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Comment by alexanderthe- | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce standardized packaging across product "classes" to streamline reuse and recycling - for example, all soda bottles of size x, must come in shape y, made out of polymer z. The obvious financial impact would be companies having to potentially retool their factories to facilitate that, but there can also be sensible tax rebates to prevent the corporations from crying.

The bottom line is, the cost of doing business has to take into account the environmental impacts on our planet and the consequences for our progeny.

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> Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce ...

You are being naive, even in the European Union which has a fairly contained level of corruption the Plastic and Petro-chemical lobby are incredibly strong.

Many countries wanted to introduce a single-use plastic ban, almost immediately a campaign came out saying they were trying to kill people at hospitals where many consumables are single-use plastic (Obviously medical supplies were exempt from the ban). The single-use plastic ban was so watered down that now the only thing that will be baned are things like plastic forks and plastic q-tips.

Another example is return deposits, many European countries have very succesful glass deposit schemes usually reusing the supermarket stores' infrastructure. The natural progression of this is to create large plastic bootle/container deposits. Again this will never happen because it obviously stops the current externalization of costs in the plastic business.

There are two main forces at play against Humanity on the plastic front of our Anthropogenic calamity:

- The consumer product manufacturers (think Unilever, Pepsico, Nestle, Kraft, etc.). Their interest in plastic containers is mostly due to the reduction in production cost and transport costs. They heavily lobby against bans and any cost increase for their production chain.

- The Petro-Chemical industry (Including Big Oil companies), many of these refining business know they are getting squeezed out of the fuel business as electrical vehicle adoption is bound to increase. The Plastic production is the last remaining golden goose in their portfolio. A circular economy where most of the plastic is recycled from previously used plastic would mean that the volumes and profits of these very financially successful business would evaporate.

Both these lobbies and others will continue to resist and undermine any attempt to curb our planetary and Humane destruction until they are stopped either by public pressure or insolvency.

>The natural progression of this is to create large plastic bootle/container deposits. Again this will never happen because it obviously stops the current externalization of costs in the plastic business.

We already have that in a lot of EU countries. Every soda bottle has an additional deposit cost (10 cents) on top of the soda itself. You pay that when you purchase it and get the 10 cents back when you take the bottle to a collection point for plastic bottles.

But even then, you often aren't returning the plastic bottles to be reused anymore, instead they're just recycled. --When I first moved to Norway in 2008, the soda bottles actually were collected, cleaned, and reused, but they stopped doing that, and now they're only recycled. --It's better than them ending up in landfills or being burned for energy, but as has been noted, plastic can only be recycled so many times, so it still ends up causing more plastic to be manufactured.

> We already have that in a lot of EU countries

Citation needed?

There are many glass deposit schemes, but apart from Norway and maybe Germany, other EU countries' _plastic_ deposit schemes to my knowledge are either draft proposals or rejected draft proposals? What exactly do you mean by a _lot_ of EU countries?

Here in Lithuania we have like 90% of plastic bottles have a deposit logo on them, pretty much all of the soda, beer, water, milk bottles are recycled. Most of the non recycleable bottles are from outside of EU brands, and those are generally more expensive. Collection points are also automated, where you put them on conveyer kind of belt ant it uses OCR to detect if the bottle can be recycled. Those collection points are attached to a store and you get a credit in associated store which can be used to either buy groceries or jus get your money in cash.

>In Europe, 10 countries have implemented programs, with return rates ranging between 82% in Estonia and 98% in Germany.

https://plasticsmartcities.org/products/deposit-return-progr...

> ... all soda bottles of size x, must come in shape y, made out of polymer z.

This style of legislation is exactly how we get articles like this posted. Where we can't have new headlight technology in the US because the law exactly prescribes the types of headlights permitted.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24042266

We need to find a way to manage this while still allowing science and technology to do its thing.

Like you would put `package-z >= v1.2.3` in your dependency manager, lawful requirements could be expressed like this. Maybe something to consider.

