60% of home compostable plastic doesn’t fully break down | Hacker News Reader

60% of home compostable plastic doesn’t fully break down

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142 pointsclouddrover191 comments

A local "green" grocery store replaced its plastic hot bar containers with compostable cardboard containers.

But when I looked at the maker of those containers, and dug a bit, I discovered they used polyfluorinated alkanoates (PFAs) to keep the hot greasy liquids from soaking into the cardboard.

Compost these things and you'll get fluorinated forever chemicals in your garden.

Similarly I was very dissapointed to find paper coffee cups are almost always lined with plastic. In hindsight it's obvious that paper is not going to hold boiling water, but I dunno, I'm not a paper cup engineer, I guess I thought someone figured it out. Of course I've been tossing the paper cup in the recycling this whole time, which is fine, since it all ends up in the landfill anyway.

It was always about reduce, reuse, recycle. You can reduce by using your own cups. It’s just a habit we have to get in to. Once we do it’ll be a status signal like YETI on steroids.

It’s disappointing though that you assume that all of your recycling ends up in the landfill. This pervasive myth is spreading through society to the point where recycling companies are literally running TV ads to dispel the myth. Even if it’s locally true for you that your recycling goes to a landfill, it’s important to add a caveat that it’s likely to only be locally true for you. Otherwise other people will become apathetic too.

Because people are starting to recognize recycling for what it is: A largely performative societal ritual that gives us the illusion we are doing something and nothing else. And on top of that we have TWO garbage collection systems that take it to the same place! How much extra resources do we use - fuel, manpower, etc. - to support this duplicity?

Reusing cups often require some level of washing, drying, and/or wiping.

It would be nice if there was more infrastructure for it.

For most people i see at work with their mugs that amounts to either 5 seconds in the sink, or no time at all since they will just slosh the new coffee into the dirty cup.

Can confirm. My coffee mugs get washed once every “ok that’s really gross”. I mean, it always holds the same piping hot liquid and only one person ever drinks out of it. So what’s the point of keeping the mug pristinely clean?

I had to clean my cup, FML!

many places do not have open access to sinks or have it only in bathrooms were they are designed to be hard to use this way.

Please excuse my language but I fucking despise most bathroom sinks. What genius decided to make a super short tap that only extends 4cm from the back wall of the sink. What kind of child must you be to actually wash your hands in sinks like this? Most people are older than 4 and thus have larger hands.

It's nearly impossible for me to wash my hands in most bathroom sinks without punching the sink itself on accident just trying to get my hands in the water stream. I usually have to rinse one hand at a time, sideways just to have the tiniest amount of room

IMO these are because of moron designers who picked the wrong size tap for those kinds of sink.

In a different universe I'd sell stickers for people to buy and stick near any sink like this that's been misdesigned, something like "Warning, the interior designer designing this bathroom was a moron, and choose an inappropriately-sized tap for this sink".

Punching the sink on accident sounds very painful. If it's a recurring accident then you might want to look into improving your hand eye coordination. Try searching on the internet for "improving hand eye coordination", there is a wealth of material.

Best of luck, I hope your hands heal quickly.

Punching was an exaggeration, but the force can vary from a touch to smacking my knuckles against the back depending on how much of a hurry I'm in.

Hand eye coordination doesn't improve the amount of room between the water stream and the sink, but as your comment appears to be in bad faith I'm sure you already know that.

Perhaps your hands are 4cm long so they fit just fine?

Often it's PLA, which although not trivial to compost, will compost in the right conditions.

I think they are pretty awesome as long as you are in a place that takes the incineration approach to waste handling. When we burn biomass for energy we might as well insert a step or two between harvest and energy use that solves some other problems in passing. Trace chemicals in the coating will break up and oxidize just fine.

They did have cups like that, in the 50's. They were extremely bad at the task of letting someone "grab a coffee" and return to their car instead of sitting down at the location, hence when styrofoam and coated-paper options came up, they immediately dominated and were a big enabler of that culture, alongside fast food. I still get cups to go on occasion, but I'm a little more wary now of them being a vector for microplastic consumption.

I'm sure we'll find a way to get acceptable price/performance with fully organic, disposable packaging at some point. The demand is definitely there.

That's why I switched to keep cup I carry around

Same! After something like 12 years I couldn’t imagine not having it around. It makes every coffee taste better.

See also: carrying around your own chopsticks and cutlery.

What about wax linings?

That is the issue, all of this always comes down to cost and volume... and convenience.

Beeswax is perfectly acceptable but it costs more and I don't have the numbers but there is probably not enough bees in the world for all those starbucks cups.

The unpleasant truth that nobody wants to hear is that the only way to solve this is to ban all these disposables and use ceramic cups in the cafe or bring your own flask.

Everybody is an environmentalist until the environmental policy bothers their sense of convenience.

There was a brief push for "keep cups" that seemed to have growing momentum ~2019, but that came to a halt with COVID and it seems isn't coming back any time soon.

I think the fundamental problem is plastic is cheap and companies have zero need to factor in the environmental costs. It's pointless to blame the consumer for buying something that they can afford, these products that do terrible damage to the environment need to be made unaffordable through taxes on the companies producing them.

Indeed perhaps my wording wasn't explicit but by "ban these disposables" I meant ban/regulate them out of the market through governmental policy.

Consumer sentiment alone will never make a significant impact.

You still get a discount for bringing your own cups to coffee shops, in the UK at least!

