Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap | Hacker News Reader

Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap

lumafield.com

268 pointsviasfo462 comments

> Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States, but it is becoming more widely accepted

So now the relatively small amount of mass in the cap is just as recyclable as the bottle itself -- neither are actually going to be recycled.

There's nothing to see here but marketing. And a an interesting engineering puzzle solved, sure.

"How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled"

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...

Based on the title, I had originally assumed clicking on this thread that it would be about their glass bottles with the white metal caps.

And those caps were probably fully recyclable.

I expected to at least see photos of the cap and the one it's replacing.

I think this is about newer upside down bottles, the one that has a giant flip open cap with a gasket that don't open until the bottle is squeezed hard enough.

But PP is one of the plastics that CAN be recycled, and IS recycled, often at a much higher rate than in the US.

One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful.

The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material.

The ideal solution is the bottle recycling machines (like Tomra) found in Northern Europe, that only accepts aluminium and plastic cans/bottles, which goes right back to making new cans/bottles. Well, the plastic bottle part is work in progress, but there are bottles made from 100% recycled materials now, and the key to that is to have a clean well-separated stream of recycled materials coming in.

Funny story: I saw a documentary from a local advanced recycling centre, where they mentioned that the bales of plastic that actually went to be reused in new products/bottles smelled really nice. Because a big portion of them was PP shampoo bottles.

Bottle and can recycling machines are common in the United States as well, although only in places with bottle/can deposits.

Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.

The first principle hack here is to put the waste stream separation burden on the consumer.

Here in Japan we are sorting and packaging our trash all at home and putting it out to be collected individually.

There is

- cardboard (to be cut flat and bundled with string)

- unlaminated and clean paper (to be bundled with string or collected in a paper bag)

- PET (clean, no bottle cap, label removed)

- Milk cartons above 1l (cut open, flattened and tied up with string)

- glass

- cans

- aluminum

- other plastics (if clean)

- other metals

Of the top of my head ;)

What’s left over is classified as Burnable or non-Burnable and collected separately.

Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know.

Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.

I spend about an hour sorting trash each week. Given the opportunity cost, I really consider what to buy, order online etc.

> I spend about an hour sorting trash each week

That gets to the clear difference between Japanese culture and US culture.

Americans will sort their trash, but they won't spend that much time sorting their trash.

Japanese culture has an immense amount of civic pride and responsibility that isn't present in the US.

>Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know.

>Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.

Part of it is the fact that neighbors police each other. Culturally we tend to reject when others are intruding in our business. Note the disdain for HOA and busybodies.

Having that culture might be a good thing in respect to recycling but it is also a brake to other societal change as it is a consecutive force.

But one of the beautiful things of living here is to witness (positiv) societal change happening in crazy speed.

It used to be that people smoked everywhere, 10 years ago certain districts started prohibiting smoking in the street and relegated smokers to certain corners, today this corners have been replaced by closed containers with air conditioning and filtration systems.

It sometimes feels magical…

Putting that kind of pressure into cleaning up smoking is pretty cool.

Putting so many hours into recycling... well it depends on how much that actually accomplishes. Because that is a huge amount of labor.

We use translucent plastic bags for trash as well, not that tall bin with lids. So a bag full of sausage bags in the bottles day at the neighborhood collection point sticks out.

And we burn most of it anyways. It's not like Japan got plastics and glass recycling to work, some of us hoped around the turn of the century that with the rapid progress of technologies at the time we soon will and did the legal prepwork. At the end of the day it was a bit of a dedicated self driving lane.

Is that so? Do you have any sources for that? Honestly curious.

There won't be readily available and easily digestible English sources for these topics but... ~20% of total wastes are recycled[0], of which:

  - 86% of plastics are "recycled", of which 56% is "thermally recycled", the rest 25% is only quoted as "chemical recycling and material recycling combined" in most PR materials, which I think is enough indication that it's not going back into bottles.[1][2]  
  - I was wrong about glasses: 70% of glass bottle source materials comes from recycled materials[3], and use of reusable bottles have declined over the years and converging into 50%[4](by numbers of bottles?).  
 - Papers and milk cartons[5] are fine as had always been; I think those were recycled to toilet papers.

... but the bottom line is 76% incinerated, 1% buried[0], rest recycled of which major part is by "thermal" means. So most of it is burned. Personally I think there won't be rapid drastic changes in this front and it's possibly more worthwhile to find green sources of plastics such as grain straws and fruit skins(but I think I did see a lot of such presumably failed attempts at it in the past couple decades)

0: https://www-cycle.nies.go.jp/magazine/kenkyu/202008.html

1: https://www.sustainability-hub.jp/column/learn/about-chemica...

2: https://www.wbsj.org/activity/conservation/law/plastic-pollu...

3: https://www.glass-3r.jp/data/

4: https://kyushu.env.go.jp/content/900177400.jpg

5: https://www.jpa.gr.jp/states/used-paper/

I’m just laughing to myself considering the thought of getting Americans to cut open milk cartons, flatten them, and tie them up with string. It will never ever happen. I don’t know why. They think they are too busy or they are too messy. Why? I don’t know. It’s a very complicated long question and I don’t know the answer. Not all cons, maybe the American economy leads the world because the people here left their home countries because they are gamblers and they aren’t the type to tie milk cartons with a string, as much as I would want them to.

Agreed. In the beginning it’s a bit strange, but by now it’s a cherished Saturday morning ritual. I also police the family if they don’t cut them up nicely.