Unlike library version numbers, the properties of a plastic bottle that might be of interest are not one-dimensional and monotonically increasing.

Create a recycling bureau that analyzes source materials and grades recycle-ability, and then in the law require certain grades for certain applications.

I'm not sure you need those LED/LASER headlights... I don't understand what the manufacturers are thinking, those lights are incredibly bright, dangerously so - how are they even legal?

That's the version we have in the US. TFA I linked covers that in Europe they are permitted to do dynamic shaping of the light cones in order to reduce your exact complaint.

I don't know how things are now, but in Sweden there used to be standard 33cl glass and 1.5l PET bottle sizes, and when they were returned for their deposit, instead of crushing or melting them down, they'd just have their label stripped and they'd be washed and reused. You could tell old a glass or plastic bottle was by how scratched the sides were.

I don't think these were government mandates but just industry agreements. I remember Coca Cola being the first company to break the mold with custom 1.5l bottle designs

Yeah, seems to be a common theme across the world, there used to be some standard and system for reusing/recycling containers... and now it's gone. We've gone backwards on this for some reason.

The bottle recycling system in Finland and Sweden is brilliant. Each bottle has a small (5-20c) deposit tied to it's price which you get back at the ubiquitous bottle returning machines in grocery stores. This creates a pseudo-job for the homeless and youths and unemployed etc. to aggressively collect all the bottles and cans they can find in the city. It creates it's own little economy.

I'm always surprised this hasn't been expanded to other uses and more countries.

Ever see a soda or beer can? Pretty standardized. Same goes for a beer bottle, or even a lot of soda bottles. (This is my perspective in the US, but things seemed similar the week I spent in Europe and the week I spent in India.)

1 gallon milk jugs are quite standard, same goes for milk cartons.

When I was a teenager I worked in a dairy. We sold milk in both single-use containers and returnable glass bottles. The returned bottles were washed and refilled. The "problem" is that single-use won in the marketplace. The owners couldn't get it together to charge a deposit on the glass, and lost a lot of money from customers who didn't realize they had to return the glass bottle. (Edit: All of the containers, single-use and returnable, were standard and came from a distributor.)

We really only see unique packaging when some business sees it as in their best interests to design unique packaging for their product. Otherwise, beverage / food makers are just going to buy easy-to-get equipment that fills easy-to-get containers.

Europe forced automakers (indirectly) to change what plastics cars were made out of. Previously there were so many unique formulas of plastic that you’d never be able to sort them properLy.

But as has been mentioned already, plastics don’t recycle well.

> made out of polymer z.

Wow, sounds like you really want to encourage innovation in materials. The variety of polymers we have serve multiple uses and different functions because of their numerous unique properties (and costs).

But it is the variety of polymers that make them so bad. Surely, it is better to standardize to one material (or rather, standardize for the recycling process), than to ban the whole class of materials altogether.

I believe innovation would be encouraged by the incentive to capture a market for a specific use case with an innovation in either process, material, or diminished environmental impacts.

Corporations (and citizens) need to be accountable for making decisions that go against societies best interests - the current infatuation with profit at all costs is eerily similar to the proliferation of cells at all costs in cancer.

Not in the case of the comment you're replying to, where the use is to carry a specific size of soda and the function is to not spill the soda. I don't mind advancements in soda bottle technology being slow and careful, even if it gives an advantage to the Chinese.

Because without fancy, bespoke packaging people will be less inclined to buy copious amounts of junk food.

We need to fundamentally rethink our entire food system. For example, having every individual buy, transport, cook and dispose of their own food is a huge inefficiency, particularly now with smaller and individual households.

We need to encourage more neighborhood kitchens, with food prepared cheaply and healthily, that people can eat multiple times a day at. For starters remove the tax loophole where if you buy your own raw ingredients and cook something yourself, you pay no or reduced VAT, whereas if you buy the same ingredients at a restaurant you pay full VAT.

You seem to have thought this through pretty thoroughly, how do you intend to incentivize people to go to these communal meals vs cooking at home or getting a “personalized” meal at a restaurant?

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