Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckNorris89 | Hacker News Reader

>the main culprits: Coca-Cola, Nestle, Pepsico, Unilever, P&G, Mars, Kraft-Heinz ... etc.

And what do these giant multinational companies have in common? /s

The issue is there is no unified multinational push to regulate these multinational giants.

You can't have local solutions to global problems, and these companies are as global as they get, constantly chasing the places with the lowest taxes, lowest wages, least amount of regulations, most corruption, and easiest to bribe officials for access to exploiting local resources, etc. while making record profits quarter after quarter at the expense of the environment and people in less afluent places.

We need global regulations for them. But that will never happen because China, the US and EU won't touch their giants as long as they're not doing anything illegal back home.

View on HN

> We need global regulations for them. But that will never happen.

That is a pessimist outlook, all you need is for the EU bloc and the US to implement such measures and plastic pollution in the world would fall an order of magnitude.

The problem is not lack of _global_ regulations, just spineless politicians.

What kind of regulation of these corporations do you envision? It's not them making the waste - it's the people-consumers who are not throwing the bottles away for recycling, or their countries not recycling locally and instead just throwing away the waste somewhere else. What about that is changed by regulating Coca Cola?

I think the best way is to follow the German solution: When you buy a bottle/can, you place a collateral there for each bottle, like 50 cent per bottle. You only get the deposit back when you return the bottles to some supermarket.

I really like this model, and it works over here.

Of course, you still need a working recycling chain, but at least it incentives individual people to properly bring their rubbish to the recycling places.

But the problem is not in this part of the chain. The states then take their collected plastic waste and ship it away - and that's what we're reading about here in TFA.

Collecting the waste is not so hard - today you have automated sorting lines that can separate plastic waste from other waste and some people are saying it's actually better than separating the waste during collection because maintaining separate plastic waste/other waste disposal infrastructures comes out as more costly and less ecological (2 specialized trucks instead of 1 general, etc).

This whole problem is about what's done with the collected waste after it leaves the garbage bins at stores or elsewhere.

Indeed, and some of the plastic bottles are actually really thick and heavy and are reused, e.g. the Adelholzener ones, which they claim they reuse up to 15x: https://www.adelholzener.de/nachhaltigkeit-und-werte/zukunft...

Are they significantly less than 15x thicker and heavier than the cheap, single-use alternatives?

> the German solution

Created in 2003, about 32 years after Oregon created the first bottle bill.

Which reminds me, I need to take the bin of cans to the local drop site.

TIL. I must say that I'm quite surprised that such a bill was first introduced in the US.

9 of the 10 US states with bottle deposits implemented those laws in the late 70s or early 80s.

The relative autonomy of US states often means that states can move very quickly to pass progressive laws, even though the US is well known for legislative friction at the federal level.

We’ve tried this line of reasoning ever since the plastic industry had pushed for recycling as a means of reusing plastic when they know it’ll never be economically feasible to do so.

So might as well try something new and fix excessive plastic waste at a different point in the lifecycle.

So your solution is to ban plastic entirely? If so, then sure, let's talk about it - I'm not picking sides, I don't care about plastic bottles that much (or at all). What would you pick as the replacement?

Stop selling crap that needs to be packaged in single use plastic a simple solution That will destroy entire industries with impunity industries that do nothing but poison our bodies and our planet.

So how do I buy a coke? Are you suggesting I drink water and nothing else? Sorry I'm not going to support your vision of the world.

> It's not them making the waste - it's the people-consumers who are not throwing the bottles away for recycling

I can't tell if this is ignorant or ill-intended. The 'recycled' material from these markets is getting shipped to Southeast Asia and dumped in landfills as per the original link in this submission.

Ask yourself if what you say is real, then there would be no need for new plastic from crude oil since our market would be interely circular with recycled plastic.

Plastic recycling pelets have a very limited use and there are only a handful of countries were consumers care about it where manufacturers mix in some recycled pelets and claim the plastic is from (partially) recicled plastic.

Recycled plastic is greyish in coloration (you can't make it transparent) and far more brittle than 'new' plastic. Recycling plastic was a con all along to allow corporations to make a fortune on packaging cost savings.

OK, and what kind of regulation do you envision to solve this problem?

We could demand reusable glass bottles but some say the washing takes more energy than new. Maybe aluminum would work.

Washing, and transport.