In America about 2/3 of your neighbors would not put in that sort of recycling effort. About 1/3 of your neighbors believe there are no benefits, only downsides to recycling. Maybe 5% just throw pizza boxes and dirty diapers into the recycling stream ruining the paper materials in that truck load. Maybe 2% of them just drop trash on the ground wherever they stand as long as it's not their own home. For the remaining altruists to recycle, they need to live in an area that collects recycling, doesn't quietly dump it in a landfill or ship it to China.

> Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know.

> Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.

See, that's the key. In my area, we have compost, recycling and trash bins for each home. What you put in it is up to your moral compass. Nobody is checking or seeing what you put in there. If there was some peer pressure around that, things would change rather quickly, I'd imagine. Though I can't see such a system emerging in the states. People like to do their own thing, individually, and not be bothered with it.

Yes. It’s a delicate net of social control. I really wish social scientists would study this more. Can’t be genetic after all.

> Nobody is checking or seeing what you put in there

The trash men check our bins in Seattle (although not very thoroughly). We can be fined for throwing compostable material in the trash (has never happened to me) and your recycling can be rejected for throwing away non-recyclables (has happened to me when someone dumped their trash in my recycling bin.)

This is amazing!

Here in Germany, the only additional breakdown is that "glass" is separated into brown glass, green glass, and white (or clear) glass. Usually thought as beer / wine / other.

In my local jurisdiction (a part of the US) the recycling bin is only allowed to be filled with cardboard and metal cans.

Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash.

Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump.

Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip your trash collection folks well, and they will make all kinds of stuff disappear) and they mentioned to me that because there is no demand for cardboard/metal recycling while they load it into two different trucks, they end up at the exact same dump.

This was confirmed not too much later when I went with my contractor to the dump to get rid of a ton of construction material, where I saw two dump trucks right next to each other, one filled with trash and one with recyclables.

So very little actually gets recycled in the United States. Most of it ends up in giant piles, buried...

> Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump.

It's reusable, sure. Glass milk bottles you return to be washed and refilled are great.

Glass recycling though makes little sense in many areas of the world. You are basically trucking sand around. Just far less efficiently. Glass takes about 40% less energy to melt than sand does, so you need to have a relatively efficient recycling supply chain to make up for that.

I haven't looked into it for over a decade, but the RoEI on that was exceedingly negative for my locality when I did.

Yes, but

https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-wo...

I only skimmed this particular article, but the problem it discusses isn't relevant to glass, in which the particle shape doesn't matter. Am I missing something that makes it relevant?

> Glass takes about 40% less energy to melt than sand does

Energy is not the only metric. We need metrics to roughly quantify ecological destruction due to mining, and account for those in our calculations.

Mining sand for glass is really negligible environmental destruction. Extra energy needed for recycling vs fresh glass has worse environmental impact.

Mining sand has terrible effects on riverine ecosystems. You can't just use the sand at the beach.

For bottle purposes, why can't you use basically any sand?

Assume the bottles don't have to be super clear.

> tip your trash collection folks well, and they will make all kinds of stuff disappear

Mine even stops, gets out, and puts my bins away. Only for my neighbor and me, because we take care of him at the holidays.

> The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material.

Yep, its all our fault.

I would say a significant portion of the burden, perhaps the majority, lies on food companies for using so many different types of packaging. Sorting discarded packaging into N bins is exactly the kind of overhead in day-to-day life that a lot of people simply don’t have time for and causes friction that makes it less likely to be adopted by the people who do.

Regulations that greatly limit the total number of packaging types may be of help here.

>The ideal solution is...

The ideal solution is surely that the waste management industry figures out how to deal efficiently with two streams of waste, one perishable and the other not.

In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously.

However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process.

Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself).

People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,

I mean your analysis isn’t taking into account the high cost of reducing entropy.

Picking damaged fruit from undamaged fruit or mixing a low-entropy fuel with a low-entropy additive to make a high entropy product is cheap.

Sorting through trash is much more expensive because the entropy in a trash stream is massive, and it only gets worse downstream in the chain. You’ve got all sorts of different types of things mixed together, some possibly dangerous.

And we already offload a lot of this sorting to third-world countries and this is not exactly an ethical solution.

If specialization were always better then we’d hire a different specialist to press each key on the keyboard. Specialization is only efficient when the specialist can do a better job, and by enough to outweigh overhead. Rough sorting is extremely basic and requires no “training”, so specialization is less efficient, and serves only to shift work to people whose time is valued less.

> Rough sorting is extremely basic and requires no “training”,

This is obviously false from the start. the entire problem is that it does require training and people don’t perform the task very effectively as a result.

I agree in principle with specialization, but I don’t think it applies well to this case. Before you throw stuff in the bin, it’s already mostly separated. After it’s in the bin, everything is getting crushed and squashed together before it can reach a plant where it can be picked apart and separated.

The only genuine path to sustainability is reduction. There is no sustainable way to have disposable single-use packaging that you throw away when the bottle empties. Glass bottles with a deposit to incentivize bottle return, following which they are washed and refilled with new product (ideally locally, with fresh ketchup arriving to local distribution centers in bulk), is a much more reasonable approach.

There's a cost associated with bottle return as well. Consumers also may feel weird about buying used packaging.

What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.

Consumers _always_ feel weird about reused packaging? That is probably not true. Here in Swede we used to have an awesome system of plastic containers for a about 20 or so glass bottles of soda. These were always recycled (and so much cheaper than PET for some reason!), and it was obvious due to the wear on the glass bottles. Literally nobody cared about it. Google for "drickaback" to see how it looked like.

I did qualify that with "may," not "always."