In the U.S. it's a per-store basis, and often they won't give you a discount unless you're using their own brand of bowl/mug/whatever which itself is often plastic and probably leeching chemicals into the food every time they refill it.

Leaching, technically, not leeching.

That and the Boogeyman of food safety liability.

God forbid you get a drop of spit on another thing, in the coffee shop where everyone spews drops of spit everywhere when they order anything at all

I think people are willing to hear it, and they probably know it already. It’s rather that companies aren’t willing to admit it because let’s be honest, if everyone had to bring their own cup to Starbucks, their sales would plummet.

We really need to stop blaming individual people for not doing their part and start blaming the system for having the wrong incentives.

> We really need to stop blaming individual people for not doing their part and start blaming the system for having the wrong incentives.

Why not both?

Yes, we definitely should fix the incentives wherever possible, because many people are just going to blindly follow the incentives. Those who don't will often get outcompeted by those who do.

On the other hand, if ethics does not mean "do not always blindly follow your incentives", I wonder what else it might possibly mean.

Yeah I sort of agree but badgering people for flying or buying a new car or something is I thin just a bit counterproductive because people probably won’t like it very much. It would be more productive to badger representatives to make better legislation.

It used to be that conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, I think that was probably a good thing.

Beeswax wouldn't work because it's melting point (around 140°F) is lower than the temperature coffee and tea are usually brewed and served at. It would just melt.

Subsidize it, let there be enough incentive to have more and more bees. I don't care about the cups, just want more bees.

Wax works great for cold liquids, but melts with anything hot.

I tried it once! You start to see pools of wax float to the surface of your coffee.

If you want to know where your recycling ends up, tape an airtag onto the inside of a paper cup and see where it goes.

I’ve just installed a reverse osmosis system and full-house filter after discovering fairly high levels PFAs, Bromodichloromethane, and chloroform in my water after a test. I didn’t realize moving here how bad it was, but the testing company said it probably wasn’t safe to bathe in lol.

All these chemicals leech into the water from various factories and farms. I imagine dumps have a similar issue. In terms of the environment I’m far FAR more concerned about this than climate change. It’s an imminent risk.

I personally switched to glass containers for storage of food and water. I also use cast iron for my food, non-stick has a lot of chemicals.

It’s slightly less convenient, but easy enough. I also get satisfaction from the cast iron and regularly bake steak and what not.

Cast iron is pretty awesome, and they're plenty "non stick" if you use plenty of butter. The argument for coated pans kinda goes out the window if you're not trying to cut out fat, other than that cast iron is heavy.

I also love keeping glass jars. I use them to drink out of, containing food, distilling, etc. They're way tougher than actual drinking glasses too. Eventually I might toss some in recycling if I've got too many, but I don't buy all that much canned food in the first place so it kinda works out.

In terms of water, I still need to get an RO filter, but in the meantime I've been using a regular water filter and also distilling my own water. Don't believe the hype around distilled water being bad for you, because it's not. RO water is pretty close to distilled anyway, but nobody handwaves about it eating your bones or other such nonsense.

Yep, cast iron is great. For something lighter weight, there's also carbon steel. Both of these need some amount of simple maintenance, but they last generations when taken care of properly.

> discovering fairly high levels PFAs, Bromodichloromethane, and chloroform in my water after a test

Out of curiosity, how did you have these tested?

There are lots of companies that’ll test water for you. I picked two, one test was on Amazon (was like $300 for all the trace chemicals). Then I selected another test I found online. Both came to the same basic conclusion so I trusted the results.

Hmm, some group needs to come together to crowdfund a series of tests by these companies versus a laboratory test to ensure we don't have a 'Everybody hosts on AWS' problem where all these tests actually go back to one or two labs across the entire nation.

The way it works is that the NSF (and other groups) certifies labs then you can go to them. Mine had the results of two different labs. I’m sure they could be cheating in some way, but seemed legit enough

The only problem I’ve heard about reverse osmosis is you end up lacking in trace minerals. It sounds like straight filtration is the way to go and you can also buy special filters to greatly reduce other industrial waste such as fluoride.

I find the trace minerals claim dubious. Trace minerals are easily obtained from diet; the drinking water shouldn't make any difference.

I have heard of a case of a well drilled through unfortunate mineralization and yielding water with so much arsenic the home's residents developed symptoms.

Yeah, I don’t really see much support that it’s an issue. The trace minerals likely have very little impact and if you eat food you’ll have plenty.

You can also get drops to add minerals, add a very tiny pinch of Himalayan salt, add a remineralizing filter, etc

I challenge you to find sound scientific evidence that drinking mineral free water is harmful to human health. Not opinions, but actual studies. They don't exist, by the way, but feel free to confirm it yourself.

Many reverse osmosis systems sold at home improvement stores include an optional filter that replenishes trace minerals to correct taste

There's also the water waste factor, you send a few gallons down the drain for every gallon dispensed.

Where I live there is no shortage of water. Opposite problems really…

That said, if you drink 10 gallons a week, you’re talking 10-30 gallons of waste water depending on the system (mine is 1.5 waste for every 1 gallon). The average bath is 35-50 gallons. It doesn’t seem like a huge impact.

That is definitely true... on the other hand, if you were thinking of buying bottled water that is worse.

Wow, I would have expected the opposite ratio.

But you can use that water if you set your system up for it.

It's at the point where it's in the rainwater.

