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hedora

It could work. Just require manufacturers to recycle 1.1lbs of post consumer waste for every 1lb they ship.

Require the recycled waste to be the same composition as the shipped material.

Also, only require this for plastic.

All of a sudden, the vast majority of products would switch to easily recycled plastic or away from plastic entirely.

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The problem is that our main problem by a mile is that we burn hydrocarbons to do things like shipping.

Switch to any material that’s even incrementally heavier/more energy intensive to make and you’re creating more CO2 which almost certainly offsets the environmental and quality of life benefits you generate

The may be more expensive to ship but it's unlikely that they will be more expensive to manufacture in the long term. If they can be used 100x times a cardboard box, the cost of manufacturing cardboard would be much more.

Also, as we move to renewables, the CO2 equation will move further in reusable materials' favor.

Yeah, I’d rather we make more reusable stuff instead. For example, I love the minimal packaging on Commander decks for MTG because the boxes they come in are actually really great for a deck box as well unlike the tiny ones they include with their normal packaging. Even if you don’t use them for that, they’re fairly sturdy and a nice size for organizing stuff.

Shipping produces a tiny fraction of greenhouse emissions.

I don’t think it can work. When I interned at a consumer product manufacturer they used 1/3rd recycled and 2/3rds new plastic. Recycled plastic is too low quality to pass QA. And they could only used recycled bottles.

That’s because it degrades each time you use it. There’s a reason the cheapest stuff comes in black, thick, low quality plastic containers. It’s because it’s just short of being processed into either astroturf or roads.

Some stuff gets re-manufactured 5 or 6 times. The majority gets manufactured once and ends up in landfill.

Glass, metal and standardised sizes is really the only way forward.

I wonder if the QA standards are too high for throwaway goods.

Is a soda bottle a high-precision moulding that needs super-precise tolerances? And if so, are there ways to redesign this to reduce the constraints?

Soda bottles are injection-blowmolded, which requires fairly predictable elongation under heat and pressure. I do know using 100% post consumer plastic would affect elongation, but I don’t know how significant the effect is or how hard it would be to compensate for.

Fwiw they do need fairly tight tolerances otherwise the cap won’t seal and the product will leak or spoil.

Would it help to increase thickness? More weight and material, increased cost, to factor in the reduced trail of pollution every piece of single use plastic has?

This probably leads you to reusable bottles, which are just cleaned and refilled again.

Would be the next logical step. But without strong incentives, either intentional rationing of row materials or the equivalent sharp increase of their cost, I don’t see any indication producers and retailers would adopt it.

The problem is the plastic we see as a uniform material is a chemical cocktail of the polymer, plasticizers, chain extenders, curing agents, lubricators and process aids, stabilizers, colorants and more.

Size tolerance, the way plastic flows through the molding equipment, temperature at which its blown, how much shit leeches into the beverage, how strong the resulting container is, all that factors in.

Plastics are a complex technology and people are optimizing what we can do with them as across every dimension much as possible

That’s fine. The input to the recycling facility has to match the grade that was shipped.

Capitalism can find a use for the low grade plastic, or a way to avoid producing stuff that needs high quality plastic.

The problem is what would they switch to? In Japan, they have disposable bamboo forks and spoons, at least I hope it’s bamboo and not wood.

One company I used to work for went through a saga of finding the best compostable material for disposable cutlery. I think the first attempt was some black plastic thing that melted if you used it to cut an orange. Next was pressed bamboo, which worked but it tasted like wood. Next was a starch based thing that would melt in a cup of tea. I think they finally ended up with some kind of hard brown plastic, but by that time I just had a titanium spork from REI.

So the answer is just bring your own fork and rinse it off when you're done.

When I was a kid we used to get ice cream that came with a flat piece of wood to use as a spoon. It was fine.

That's still the standard around here. (Ireland)

Is it plastic in your parts? Plastic spoons always feel way too flimsy to me.

I don't know, they don't give them to me anymore :(

I wouldn't have guessed that bamboo has a strong taste. I've used other wooden cutlery before and it doesn't really affect the taste of food at all.

I suspect there’s some differentiator going on behind the scenes. I remember those wooden paddle “spoons” having a distinctive wooden flavour, and there was some fast food chain that brought wooden spoons a couple years ago: the first ones were obnoxiously “wood tasting” but the current ones seem to have no flavour at all.