Do you have a sense for what the collection and reprocessing costs were for the reused glass containers where you are?

I suspect that the warehousing and distribution systems we use in the US complicate collection of empty containers, i.e. there are several warehousing and stocking steps between the manufacturer and the retailer.

If you have a product made locally and distributed in a van, it's no problem to collect the empties. If you supply a distributor who supplies a supermarket chain that warehouses product regionally... It's a lot of steps for the bottle to get back to the manufacturer for reuse.

> Consumers also may feel weird ...

Any change requires doing things that people are unfamiliar with. Most of human history - 99.9..% of it - didn't have single-use disposable packaging, and did heavily reuse 'packaging' (containers).

If I saw more packaging like this in my local stores, even if slightly more expensive, I'd pick it up every time. I think the overall friction is more in the return process, and that's where the space for innovation really lies.

Glass bottles are considerably heavier and bulkier enough that shipping becomes a non-negligible expenditure of energy.

I don't think deposits or a meaningful motivation for return in the US. More of a grift or sin tax than anything else.

I wonder if even 1% of the charge is paid out to consumers

They worked pretty well when I lived in MI (although non-deposit containers would still become litter). Now I live in TN, with no deposit, and cans definitely get recycled less, even in relatively liberal parts of Nashville.

https://www.infographicsarchive.com/which-states-recycling-t... (which in turn cites https://www.ball.com/sustainability/real-circularity/50-stat... ) seems to show deposits correlating with better recycling rates. MI got a poor score overall, but in cans it's on top.

89% of deposit bottles are returned and recycled in Michigan

Bio-degradables are one way. Some companies are spearheading this, but investment doesn't appear very high. GDNP.V in Canada.

I think a multi-pronged approach that includes but is not limited to reduction will be necessary.

Or let people refill their bottles at the shop/mall like from a beer keg. But it probably would be a hassle to deal with for the seller, so it won't probably won't happen.

I get a significant chunk of my food here in Canada from Bulk Barn - where you can go and refill your containers with what you want. Besides grains, dry fruits and spices, I also get peanut and almond butter from there. The peanut butter is made right there with a nut butter machine - so you can be sure there are no additives or ultra-processing.

If these guys also started selling sauces like ketchup or mustard etc, where I could fill my bottle with them, I would absolutely get it from there. I guess most sauces can't be made on site, but its still a net win for the shop to get a bulk keg for them and customers to refill their bottles.

Americans revolt at reusable shopping bags which are leaps better than disposable ones. They just have to be stored and carried to the store. Resuable bags don't need the rotten ketchup cleaned out before the next use. You don't need a hundred different proprietary styles of resuable bags for every brand and type of contents.

Could just have bulk dispensers available at a lower price and people pay by the oz or whatever.

Yup. recyclable != will be recycled. If recyclers don't know that the cap specifically is recycable, it won't be recycled. In fact, if only this brands cup is recycable, the chance of it being recycled is probably 0

worse recyclable != recyclable most of the time .it's all a scam. wake up.

eli5:

The bottle is PET and is easily and commonly recycled, if it actually makes it to the recycling facility. About 30% of PET sold in the US actually gets recycled. It's the clear soda bottle plastic.

The cap was previously 99% PP and 1% Silicone and was not recyclable at all.

The cap is now 100% PP and therefore recyclable in theory, but in practice there are limited facilities that can recycle PP.

Do we honestly with a straight face tell ourselves that consumers are going to remove this cap before recycling and place them in the right bins or there is a recycling facility somewhere with workers removing caps from ketchup bottles? It’s a ludicrous greenwashing idea from the get go.

I love the idea of recycling but I just don’t do it anymore when I realized my city’s single stream recycling was likely just ending up being shipped to Asia with fossil fuels and dumped in the ocean eventually and adding to the Pacific plastic gyre. Burying it in a landfill seems highly more optimal than that.

Works in the EU. I wonder how the cultures can be so different!

Does the EU have reactionaries who deny anything and everything is possible?

https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/environment/plastic-for...

>They discovered that a massive 46 per cent of European separated plastic waste is exported outside the country of origin.

It doesn't matter in Seattle, it's too small for the machines to sort. Only recyclable lids over 3 inches are allowed.

And if you can't even recycle it in Seattle...

but the 30% is the tip of the spear of a scam so fuck them because plastic recycling is a joke and they've put the burden and blame on us for failing when they never had the science or the tools to do it at scale and won't any time soon. that you're so easily sucked into their scam with selective statistics is sad but don't spread your imaginary industry to others. got an STD, keep it to yourself. this is no different.

Are you off your medication? Do you need help?

Can't a metal/aluminum cap be endlessly recycled? Looks more like a cost cutting venture versus a lets save the planet venture.

needs a seal

This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high.

Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.

My bet is that it is just cheaper to make without the silicone and as an added bonus it’s more recyclable.

It’s just cost savings that can be greenwashed.

But is that so bad? Assuming it works about as well, it's likely more resource efficient to make in general, too.

But you don't know that. All the previous equipment obsoloeted and tosssed somewhere. All the previous workers retrained or fired. It could be far worse. Trusting plastic makers to tell you the truth about plastic recycling is like trusting WWE to tell you the truth about sport.

And you're assuming they weren't redesigning it anyways.

Nice! It's cheaper and less bad? Seems like a win/win.

Very tiny wins though, so don't let them squeak out of anything else because they already did "something".

My bet is that jurisdictions with Extended Producer Responsibility laws were going to charge them money to clear up their mess and it became a sensible business decision to make this change to save them money.

No.

This is what the bargaining stage of grief looks like.