I give it another 20 years before people rediscover the milkman model

I'd be fine with plastics, separated from the trash stream and sent to a big petrochemical plant to be thermally decomposed into a petrochemical feedstock. It would make a lot more sense than pretending plastic bottles can be directly turned into more bottles.

When oil stops being a thing and carbon becomes scarce for making stuff I think this will make sense to do. Until then, let's just make piles of the old plastic so they can conveniently mine it then.

Love your thinking. Rather than comingle the plastics with waste, let's keep them separate at the landfill for use when future humans figure out what to do with it.

By mixing it all together we just make it much more difficult for ourselves later.

> when future humans figure out what to do with it

I'm not keen on models that include: "Let our grandchildren solve the problem". I have grandchildren.

But sometimes just waiting and letting someone else deal with it is the right solution. For example: spent nuclear fuel.

Finland is doing it. It's a smaller country but it's possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

I don't agree with you. Or rather, I agree with "just waiting" - we don't have any choice about that. I don't agree with "letting someone else deal with it".

The spent waste we've already produced needs to be stored in a way that puts it beyond the possibility of access within 200,000 years. And we need to stop producing new nuclear waste. Note that modern humans have been walking the Earth for just 200,000 years; we can't hope to be able to label it with readable danger warnings. The oldest languages we can read are only a few thousand years old. And we can't just pop it into orbit - there are many thousands of tons of it, sitting around in cooling ponds.

Well, unless we become immortal, waiting long enough means letting someone else deal with problems.

Right now, the obviously (and I do mean that) best way to deal with spent nuclear fuel is (after some cooling) to stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there. It's much cheaper than the alternatives, it's quite safe, and it doesn't preclude any other solution.

But (you might say) we're leaving the cost of dealing with it to our descendants. I respond: we leave the consequences of all our actions to our descendants. For example, if we spend resources of doing something to nuclear waste, we do not do something else with those resources that might have been better for our descendants. Economics is all about tradeoffs; you can't just look at anything in isolation.

Delaying dealing with a problem also means that those who ultimately solve it can choose the solution they prefer, rather than one we impose on them. Maybe they'll want to extract plutonium. Maybe they'll want to bury the fuel unchanged. Maybe they'll want to shoot it into space. They will know better which solution is best for them.

This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made (except if you're trying to use the waste issue as a bludgeon to force the other issue.) I get the distinct impression the waste problem is being greatly overstated for rhetorical reasons.

> stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there.

Well, yes. We have to stick it in something, and then let it sit somewhere. I'm not sure that on the surface, anywhere it can be reached by weather, anywhere close to the ocean, is a good place to let it sit.

> They will know better which solution is best for them.

Sure. So we shouldn't close off their options. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem now, that we need to solve.

[Edit] Actually, I'm not at all sure that "they will know better". It could well be that human interest in fundamental physics fades away completely in the next 5,000 years. That would leave our descendants without the tools to even understand the problem, let alone fix it, or try to exploit it.

> This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made

I don't agree. We have a problem now, of how to deal with the waste (and devastated land) we've already created; we don't have a way of dealing with it. We shouldn't make more waste until the problem is solved.

> bludgeon to force the other issue

> for rhetorical reasons

Hey, I'm taking you seriously, there's no need to suggest bad faith. Your other remarks have been pretty straight-arrow; I'm not sure why you're switching to ad-hominem now.

That model has made a comeback several years back. I have friends who get vegetables delivered in wooden crates every week and return the crate at the next pickup. At a supermarket where my parents live, you can't get meat and cheese wrapped in plastic but have to get a container (admittedly a plastic one) that you then can bring every time.

A plastic container that you use more than once already halves your plastic consumption.

Depends on how thick the plastic is and how many times you reuse it. I’m guessing you have to reuse a Tupperware a good 100 times before you’ve saved vs Saran Wrap

(Of course the Tupperware has other advantages)

Interesting you're getting downvoted for something that is absolutely true. Thin film plastics are exceedingly efficient. When you add in secondary energy effects like adding soap and water for cleaning the reused packaging, and 3rd order effects like food borne illness when you fail to do so properly, the plastic wins the energy game every time.

The discussion goes in to debates over energy use versus litter at that point.

I normally use my Tupperware about 100 times or so. And while I completely agree, I not sure if lots of thin is better or worse than one thick even if it ended up being used relatively the same compared to thickness.

Or just plastic, metal and glass bottles/cans deposit like in Lithuania.

You pay 10 euro cents extra when buying, and get it back after depositing the bottles/cans at local taromat.

If someone is trashy and throws bottle to dumpsters, at least they already paid for their damage.

Still have a milkman. Takes the empty glass bottles off the front steps and replaces them with full ones. Even had an electric "milk float" up until a few years ago.

Its like he reimagined and modernised Hello Fresh or Just Eat.

Supermarkets were buying back empty glass bottles in Italy in the 70s so people didn't send them to a landfill anymore. My parents handed bottles to a clerk at a desk, got some coins, then we started shopping.

Then plastic bottles took over the world.

A grocer near me (California) still operates this way for certain items. My wife and I go there for cream and milk from a nearby dairy and there's a $1 (I don't remember the exact value, it may be $2 or even $3) deposit on the bottle. Bring the (clean) bottle back and you can swap it for a new bottle or get your deposit back.

Still works for beer (at least in Poland), as people don't want to drink beer out of plastic or even metal containers.

In the UK I sometimes see mention of this scheme on the backs of bottles, but it's denominated in cence (which we don't have) and is for Australia & New Zealand only.

