manufacturing, paint, tires, and other airborne particles from dense human population zones. Macroplastics largely come from dumping that's already banned under laws we don't bother enforcing.

"Recycle everything" is a mantra for people who care more about feeling good about themselves than the actual mathematics of our environment.

>We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%

There's literally no way to do this. Any costs you try to pass on will just be passed to the customer, and there's no legal way to prevent that from happening. And no, the customer won't care about a 5c recycling tariff, which is about the most you could charge for this without getting sued to oblivion.

I don't understand the sued comment. Why can we heavily tax gas to pay for roads but taxing plastics to pay for recycling costs is a non starter?

Maybe I misunderstood the parent but "force manufacturers to bear the costs" is very different from taxing the end consumer goods, no?

> We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable

Proclamations like this are strong evidence of economic illiteracy. Forcing everything to be recyclable isn’t optimal for society or for the environment.

Care to elaborate? I'd quite like making Coca Cola, Pepsi, Keurig, etc. pay to recycle or repurpose all the plastic they produce. Especially now that the US is no longer shipping plastics to Asia. I'm fairly certain both my recycling truck and trash trucks deposit their cargo in the same place: the landfill.

I think the parent means that manufacturers need to either switch to sustainable materials or pay a premium to use plastics.

tl;dr you can recycle vintage goods as well into your daily life, start at home.

my entire kitchen is vintage glass, some of it lower in cost than buying new, that I snagged off ebay. In my case Anchor Hocking bubble glass. Combine with Corning Ware storage pieces for the kitchen you can "reuse" at home by buying what was made decades ago. Heck, my toaster is a 50s era Toastmaster.

Getting soft drinks out of plastic containers and the ever famous k-cups would go a long was as well. I do my best to only use cans and glass for for my food purchases. produce aisle is still stuck with plastic bags but I would love to see biodegradable paper bags or open top containers to stack goods in.

The soap/detergent aisles really need to go down the route of selling concentrated goods but this will require some incentive on manufacturer's part to sell them cheaper by end result.

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