We - all of us - want to believe that life can continue on as it has if we just take the right special steps in our kitchen.

In fact, the rituals of modern consumers straining to be “sustainable” is reminiscent of a rain dance - and about as effective.

:) Funny rhetoric, but there's no fact or argument there.

The application of ridicule and dimissal to everything associated with progressivism is a common pattern these days. Effectively, it's reactionary; the reactionaries have done a great job at spreading their messaging and demonizing their perceived enemies, and at the same time making people argue for their own powerlessness.

Demonization, despair (powerlessness), and ridicule are tools for people whose agenda loses on the merits.

Yeah -- it's sort of like those people who complain about the plastic lining on compostable coffee cups making them pointless.

Like if a 100% plastic and a 1% plastic end up in a landfill or elsewhere the 1% coffee cup is just going to two orders of magnitude less damage than the pure plastic one, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good but OP does have a point about the oil lobby push but that is a separate but related issue.

nah, it's all a scam and that they can get you back into the scam so easily with a little bit of marketing is a serious indictment of our education system and the ability of our population to reason effectively.

It isn't anti-progress. It's identifying a lack of it. A step in the right direction would be developments that either definitely lead to more recycling in practice, or a reduction in materials used.

> But this is a small step in the right direction.

You know what, you're right. Here, one second...

Ok, I scooted a half foot in the direction of the peak of Everest.

Man, it's exhausting living a life of adventure like I do. At this point, I wager I must be half Sherpa.

On the topic of the interesting engineering puzzle...

I went to a university job fair in 2014 and Heinz had a booth there. I remember asking the recruiter what kind of positions they were recruiting for, and her only response was "We are looking for top talent. Are you top talent?" I was pretty thrown off by that, so pressed her with "Top talent in what? I know statistics and programming, do you need anyone who can do that?" Her only response was "well, do you think you're top talent?" I think I tried to ask a couple more times what they were actually looking for, but she just kept repeating the top talent line. I think I eventually said something like "I think I'm pretty good" before dropping off my résumé, grabbing a pickle-shaped lapel pin, and walking away.

Totally weird experience, and very different from the usual job fair recruiter. If it wasn't for the lapel pin that I still have, I wouldn't even be sure it was a real memory.

I sometimes wonder if my life would've been different if I had had the self-esteem and confidence to look her right in the eye and say "yes, I am top talent".

I also wonder if Heinz is actually hiring and retaining "top talent". When I look at their ketchup bottle design innovations over the years, I wonder if maybe they really are!

Has anyone here ever interviewed there or worked there? Are you in fact top talent? Were you surrounded by top talent? Is a packaged food company secretly where all the really smart people go for jobs? That article about the Unilever ice cream factory the other day makes me think there's more to it than meets the eye.

The screening technique is straightforward and not surprising: They have to filter a few people from possibly hundreds of resumes. They need a way to narrow it down rapidly, even if imperfectly. They don't want to invest time in your resume if even you don't think you qualify.

There's a false negative problem, as in all interviews: interviewing well is a different skill than engineering bottle caps. Still, confident, talented people who are on their toes and accustomed to pressure may respond convincingly. So will con artists and the self-deluding types like megalomaniacs, so there's also a false positive problem ...

I just thought it was a particularly extreme version, to the point of being silly and funny in hindsight.

Were they looking for chemists? Programmers? Mechanical engineers? Project managers? Janitors?

I'm top talent with a vacuum cleaner (at least according to my mom), but I wasn't thinking along those lines at the job fair.

This is a weird take? It's not Heinz' job to solve every issue in the recycling supply chain. If more of their products can be recycled; more of their products will be recycled. That's still progress.

Anyone with a modicum of product and process exp. knows progress > perfection.

Very nice. I live alone and often I'm baffled by the sheer amount of garbage that my urban lifestyle generates. I was not alive in the 80's but I was told that people used to use more environment-friendly packaging like glass bottles. Sometimes I wonder why this massive change to everything-should-be-packed-in-plastic happened.

Plastic bottles weigh less and can be made thinner. Transportation costs dominate the cost of most consumables

Which sort of highlights local vs national production and shipping.

The local milkman of the 50s, did better with glass collecting and delivering milk. The national enterprise benefits, as you say, from weight reduction.

The enterprise "benefits" because it completely off-loads the environmental impact to the tax payers.

It does with glass, and the cleaning solutions, and the water used during re-use.

I'm sure glass is far more environmentally sound, but to claim that glass production, glass cleaning(and the harsh chemicals and their production cost to the environment), and water for flushing afterwards are not relevant, would be wrong.

So every business off-loads some environmental impact to the tax payer.

My point? While your statement is true, it has nothing to do with how the business decision is made re: cost to the business. The metric used there is "what saves the business money".

And as the cost of workforce increase, or in order to generate even more profit, using plastics enables industrial automation and removal of the delivery workforce.

German Flaschenpost kindly disagrees.

The only way we get this hyper optimized bottle cap is with a dominant global ketchup superpower. They will save enormous amounts of money with this cap, because of the giant volume of sales that they do.

Glass bottles have to be reprocessed later. Forever pollutants offer more benefits for the industry.

Short term benefit and profit margin dominate the calculation of if life environments deserve to continue unpolluted or they deserve to be destroyed in the name of compound interest.

Transport cost is one factor, but even in countries where glass bottles are sold alongside plastic ones they are unpopular to the end user themselves because of their inconvenience.

The common 2kg×6 PET bottles format is too heavy for glass bottles, so you end up paying more for heavier 1.5kgx6 bottles that are going to last you less.