We can recycle them at home of course (though I was surprised to learn not everywhere! It's up to the council! Wandsworth borough of London has no recycling for many flats, unless the landlord cares to provide something) - but not in a supermarket or anywhere for cash incentive.

Or the pfand model which Germany still uses today.

I'm sure there's a local milkman you could sign up to, but you'd probably find it's 'just' delivery of 'normal' plastic bottles. (Perhaps with a more expensive glass option, or a premium option that happens to be in glass.)

Our local milkman (UK) still uses glass bottles

I’m lucky - we have a milkman. It’s great and our milk comes from a local farm. The cost is about 40% more, but it magically shows up in the milk box every Monday and Thursday.

Ontario's beer bottle model is basically this. And it works really well.

> Compost these things and you'll get fluorinated forever chemicals in your garden.

It's already there (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069). It's still not a good idea to compost that stuff and spread it around near you or on your veggies.

Good god, that has to be some kind of crime.

I think it's the difference between compostable and "compostable in an industrial facility".

Fluoridated forever chemicals can’t be composted in any scenario.

There must (?) be some microorganisms that can break down C-F bonds, because there are organisms that naturally create C-F bonds.

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

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

It’s not because that’s how all paper products are waterproofed.

No, often a PLA lining is used e.g. https://www.vegware.com/uk-en/catalogue/single_wall_cups/

Yeah, most stuff that is marked as compostable should be treated with suspicion. I only compost organic food waste, no wrappers or containers, no matter how they are marked. We have decent recycling where I live, so all cardboard, paper, metal, and plastic just goes in the bin.

TBH the biggest benefit from composting food waste (vs throwing away) is that my garbage bin doesn't smell.

These articles always strike me as a red herring. Sure, these won't break down in compost or a landfill, but why are you composting plastics to begin with?

The proper way to dispose of plastic is in an incinerator, as is commonly done in the EU. Regular old polyethylene burns cleanly and easily.

Do you know what's actually dangerous to the environment? These new "paper" alternatives which are often coated in PFAS chemicals -- which cannot be safely mulched or incinerated because they are "forever" chemicals.

Just use regular plastics please, and burn them. It's by far the most environmentally friendly solution.

Because these plastics are marketed as compostable (and therefore eco-friendly). However, they know and deliberately leave out the fact that most municipal composting facilities can't actually compost them.

It's completely deceptive. The same way some plastics get marketed as "recycleable" plastic, but in reality few recycling facilities are actually recycling them. Companies are claiming they have made these "eco-friendly" recycleable products, but they know they will just end up in landfills.

Ok, but people don't burn plastics. Source: look around.

Better ban both plastics and paper coated with PFAS chemicals

Most every European country has bins for collecting plastic. People shouldn't be burning it themselves, just collect it in the appropriate bin and send it to the incinerator.

If every bit of plastic was burned in Europe, then we'd still only be talking about 10% of the problem. The US for example is high effective at burying their plastic problem in sanitary landfills, something tiny, like less than 1% of plastic waste escapes this flow.

Once you get out of US and EU these numbers can vary wildly up and to the point of everything getting thrown in the nearest ditch and flowing down the river to the closest ocean. Dealing with worldwide problem with a EU/US mindset is a great way to propagate a worldwide disaster.

Waste to energy is something that can easily be implemented worldwide because the resulting infrastructure has income to pay for itself. There are world wide infrastructure programs that build less useful things. It's much harder to get high quality landfills made and maintained because they don't have a source of profit.

>> Most every European country has bins for collecting plastic.

Yeah they do but how much is recycled? 10 - 20% ? Banning plastic fixes the both the environment issue and the oil dependance issue.

Another thing. I absolutely hate the taste of those materials that pass for compostable stuff these days. The McDonald's around here switched to paper straws (EU laws) and wooden ice cream spoons. I seriously stopped going there since they did. People always tell me, why don't you take your own plastic straw and a spoon if you want to go to McDonald's? Well, when I did used to go it was usually on a whim, when travelling on a motorway far away from home. I would have to remember to carry this stuff with me all the time, just to ocassionally benefit from it. So they lost my business.

What they should've done is what IKEA did when single Use carrier bags were outlawed. Just have much stronger multi-use equivalent one can buy there and then.

>The McDonald's around here switched to paper straws (EU laws)

McDonald's soda in the US used to come in paper cups with plastic straws. Now it appears to come in plastic cups with paper straws.

I don't really know what to make of that.

The paper cups were waxed. They can’t be recycled. At least the plastic is recyclable.

Doesn't 90% of plastic end up in landfills, anyway?

Yes, but McDonalds gets to say that's someone else's fault.

Isn't the same true of the straws?

Yep, one of my favorite places to grab a coffee on the go changed their lids from plastic to something that resembles egg carton (pulp?). By the time a third of the coffee is gone the lid turns into a soggy mush. It doesn't fall apart. Just disgusting to handle... not getting coffee there anymore.

A huge hack with the paper straw is to take it out or put it on the top of the cup when you aren't actively drinking. Then it will actually last the entire portion versus dissolving on you.

What’s wrong with wooden spoons?

The feeling of wood spoons running on my tongue and lips send shivers through my spine. It's a very unpleasant sensation. I understand the need to stop single-use plastics but I rather not eat icecream if I need a wooden spoon to eat it.

first world problems..

There's a large range in quality of wooden spoons. A lot of it comes down to the finish texture.