Note: none of these were bamboo, they were all some type of lighter tree wood

Edit: if you’re not sure on the taste we’re talking about, chew on a wooden toothpick until it goes a bit soggy: same flavour.

I think it was more of a dry feeling on the tongue and palate than an actual flavor, kind of like a tongue depressor. At any rate, it was a weird experience for someone who grew up using stainless steel.

Yep, I just have my own utensils at work. Pack my food in a glass container (lid is plastic but reusable).

> So the answer is just bring your own fork and rinse it off when you're done.

I mean sure, but this was an international long haul flight. I can actually imagine a 100 people trying to wash their silverware in airport lavatories on a 767 after dinner service.

They supply metal utensils in business class on every long haul flight. There’s nothing stopping them from doing it for coach beyond cost.

As as an added benefit fewer people would waste energy traveling if it were made more expensive by upgrading all seats to business class.

I assume they don’t in economy due to weight, and the reason they provide it in business isn’t related to environmentalism. So we are just exchanging one negative (disposable cutlery)for more of another (more fuel consumption)?

My guess would be speed of service. If everything is disposable you can just chuck it in garbage sack and be done. But having to sort out each customers items when the cutlery can be wherever would take too long.

Ya, that makes sense. But more work would mean more employees which would also have a (monetary and carbon) cost.

Bamboo is used too, but AFAIK well over half of disposable chopsticks are made from softwood (birch, aspen, etc).

I have heard a Japanese person comment on the large quantity of disposable "wood" stuff in Japan, but I have no idea whether they were including bamboo as "wood".

It is considered wood and used as such.

Bamboo is a bit more environmental than wood (it grows easier and faster). Only 10% of disposable chopsticks in Japan are made of bamboo rather than wood, however. Not sure about forks and knives that were plastic before.

Some bamboos grow a meter a day. It's also a good way to bioremediate nitrogen pollution, they should really do that in places like The Netherlands where excess nitrogen from livestock has become an issue, but I don't know if the weather is compatible with bamboo. Some grasses that can be used for paper-making could also be an option.

Yeah, those are all great benefits. It grows SO fast and with model lamination/bonding it makes a great material.

We switch away from disposable things in general

Sure. Considering the US, though, just imagine the backlash.

To be fair, some states have passed legislation regarding single-use plastics, and it's not as though measures in the EU didn't provoke whinging and pushback ... China, and Japan, among others, are somewhere between the US and EU when it comes to regs at least.

But, these are difficult measures to "sell" - the effects of this kind of legislation are immediate, impacting consumers, companies, etc. ... and "hit pocketbooks", in particular. The benefits are nebulous*, relate to some "ill-defined future", and don't seem to have tangible impacts today (except possibly negative) on ability to make a living / continue living.

Unfortunately, these factors in our current system(s) underlie a rigidity (resistance to changes) that bodes extremely poorly, IMO, for adaptations required to face the absolute sh1tstorm of challenges converging on societies like the water from "Lake Conemaugh" after the "South Fork Dam" break (i.e., when what was formerly protective focused problems avoided in former years, delivering decades worth of suffering in an ~hour-sized package).**

This isn't intended to suggest pessimism or apathy, but, rather, how much energy - voting, getting involved in politics, etc. - will be required from the (generally younger) citizens of many countries to break through the momentum of "legacy systems" to create some of the changes necessary.

The current indications aren't great when orange clown*** is still dominating the news many days...

* To the vast majority of sheltered "modern people" - who don't fish, say, or look at rain droplets with magnification, or have other occasions for encountering the really massive problem that's been developing for decades now

** https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnstown_Flood

*** And a whole circus and set of sideshows built around other grifters

Edit: one other point - my current favored "solution" is simply burning the plastic (most can be IIRC) in cement kilns and the like. Unsurprisingly, I think, to anyone with some understanding of "polymer chemistry", plastic isn't so "inert" when exposed to the harsh physical environment over the course of decades. In some sense, worse, one of the properties that makes plastic so useful, also means that most biological systems don't have enzymatic / other machinery for dealing with / processing plastic. There has been more burning of plastic, in recent years - it's not "great", but, it's actually still about the least harmful option for waste streams that can't be (practically) reused, recycled, etc. ... (yet). There have been some reasonably good articles on plastics recycling in some of the more mainstream sources that discuss burning (esp. for cement production / in "cement kilns")... I'd provide but kinda rushed (sorry - I need to stop writing long-ish comments when time is tighter), but, web searches should likely turn those up easily enough.

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