Now check the price per litre and ask your decision makers to introduce a deposit system for glass and plastic bottles.

Ketchup should be in a jar rather than bottle really. You can't get the ketchup out of glass bottles. Or atleast 5yo me couldn't. And that was about the last time I had those.

I never understood why we put condiments in slim/squeeze bottles, I would love to buy a jar of ketchup.

> because of their inconvenience

IMO it's simply habits

no one would buy beer or wine in a plastic bottle, because it feels wrong (and it is if you ask me).

Here in Italy nobody in their right mind buys tomato sauce in plastic bottles, our granmas would come to haunt us at night if we did.

but we buy water in plastic bottles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Trying to make sense of the world is the surest way to go mad.

Boxed wine comes in a plastic container. Beer goes off rather quickly without excellent storage, which is why cheap beer has settled on aluminum cans which preserve well while being cheaper and lighter than glass.

> which is why cheap beer has settled on aluminum cans

Where I come from beers come almost exclusively in glass bottles for the large ones (66cl), aluminum cans are only used for the small ones (33cl) but you can buy them in glass as well.

There is usually no price difference whatsoever

For example

https://www.amazon.it/Peroni-Italiano-Moderatamente-Gradazio...

https://www.amazon.it/Peroni-175-Anniversario-Birra-Cassa-dp...

Many of the cheapest beers are imports, for example Bavaria, that you usually find in aluminum cans in Holland but in glass bottles in Italy.

I can't explain why, but for us some things must be bottled in glass or they aren't "good".

Tomatoes is another example: you can find cans of tomato pulp or peeled tomatoes, but not the sauce, it always comes in glass bottles (it exists of course, but it's a very weird choice to us).

> Transportation costs dominate the cost of most consumables

That was surprising to me and, uh, no, they don't, unless you're considering building materials (i.e. rocks).

It's not easy to find numbers, but for milk in Germany, it appears to be around 10%, about the same as packaging. Milk should be worse than many other products because it's cheap and heavy, on the other hand it's rarely shipped over great distances. [1]

Another report [2] considers transportation costs relative to the value of the goods transported, which isn't exactly the same as "how much of the consumer price is transportation", but surely related, and has 2.7% for foodstuffs (and 55% for rocks).

I mean, I'm sure it varies widely for different kinds of consumables, but overall, transporting stuff is cheap. I think even in terms of CO2, which is certainly underrepresented in cost currently, production dominates transport for most goods in a grocery store, apart from produce shipped by air.

[1] https://www.agrarheute.com/tier/rind/78-cent-fuer-trinkmilch...

[2] https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/G/MKS-Wissenschaft... (Tabelle 8)

In the 80s in the UK we had milk delivered every morning in glass bottles by a huge fleet of electric vehicles. The empty bottles were left out, collected by the milkman, sterilised and reused.

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

The noise of the electric milk float was oddly haunting. Partly because it was generally still dark outside.

There are still companies doing this, check out Milk and More

I just had a look at this (I'd been meaning to for a while, I miss the milkman leaving milk and other bits from my childhood). The milk is literally 4x the price I would pay in the supermarket. It's a lovely idea, but in this economic climate, most people are more price-conscious than that...

Yes it is unfortunately... we used to use them as it supports a local farmer with a proper price for their milk and the delivery guy gets paid a fair amount but when prices shot up we went back to supermarket milk.

I'm all for making sure farmers get paid properly instead of ripped off by the supermarkets but when it comes down to it had to count the pennies at home first

There's often a few middle men with better websites but if you have a more direct option see if you can. The milk we get has a big creamy layer on the top, and tbh it's quite handy just getting a regular delivery of something we have commonly. We often add in some eggs.

It's more than the supermarket prices but those are insanely low for the product. I understand many feel the pinch more but if you can, skipping the supermarket can mean more to the actual producers.

I looked into this a while ago, but as I live in a block of flats with multiple locked entry doors needing the intercom etc it’s sadly not an option.

When my parents were kids in Asia they used to get all their club soda delivered in cartons in glass bottles that had a little glass ball in it to hold in the carbonation. You then pushed the glass ball down to open it up. They would then sterilize and reuse those and the glass ball would self seal once carbonated again.

What a really nice, fully reusable bottle with no waste at all.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codd-neck_bottle?wprov=sfti1

the seal is waste depending what it is made of. ramune uses some kind of plasticy stuff, for example

Ah interesting. I though it was glass on glass.

Historically it was pure glass but modern retro recreations usually adds that plastic cap, pusher rod and a plastic wrapper for easier manufacturing as well as for corporate liabilities. Those aren't technically necessary.

I have not seen one that is pure glass. The oldest I have seen has a gasket. Every source I see indicates a rubber gasket was used in the first versions.

Just collected the milk from the doorstep. Still electric! Milkman wears a headband light. 3 times a week because we have fridges now.

In 70s after an all night party I nearly got run over by one. The only moving vehicle in sight!

Was brilliant during lockdown because you could order food stuffs the night before 3 times a week as part of regular delivery.

Same here in South Africa, albeit just with a normal truck. They also delivered Orange and/or Guava Juice depending on what tokens you'd put out.

In NZ - ditto growing up had the milk delivery service. Now it was a long distance memory until we moved to a smaller town/city. To our surprise one of the independent milk companies had a delivery service and up until a few months ago there was a glass bottle based delivery service of proper milk (the kind with thick fat/cream on the top..). Absolutely magic.