I assume they mean these - https://www.walmart.com/ip/100pcs-Wooden-Ice-Cream-Spoons-Wo...

If so, you can taste the spoon when you eat ice cream off of it..

Most of the “paper” products that replaced plastic for stuff like straws and take out containers are coated with PFAS.

Edible spoons:

https://incredibleeats.com/

> Just have much stronger multi-use equivalent one can buy there and then.

That still doesn’t solve your problem: “when I did used to go it was usually on a whim, when travelling on a motorway far away from home”.

I don't understand, why not? He can buy one there at the place if he forgot to bring one along.

Then again, if this is really stopping them from going to McD’s, why not just buy a pack of straws for your glove compartment.

Same with people who forget about reusable bags when you can buy a big pack of plastic bags for $60 for the car.

It’s a weird sort of helplessness, especially while driving what’s basically a mobile storage container. We’re really running out of things to complain about.

Thinking about this problem reminded me of the video from last year [0] made by an employee of an animal feed manufacturer. He documents how a bunch of plastic-wrapped food waste is ground up in a large grinder, with the plastic still on the food, and the end result goes straight into the pig feed...almost certainly with many bits of micro plastics inside. Many don't realize how pervasive are these sorts of issues.

[0] https://youtu.be/Xp0NSIrbu3Y

This past year, I've taken to throwing all of my plastic waste directly in the trash. It saves me time from trying to figure out if it's compostable or recyclable (god forbid I get it wrong) and gives me back a tinge of guilt that makes me wish I had bought something else with less packaging, or brought my own cup to the cafe.

Most plastics that claim to be recyclable aren't. And now it seems like most that claim to be compostable aren't either.

When will people realize that it's all a sham to make us buy more plastic shit?

I have food-waste bags that are labeled "compostable". They tend to start "composting" in my food-waste caddy, so the bags burst once they're about 36 hours old. I think they're made from cellulose.

Apart from food-waste, I have a recycling bin and a landfill bin. In general I don't recycle plastics any more. There's a bunch of different kinds of plastic, that have to be separated to be recycled, and if I can't decode the recycling label, then I really doubt there's a robot at the recycling centre separating the different kinds of plastic.

Plus: I'm constantly coming across plastic packaging that's mixed: two kinds of plastic bonded together. Those can't be recycled. And cardboard packaging bonded to plastic: that goes to landfill. Also window envelopes; I wish companies would stop using them, the whole envelope goes to landfill.

I think the theory is that I'm supposed to pick over my waste, doing my best to separate labels and caps from plastic bottles, recycle just the cardboard from mixed packaging, and inspect each piece of plastic looking for the recycling code. I'm afraid life is too short.

You don't actually need to separate window envelopes (or paperclips or staples) when recycling paper. Same for the tape they use for cardboard boxes, they use the right kind of plastic for those. (Though I wonder how the average consumer is supposed to know all about recycling processes...)

Worse, you can't even make that claim without knowing which jurisdiction the reader is in! Some places have the machines that can handle the window envelopes, but not everywhere. Same for plastic bags, or PET or PLA plastic.

"Jurisdiction" sounds grand, as if there are laws about these things. There might be where you live, but here it's a question of which private recycling firm has the contract with your local authority. Cross a county border, or move into town, and you have a new recycling firm with new processes.

I completely agree that it's a sham, and the plastic is not even close to as recyclable as it is spun to be.

The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill. At least if you "recycle" it, something like 30% actually does get fed back into the system (35% according to https://www.greenmatters.com/p/what-percent-recycling-actual...) vs. 0% in the landfill. It's terrible, but it's something.

In the landfill it will probably never be worth mining, it will be so mixed up with other crap.

I think the tinge of guilt you're talking about is really important and I wish more people feel that when they buy something in plastic. Plastic recycling really does make people feel off the hook, and they don't realize how poor plastic recycling actually is.

A landfill is actually a great containment site. Its already fucked from an ecological standpoint so you might as well build the mound up higher and higher since the environmental damage has been paid already.

> The part where I disagree is with throwing it in the landfill.

Here in Germany most is burned - or exported (the number I found was 6% of the total; we also import some trash from European neighbors and it varies widely depending on type of trash and it's complicated the more I read). Even when I tried returning unused drugs to the drug store as recommended they looked at me funny and told me they'd just throw it into the regularly trash too anyway, since it's all burned. The burning facility uses extra high temperatures.

Map of the 66 German trash burning sites: https://static.dw.com/image/50749190_7.png

https://www.wsj.com/articles/germans-have-a-burning-need-for...

We do that so much now this causes concern about the CO2 balance sheet:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growi...

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/sites/default/files/medien/pu... (2008 but it's a government agency paper)

So... before you are concerned about landfill impact I think you may want to check if this is where your trash actually ends up. Maybe it's burned.

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/is-burning-trash-a-good...

https://www.clientearth.org/latest/latest-updates/stories/th...

The last two links also discuss environmental impact of trash burning. I did not find much about the technical side unfortunately, how good is current trash burning tech at filtering toxins? I understand 30 year old plants won't be good, but what about more modern ones?

This German article quotes a chemist specializing in "sustainability" saying that the air quality is not a problem these days (from trash burning). There are a lot of toxic waste products from the process, but apparently they are filtered out. They still need to be disposed of of course. --- https://www.dw.com/de/m%C3%BCllverbrennung-in-deutschland-en...

Reading further in that article, there still is some toxins left in the air, so over time there still is a problem of accumulation in the environment especially around the plant.