Plastic is the lightest, thinnest packaging material we have. Reducing its use may means trucks carrying less stuff that is heavier.

Yeah, according to https://www.roetell.com/glass-vs-plastic-vs-aluminum-contain... it can be a 40:1 ratio.

Though you could counter-act that with more local bottling plants so that transport is shorter. In other words, don't bottle the soda in George and ship it to New York or whatever, but actually have multiple local bottling/washing plants in New York itself.

Unfortunately, after three decades of de-industrialization and gentrification, there isn't really cheap industrial land on which to site a bottling plants in NYC city limits.

I commented on this before on hacker news:

- Plastic is cheap to produce but difficult to recycle. Create quotas for 'new' plastic and make packagers bid for plastic in a plastic market managed by plastic producers. Petro-chemical producers still make money with less volume manufactured, since packagers have to bid for new plastic, paying more for it. This also forces more recycling since it is more competitive in comparison than outbiding in a new plastic market.

- Ban single-use plastic except for medical/lab applications.

- Enforce return schemes for plastic and glass at consumer shops but payed for by packagers.

People will complain that prices go up but that should have been corrected a long time ago. There is no free lunch, you can't have near free cost packaging without some consequence, in this case we already have plastic in intra-uterine babies, I say the buck should stop here.

Some countries and states require companies to pay for the cost of recycling, or higher fees if the material is not recyclable. We could simply jack those up.

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/2022-2-summer/notes-here-t...

Well no duh people are producing the waste. We were literally told to by thier advertising teams [1].

It's always kind of strange how people how people never wonder how we got from a society where stuff got reused a million times to one where we don't.

[1]: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/vintage-ads-plastic_n_5cdb176...

What you're seeing isn't consumers failing to recycle, it is councils being unable to fund the infrastructure required for recycling, and the councils are voting with their comparatively empty wallets. So even when you are a good little consumer and put it in the recycling bin, not all councils can afford to recycle it properly, because it is a difficult and costly problem to solve at scale.

So Coca-cola reaps all the benefits, while councils pay for all the cleanup. Being pragmatic here though, whoever is ultimately at fault doesn't matter, because the outcome is clear: councils are poorer, coca-cola is richer, and the earth is full of plastic. So do we wait for the sudden and unprecedented cooperation of consumers across the globe, or do we regulate plastic?

As for how to regulate, I would suggest that plastic recycling is paid for by the companies that produce the plastic, perhaps through levies per-kg of produced plastic that ultimately make it more costly to use than more environmentally friendly materials. This would help councils/countries afford recycling infrastructure for plastic that makes enough sense, and it would naturally be more economical to use less plastic. We need a way to set a "Tradeoff cost" at a community level, similar to how there are taxes on fuels for cars.

Plastic recycling works poorly when all conditions are met. Even ideally, most "recycled" plastic doesn't get recycled. What does is of much lower grade and unsuitable for many applications - and can't really be recycled again.

>all you need is for the EU bloc and the US to implement such measures and plastic pollution in the world would fall an order of magnitude.

Yeah, that's exactly what we need but the politicians in the US and EU are too well greased and too vested in the valuation of these mega corporations because the ugly truth is these companies provide a lot of money and jobs in their home countries and regulating the amount of waste and environmental damage they can do globally (in poorer less regulated countries) would reduce the money and jobs they bring in their home countries.

> all you need is for the EU bloc and the US to implement such measures and plastic pollution in the world would fall an order of magnitude

Hahahaha wow, who would have thought it was that easy?

Also, politicians do nothing about a problem not because they are spineless (about losing popularity, I think, is what you mean), but because they gain something out of not doing a thing about the problem. Many of the poor countries cited in the article might be democracies, but they are weak democracies with regulatory capture of private enterprises.

Waiting for everyone to be on the bandwagon before you begin means you'll be waiting forever. If just one of the major countries did it, or a large amount of the smaller ones, it would be highly influential and get the bandwagon moving.

> You can't have local solutions to global problems

No, but you can start locally and watch the dominoes fall. Take GDPR for example: EU mandates it so companies fall in line, and now California has their own version (and hopefully we'll see other states & countries follow suit). Forcing a company over a hump can certainly start a movement in the right direction. If the US were to outright ban single-use plastic bottles (which I think they should), these companies would have to make a huge shift in the way they source and manufacture materials and this would lessen the resistance to other countries doing the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com