Alas cost of living took hold and they stopped the service, so sadly off to the store for the milk now. They didn't even put up an option of 'we can't afford to keep this going, so how much would you pay extra for it'

I bet they would have been surprised what people would illogically pay to have their milk and eggs delivered...

I remember growing up when milk delivery in glass bottles was replaced by milk delivery in plastic bags (in cardboard boxes). All that ultimately went away when milk was just another thing you bought at the grocery store. I imagine the supply chain got fast and good enough that milk wouldn't spoil before it could be consumed, going that route, so the extra cost of home delivery became difficult to justify.

And fizzy pop! I dare say every town had one. In Sunderland we had Sykes. They’d come round once a week; you left your old bottles out front and they’d be swapped out for new.

I always loved dandelion & burdock.

https://www.sunderlandecho.com/heritage-and-retro/retro/sars...

Villa pop FTW!

https://sunderlandglobalmedia.org/made-in-sunderland-the-his...

Dom't forget Ireland (according to Father Ted) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSstu2tzrng

I can attest. We had a milkman (daily), and a vegetable man, an egg man and a bread man who came around every week. Only the milkman had an electric vehicle.

Do you know what percentage of after tax income people paid fir this? I'm curious how other compares to today's services.

Paid for the service? I grew up in Scotland, milk and meat came from the farms every morning (90s), you'd put your order in the old milk bottle with the money and they'd leave whatever your order was. I seem to recall it was 50p for most type of milk and 75p for creams. (Except the BSE years.. shudder ugh the BSE years.)

[Edit] Do you think that the Aphex Twin song Milkman makes reference to this lack of milk delivery during this period?

Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. . . . Spread to humans is believed to result in variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD). As of 2018, a total of 231 cases of vCJD had been reported globally.

BSE is thought to be due to an infection by a misfolded protein, known as a prion. Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal (MBM) that contained either the remains of cattle who spontaneously developed the disease or scrapie-infected sheep products. The outbreak increased throughout the United Kingdom due to the practice of feeding meat-and-bone meal to young calves of dairy cows.

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

I just looked into it a bit. Timeline makes a lot of sense, Milkman was released in 1996, right during the height of the precautions (some farm kids couldn't come to school, needed to get sprayed down with some chemicals when we went into the high school, every shop/library/etc had a bucket of alcohol you walked through. However, it seems James was living in London during that period, and I don't think the restrictions in the cities were are harsh as the country. Interesting theory tho, I like it. :)

I can remember milk delivery in the 1970s in where I grew up in Scotland moving from glass bottles to rather ghastly plastic sachets.

I remember how birds learned that the silver-top milk had a thick lay of cream so if you didn't fetch it in pronto, you'd find all your bottles would have the tops pecked through.

The answer is money ofc

I was born in the 50's. Growing up, the worst thing about the garbage generated at home was that it had to go into leftover paper bags from the grocery store because plastic garbage bags didn't exist. And those bags went into metal garbage cans outside the house, because plastic garbage cans didn't exist, and those garbage cans were always dented, rusty, and with lids that quickly stopped sealing properly. What a mess.

They still sell the metal cans today but they are at least galvanized.

> What a mess.

Nothing compared to https://www.google.com/search?q=landfill+plastic&tbm=isch

Plastic trash is supposed to be burned or recycled

We don't live in a world where what's supposed to happen is what actually happens.

Recycling of plastic is only even possible for a really low percentage of the total produced, it's not a fungible thing since there are seven different grades and each one is incompatible with the other in terms of recycling. Some of those grades are not recyclable at all.

Currently we recycle 9% of plastics, sorting through the cheaper grades is non-trivial, we can't recycle our way out of this mess.

Burning plastic will just create more pollution, capturing outgassing from burning is also non-trivial.

We should instead use less plastic, the 3 Rs start with Reduce, then Re-use and only after that Recycle.

Thank you for remembering the other 2 Rs! I just had a conversation with someone last week where I brought up the two prior to Recycle, and they had completely forgotten.

Even the ubiquitous 3 Rs logo with arrows has now become shorthand for just recycle.

> Plastic trash is supposed to be burned

Ah, nothing to worry about then

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/incineration-burning-plas...

https://factor.niehs.nih.gov/2022/8/science-highlights/burni...

Plastic recycling is marketing myth to make you feel better about plastic trash.

Your lifestyle does not generate garbage. Companies that sell non recyclables and non compostsbles generate garbage. Why hasnt cocacola replaced their plastics with something compostable? There are new inventions for replacing plastics out each day, I wonder where those inventions end up.

Recyclable is a scam perpetuated by the plastic industry. You should be using reusable glass which is expensive to replace but cheap to refill.

Where I live only restaurants can buy glass bottle soda. It is quite sad, since I like those. They are way nicer to drink from.

Where I live, everyone can buy bottled water in glass bottles. I think there are now glass bottles with Coca Cola, too, though I'm not certain (I don't drink soda).

The catch is they're obscenely expensive.

There's free water in the tap

> a scam perpetuated by the plastic industry

What does this actually mean and what are you basing it on? Without any sources or references it reads a bit like FUD.

There have been a few articles about that recently. However, you can notice it for yourself if you notice how many products claim to be "recyclable" but how few are recycled.

If recycling were widespread, you'd expect the vast majority of products to be made with recycled plastic.

The ineffectives of recycling is one thing, but the person above posited that the paid industry were up to no good as well.

I guess it might refer to the fact that 80% of the plastic produced ends up in landfills and it's not recycled, for different reasons, one of them is that recycling plastic is very expensive.