It also says there are 350,000 tons of filtered toxic waste after burning every year, and they are treated with a salt solution and stored-buried in an abandoned mine.

----

At first I only wanted to point out that some countries use a lot of trash burning instead of landfills, but I googled and read a bit and it's very interesting and complex, and there is soooooooo much detail... overall though, no really good option exists, and all those methods are "leaking", meaning toxins end up in the environment one way or the other. Long-term we need something else, or we can hope for evolution to create more toxin-resistant lifeforms.

Burning at least emits CO2 instead of the methane emitted by a landfill, and can generate heat and electricity for residential use. In the end, recycling isn't feasible for most materials and the solution needs to come from the other pieces of the carbon puzzle.

Some landfills tap the methane and cycle it into the gas supply.

Don't feel bad. Plastics in the landfill is sequestrated CO2. It's oil that has been dug up, but never burned.

While you might argue that we shouldn't have extracted that oil in the first place, plastic packaging is less energy intense to produce compared to packaging made out of glass, metal, or plant mass.

So let the landfills store the CO2.

This past year, I've taken to throwing all of my plastic waste directly in the recycling. It saves me time from trying to figure out if it's compostable or recyclable.

You can save even more time by throwing it directly in the trash.

Even Greenpeace now admits the obvious: recycling doesn’t work: https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doe...

That guy writing the article is the same climate change denier who fronted the campaign that allowed the US to fail so miserably at recycling while other countries succeeded.

A possibly phyrric victory since, as he points out, he hates Greenpeace USA's fallback position even more than he hates recycling, but that's a noose he created for his own neck. He told people recycling was impossible, Americans believed him, and now Greenpeace USA is successfully using that belief to leverage even greater moves to limit the use of single use plastics.

You can now see places like Reason.com, that share his politics, desperately switiching to supporting recycling plastic, when the alternative is bans:

These Environmentalists Want To Ban Single-Use Plastics Because Recycling Them 'Will Never Work'

And yet infinitely recyclable plastics are on the horizon.

https://reason.com/2022/05/31/environmentalists-ban-single-u...

Oh, I wonder how they got the idea it would never work?

https://reason.com/category/energy-environment/recycling/

When you add the wrong things it lowers the value of the surrounding batch of material at the plant. So you aren’t playing it safe, just smug.

If he lives in a sane country, that cost will be passed onto the firms making the packaging, and they'll have further financial incentive to stop making non recyclable packaging.

In countries run by and for faceless corporations they'll call it wishcycling and it becomes your fault.

no economy today prices in all these externalities. the form of capitalism you're defending is a fantasy, not a purer form that it can be reformed into

Extended producer responsibility has been around for decades now:

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

my point stands

My recycling all goes in the same bin - plastic, paper, glass etc barbaric as that is.

If it turns out boxes from X are not recyclable - then I can only hope that the mass of them "reducing the profits of big waste corp" triggers a phone call from them to X and action happens - either the two parties come to an agreement or the waste company spends 50c sending me a flyer saying "please dont cost us $1000 by putting that packaging in your bin" or alternatively spends $5 an hour having someone on the line pick them out.

Its capitalism, not even a liberal fantasy land model of capitalism, but a filthy greedy sweatshop child labour exploititive form of capitalism - thats how it is meant to work.

That doesn’t happen, there’s no market solution for this

I think there needs to be a strict law that fixes this.

1) All consumer plastics should be recyclable, and there should only be 1 or 2 different types of plastic allowed. I don't care how expensive this makes it. That Pacific Ocean Plastic Island or whatever it's called really changed my opinion on this.

2) Anything that touches food should be either glass or truly compostable, no more plastic and not fake compostable like this article. I don't care if it's more expensive and if it doesn't last as long. Glass works good enough for long-term storage.

3) Get rid of styofoam entirely, fuck that toxic waste.

That Pacific Ocean Plastic Island is mostly made of fishing nets.

Fishing nets are also the most likely source of most microplastic in the oceans.

It is a huge problem, but not really connected to food packaging.

Your item 1 actually makes things less expensive. This can be proved by looking at places that force the producers to pay for it, but don't otherwise interfere.

When businesses assign people to do it in the cheapest possible way, but aren't allowed to externalise the cost onto society, what you describe happens, because its cheaper.

Not quite as cheap as blaming the consumer and telling lots of lies unfortunately, or we wouldnt need any regulation to achieve the most efficient outcome.

I'd love to see a standardized sized titanium reusable wide mouth jars, that could be returned and reused almost indefinitely. While titanium has a high upfront embodied energy, it is super light weight and doesn't react with most things in our environment that you would expect purchase in it.

One could imagine purchasing food (sauce, milk, oil) then reuse it to hold your left overs. You could reheat on a stove, but sadly not in the microwave. With a cozy of some sort you could even hold hot and cold beverages.

Bonus points would be that you could easily compare prices as a 1 liter jar of one marinara sauce would be the same as another brands jar.

On the same note, I'd love to go back to reusable glass jars that were manufactured for reuse and cleaning capabilities. Sadly they are a bit heavier and more fragile than a titanium version, but at least you can look into the contents.