Also there are several different types of plastic that do not melt together, or do not melt at all, and can't be easily recycled or reused. It also degrades and becomes more toxic on every cycle and, unlike glass, health safety of recycled plastic cannot be guaranteed so to package food the only safe option is to make new plastic.

Is the 80% a number for the US? In northern Europe I assume that a small percentage is recycled and the rest is incinerated for electricity and heat -- landfill usage has restrictions in the EU.

Some countries like Sweden and Finland use incineration to such extent that they have a lack of domestic waste and have to import it [0].

[0] https://yle.fi/a/74-20076606

according to Our World in data

While we might think that much of the world's plastic waste is recycled, only 9% is. Half of the world's plastic still goes straight to landfill. Another fifth is mismanaged – meaning it is not recycled, incinerated, or kept in sealed landfills – putting it at risk of being leaked into rivers, lakes, and the ocean.

I misworded my first sentence, I meant that 80% either goes to the landfill or it's not recycled, but apparently it's more like 70%.

That's fine but calling it a scam by the plastic industry suggests intention, bad inventing, from the plastic industry. I'm asking if that's the case.

Here's an article: https://newrepublic.com/article/179267/recycling-doesnt-work...

The gist: similar to Big Tobacco, etc., internally with the plastics industry, there seems to have been a much greater degree of pessimism about the long-term economic viability of plastics recycling, but it was sold to the public anyway via ad campaigns and lobbying to forestall regulation or legislation limiting plastics as public sentiment was shifting towards a greater sense of environmental awareness.

It takes mere moments to google "how much plastic is actually recycled"

You would have to be naive to believe that executives in the petroleum and plastic industries are unaware of how little plastic is actually recycled rather than complicit.

I'm aware of how much plastic is recycled. I'm not convinced that the plastic industry conspired to pull the wool over the publics eyes about it.

Where I grew up the reason stated when they replaced glass with plastic was that the weight of the glass alone caused more pollution from transport than the plastic bottles that replaced them

It's not just about emissions, though. Single-use plastics literally just accumulate in landfills until the end of time, while glass is highly recyclable (and one of the few economically viable ones).

Arguably putting plastic back in landfills is just returning oil back to earth, but it’s not a pretty site.

I've never lived anywhere that landfills garbage so I don't know about that.

Ah, you throw yours right into the river then.

Incineration which generates power and/or district heating

Homes that don't have electric or district heating are often heated with oil anyway, might as well have some utility to that oil before it's burned?

Glass is infinitely recyclable, but is seldom actually-recycled since making new glass is often the least expensive route.

I view recycling schemes for plastics as a way to make burning the stuff more convenient. Which is not necessarily a bad thing.

After fossil fuels are done, the reduced carbon in the waste stream (including plastics, but also cellulosic materials) will become more valuable as feedstock for various chemical processes. Garbage refining will be a thing. It will be an aggressive chemical endeavor, more akin to petroleum refining than to recycling.

There's a book I read as a kid that takes place in the sort of near future after we've run out of oil.

The only people that have plastic in this future society are extremely wealthy and poor people "mine" old landfills looking for plastic to sell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ear,_the_Eye_and_the_Arm

That's not plausible, IMO. Plastic may become somewhat more expensive, but it doesn't require fossil fuels. Overall secular increase in societal wealth should overcome any transient increase in price.

In Germany we have reusable thick plastic bottles, and a deposit system that's attractive enough for people to bother bringing them back (or for homeless people to collect them). Not perfect but much better than single use plastic

I don't think "army of homeless people" deserves a place in our comprehensive solution to social ills.

That ship has sailed (or sunk) a long long time ago

Glass bottles require local cleaning and filling infrastructure to make refilling economical. We don't have that infrastructure anymore.

Funnily/depressingly enough, not even supposedly compostable stuff is actually compostable [0]

[0] https://www.research-in-germany.org/idw-news/en_US/2023/10/2...

Indeed, I think/hope most people have now moved to paper bags for their bio waste recycling.

I particularly "admire" compostable cardboard hot food containers, which are coated with PFA forever chemicals to keep the food oils off the cardboard.

If coca cola's your example, then I'm going to affirm that yes, it is the lifestyle that generates garbage. People don't _need_ soda. But they want it at a low price that's cheaper than Pepsi. You know what that means? Coke's going to be shipping in the cheapest container possible to keep the price edge - which is plastic.

If soda drinkers cared about plastic consumption, they would switch to anything that has glass containers and spend more - or just cut the habit due to the waste generated. But that's not happening.

Sure, there can be political will to force Coke to switch to something else - bypassing the need for the customer to do anything - but that would result in higher prices which makes people mad. Good luck asking a politician to do something that will upset their constituents

It's not Coke vs Pepsi and pricing competition (Coke costs more than it's competitors), it's using a useless manufacturered product and shipping water in a can instead of drinking from the tap and adding a scoop of sugar and spice of your want.

It is still a pricing competition. Sure Coke costs more, but they're also riding on their brand recognition to bump up their perceived value. No amount of brand loyalty would save them if they had to undergo the price jump that comes with a massive logistics change of switching off of plastic without a proven alternative.

It might cost a buck more per 6pack for Coke right now - but people aren't going to get it if it costs 2-3x more than Pepsi.

Not sure if that's true. Soda has tripled in the last few years mostly just due to corp greed and realizing people are very stuck (addicted?) to their preferred flavors. Pepsi and Coke are competitors but not substitutes.

https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/coca-cola-s...

https://www.vox.com/money/23979340/diet-coke-price-coca-cola...

Tea drinker here, but doesn't a lot of soda globally come in aluminum cans, which are actually recyclable?