Something similar was already done in Soviet Union with glass containers (standard for obvious reasons) - instead of being recycled the usual way, they were washed and reused, so you could return them for a non-trivial fee[1]. I wonder if the only reason it doesn't work in the US for big companies like Coca Cola that have existing distribution network that could be used to e.g. collect intact standard bottles for a discount, is it's just not worth it, cause everyone is too rich to bother returning the bottles. Or maybe the US is more efficient so it's not worth it economically to bother collecting, transporting and cleaning them (or maybe it wasn't even economical in the USSR, I dunno).

[1] the joke is, the first derivative of a drinking session is another drinking session you can have with alcohol purchased with bottle return fees from the initial one; and a really good party must have a non-zero 2nd derivative.

If it’s just PLA, who cares? Lactic acid will get broken down and is everywhere already in most living things, the concerns with microplastics eyc in the environment don’t exist with PLA unless there’s some issue I’m not aware of.

There may be concerns with materials added to PLA to make it have better qualities, I’m not familiar with those.

Polylactic acid is a generally safe plastic, but it is not particularly digestible by bacteria and so on. It's considered "degradable", but only in specific environmental situations or in an industrial setting. Also, Most flavors of "PLA" (both used in 3D printing and without) are mixtures, though. 3D printing "PLA+" and "PLA Pro" are usually mixed with acrylic or with thermoplastic urethane.

(I do some 3D printing, and this is a big reason why I try to cut down on waste as much as is practical - and also why I'm trying to do more and more with PET/PETG. Even though I have a PLA-and-friends recycler in my area who just takes the stuff, the recycling paths for PET/PETG are more broadly available and understood. For prototyping, I've been trying to move more towards Algix Alga as much as possible, though it's tough because it's pricey and rarely in stock.)

Nobody is going to recycle your PET from prints/failures/etc. though, they're just going to get dumped. There's no magic plastic identification and separation in anybody's recycling. The way I see it you have three viable options:

* Use raw PLA

* Accept that you're going to generate some plastic waste

* Burn your plastic waste

Really unless you've gone completely carbon neutral, burning a small amount of plastic isn't a big deal, it's really where most plastic waste should go. Waste to energy plants are just fossil fuel power plants with extra steps.

The only plastic allowed in our recycling is PET. (And we have a local 3D printer recycler anyway, where both go anyway--it's more of an incentivization thing. It's a marginal incentive, but better than nothing.)

Of course I accept that I'm going to generate waste--but I am trying to generate less of it. Hence NonOilen and Algis Alga as prototyping materials.

Composting plastic makes no sense. When bacteria eat the plastic they produce CO2. Just burn the plastic in power plant and you'll have the same amount of CO2 plus energy.

I think the motivation behind compostable plastic is to reduce the amount of micro plastics ending up in the environment rather than CO2 emissions.

That said, burning non-compostable plastic (with appropriate emissions control) does seem like an appropriate way of disposing of it, and generating some energy in the process.

When bacteria eat anything, they produce CO2. But instead of energy you get compost. It's not clear to me that one is better than the other.

When bacteria eat things, unless you're very careful to keep things aerobic, you end up producing a lot of methane, which is a much worse greenhouse gas.

It’s not about CO2.

In the US I’ve never seen plastics marketed as compostable at home. Everything I’ve seen has been clearly marked as compostable in commercial facilities, where they heat the piles.

Edit: never mind, these do say “home compost” according to some European regulations under the more prominent label that says commercial composting only, on the same bag!

IMHO things like "compostable" and "biodegradable", effectively a sort of planned obsolescence, is a great way of both continuing to manufacture and sell more material while at the same time pandering to the "green" trend of environmentalism. Reuse is always better than recycling, and no doubt it would be perfectly possible to engineer reusable plastic products that truly could last orders of magnitude longer in addition to all their other desirable attributes, but there's no profit in that. For example, I have several-decades-old(!) plastic bags which are still perfectly usable, and probably have lasted several times longer than intended.

As the results of the experiment show that the compost contains plastic that has not fully disintegrated, plastic inevitably ends up in soil of UK citizens

That said, I don't think this is really a big deal. Plastics are used because they are quite inert, even those engineered for deliberately short lifetimes. Soil contains a lot of other inert matter too. The most widely-used plastics are also the most inert, so they'll just end up existing until someone finds a way to make use of them again. The whole "plastic scare" seems to mainly be due to the health effects of plasticisers found in things like PVC and ABS, which are not quite as abundant as PE and PP, both of which don't need plasticisers.

As someone whose generally against more government regulation and the whole green revolution, banning single use plastics seems pretty reasonable.

Just an fyi - “green revolution” is usually reserved for talking about transitions in agriculture that happened in the 1950s/60s - which from context probably wasn’t what you were referring to.

Single use plastics have massive indirect benefits which are easily overlooked.

Substituting say aluminum foil for food packaging has it’s own tradeoffs. It’s even less degradable than plastic and takes significantly more energy to create.

But it isn't creating novel microplastics which tunnel toxic chemicals past our immune systems. At some "econonomics" needs to take a back seat to "we have poisoned the rain".

Single use plastics that end up in a landfill won't be turning into microplastics. It's more a matter of re-usable plastic items gradually wearing down.

You don’t need aluminium to degrade. It’s completely safe as it is. It’s like complaining clay bricks aren’t biodegradable.

And plastic is not safe?

I think the issue here is that we lump all plastics together under a single label. Not all of them are equivalent in impact of production or as waste.

Waxed paper would do the job

I'm not sure if this is a real issue or just an annoyance. If the plastic degrades fully within a few years, it's already much less pollution than plastics where you're looking at 100 years.

When I lived in the UK for a few years, I had a compost bin and used it for a few years with the green "compostable" bin bags they're talking about. eg these ones:

https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/waitrose-compostable-...

After 2 years, those bags hadn't degraded at all. Completely unfit for purpose, false advertising, etc.

They're designed for the heat of an industrial composter.

You get ones specifically designed for home composting, but even without considering these bags there is a bit of an art to home composting and you want to mix things up to get the reaction going smoothly.

From the article:

> But the research shows that, in this case, the better solution is to send compostable plastics to industrial composting facilities, where composting conditions are regulated.

> “We have shown that home composting, being uncontrolled, is largely ineffective and is not a good method of disposal for compostable packaging,” said Purkiss.

That's the opposite of my problem: food-waste caddy-liners that disintegrate too quickly, so they fall apart while I'm taking them out.

It's a real issue for Berlin's trash collection service, who reminds people not to use biodegradable bags for their bio waste.

How do you isolate bio waste then?

You put it in the bio waste bin (optional - use biodegradable bags)

Didn’t parent comment just say not to use biodegradable bags?

Take it to the bin downstairs almost daily. Or keep an airtight bin in the house and dread the day you have to clean it.

We need some DARPA-style investment and design competitions for reduce, reuse, recycle. Like the X-Prizes, Bill Gates' quest for a composting toilet, Project Warp. This is a proven strategy for goal directed innovation.

Local optimizations, relying on individual actors in a long and complicated lifecycle supply chain, will not result in a global optimum. (Cite theory of constraints.)

In 15 min, everyone here could imagine +100 solutions. Ceramic coatings, an engineered fiber that breaks down with a specific enzyme, thin clay disposable cups (tried in India?)...

And then we should try every idea, funding based on plausibility.

I think bamboo is such an underexploited resource. You can grow it literally anywhere, even in places that see winter. A pub could have a stand of bamboo in the back that they cut pint cups from. Of course its invasive but at this point anywhere with human activity is so unnatural to begin with that it wont matter much.

Does this include the green plastic bags that are ubiquitous for putting food scraps for a compost.

Those seem to break down in my hand.

It's a magic trick!

Add the required enzymes at the point of manufacture...

https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/19/intropic-plastic-decomposi...

On Second Thought, Just Throw Plastic Away https://www.city-journal.org/greenpeace-admits-recycling-doe...

This is basically what I decided too.

Nonetheless when presented with a recycling bin, compost bin, or trash bin - I still always stand there for a split second like "uhhh" before often deciding on what I think the correct bin is.

I do feel though that we'd likely be better served just replacing them with one giant garbage bin.

Recycling should be labelled what it can take. Locally only 1-3 are recyclable for me but theres no way to tell. Its not labelled on any recycling bin. Theres no information about this at the point of sale. I had to look this up myself on my own prerogative and I have to do this in any locality I happen to be in because its aways slightly different what is taken.

Those materials must fulfill opposite requirements: 1. not break down while used; 2. break down quickly after use. So no big surprise, if they take a long time.

The main problem here is standardization; without it, there's nothing clear about them, e.g. how much those materials share with plastics (ie. harmful additives). A consequence of this is what the article describes - they can't be properly treated.

Having said that, I find less worse to find a bag of material "derived from potato starch" in the ocean, rather than a plastic bag.

This is really terrible, you can see this everywhere on earth, in some countries more than others.

I think we do not realize the mess it will be and how complicated it is to clean that up.

On a related note, what’s up with the plastic packaging in NA? Often vegetarian food has the plastic packed so tightly it is annoying to unpack. There is no easy way to open those packages and the plastic completely sticks to the food.

In EU, they just come in a plastic container without plastic sticking to the food.

A quick litmus test you can perform if you're curious: with contact with water, heat, or food, does the material in question start to degrade?

If yes, it's likely compostable. If not, then you've got plastic and it won't.

grow plants to pull carbon from atmosphere -> create plant based plastics -> use plastics -> bury plastics forever

we need to sequester carbon, this seems like one good method

Skip the energy waste making the plastic and just offer bamboo or wood cups.

And the carbon in those cups will eventually get back in the atmosphere

I mean, plastics were basically invented _because_ of their resistance to natural degradation and corrosion. A material that nature cannot destroy is a weapon of mass destruction. Anything sold to the general public _must_ be biodegradable.

Instead, we're going to invent bacteria that can eat plastics, and plastics will lose its utility as an indestructible material.

Paper is really such a great fit to replace single use plastic. Biodegradable, can be incinerated, plasma gasified, or landfilled. Will decompose if not collected for disposal, and wax can be used for the more tricky packaging applications. Fast growth timber can meet the need without impacting more at risk forestry.

Bottles and cutlery traditionally made from plastic can be made from agricultural plastic substitutes.

You might use more energy (which can be sourced from clean sources), but the trade off is less persistent pollution and micro plastic waste.

> Anything sold to the general public _must_ be biodegradable.

I love this guiding principle.

Paper might be a good replacement for dry things that are guaranteed to stay dry, but a poor replacement for everything else.

Somehow we have forgotten about glass bottles and the milkman model, maybe it's the microplastics finally leeching into our brains.

Milk comes in paper cartons.

Those cartons are not only paper.

Which paper milk cartons don't use plastic/aluminum coatings?

They used to use wax though, right?

That bacteria won't stop at the stuff in the soil... it'll thrive on everything... that is going to be entertaining to watch.

but it'll be just like any other bacteria, just wash it off

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