Yep. Though I'm hoping my point can be extrapolated outside of the soda example as well. Coke/Soda's just something I'm picking on

check to see what aluminum cans and even the cans of canned food are lined with... It doesnt look so good to me. Without that sealant, metal leeches into the product.

Coke used to come in glass bottles that were returned to the store and reused. Consumers didn't change that, the Coca-Cola company changed that.

Coca-Cola wouldn't be putting anything in plastic bottles if people stopped drinking Coca-Cola.

I go through a 64 gallon trash bin a week. By my back of the envelope calculation thats about 1.3 chevy tahoes worth of trash a year, and that's just me one American out of 400 million so all told we are dealing with maybe half a billion chevy tahoes of trash a year we need to do something with or put someplace if most Americans consume like I do.

> I go through a 64 gallon trash bin a week.

That seems absurdly large to me.

64 gallons is 250 litres. We're four and we use about one 30 litres (8 gallons) bag for "rest" trash per week (everything not recyclable, including diapers which take a lot of space, so hopefully soon we can at least halve that trash volume) one 30 litres bag for recyclable plastic/metal every two weeks and maybe one 30 litres bag for compostable stuff (mostly just vegetable and fruit peels from cooking) every two weeks or so.

That's about 60 litres or 15 gallons per week for a normal-sized family. I can see some of my neighbours having somewhat larger bags, some with smaller bags, but I feel like we are mostly average for our area (in Belgium).

In fact, a quick search tells me that Belgians have produced on average 683 kg of trash per year in 2022, which comes to 13 kg per week per person and seems rather consistent with my numbers.

Check your municipal waste centre. Mine, in Limburg (NL), recycles diapers.

Interesting, I wonder how they process them and what they become after recycling. Here in Antwerp diapers are explicitly supposed to be put in the rest[0] though.

[0]https://www.antwerpen.be/info/restafval

If you search for "luier recycling" you can find out how it's done.

https://nos.nl/artikel/2250937-fabriek-voor-recyclen-poeplui... very interesting, I hope it comes here in the future even though it will be too late for me :)

Also family of four: we fill a 120l garbage bin per week, to the brim, and a 120l compost bin every two weeks (this one maybe is not full, but it stinks by that time) and a ton of "recyclables" (cardboard, paper, metals, plastics).

Do you put garden waste (bushes, grass) in the compost bin? Otherwise it feels an order of magnitude off.

> Also family of four: we fill a 120l garbage bin per week

What goes into this since you already recycle bio, cardboard, plastics and metal? My "generic trash" is a 25 liter bag that I empty about once a month or so. Since most things go to the specific recycling containers, the generic waste is dominantly just napkins and tissues that shouldn't go to bio.

I don't have kids so no diapers or anything like that, but 120l weekly sounds still a lot after recycling.

We have a very small compost bin in the kitchen that is frequently (about once a day) emptied into a garbage can with lid in the garage, which is then infrequently dumped into a compost pile. The particular combination of materials going into the garage compost can (like coffee grounds, citrus peels) gives it a spicy rather than putrid odor when the lid is opened.

We put our compost bag in the bottom compartment of the fridge. It doesn't smell or leak there and for especially smelly things, we first wrap them in a smaller compostable bag before putting that in the city-provided bag.

I tired to do a compost last year but I live near a stream and tons of small flying insects infested the compost bin. It would never get hot enough to compost, ants moved in after the flies left in the spring. My climate is hot during the summer but even compost started wouldn’t help.

I have lots of kitchen waste, grass waste, and plenty of brown organic matter I can add that’s around my yard. The bugs love it.

I also live near a stream. I don't notice lots of insects in the pile, but I'd only really worry about flies on meat, and I don't put meat scraps in the pile.

How large is your property? I can put the actual pile some distance away on a > 1 acre lot.

In the past, I composted cat litter (paper variety, not clay) in a compost pile, and that did cause serious odor problems. Don't do that.

> t would never get hot enough to compost

Sounds like too much water content and/or not enough air for aerobic bacteria to get to work. Tossing the pile with a pitchfork somewhat frequently should help it.

Unfortunately, compositing when you live with wildlife is a challenge. I don't bother because if the raccoons didn't get into it, the bears would, and both are annoyingly messy when they do. I even had a bear do structure damage to my garage when she broke in to get at the garbage one year.

I have a special compost barrel that was given to me. It has rollers and small holes. Raccoons and other animals are not able to get into it. Bears are not much of a concern.

I’ll try again with more dry leaves. Spring is close to starting in my area.

Cardboard strips, egg cartons, and (untreated) sawdust or animal bedding style wood shavings can make for some good dry material as well if your compost is in fact too wet. Good rule is to layer it while you are building the pile, then turn twice a week once it is going / ready to go.

Your local hardware store may also have some compost kickstarter liquids as well, which might be helpful if you want to get it going before too many flies or ants come out to infest the pile.

(Fellow country man here!) That still sounds like a lot to be honest. According to the yearly stats we receive from our trash collector: in 2021 our family of 4 produced 27,50kg of non-recyclables. That's not per month or per person but for all of us for the whole year. Granted, no diapers anymore here; that takes quite some space (and weight, which is more important since we pay per kg).

We saw a significant drop after they started collecting plastics separately. We have a 120 litre bin that we put to the curb every two months or so. I don't quite understand what people are throwing out all the time that you can fill a large bin every week...

We nominally go through a garbage bin a week... but if you compact it down it isn't anywhere near full. It's just effectively impossible to compact as an end user without special appliances.

I think a lot of people make the mistake of looking at a quantity of trash and measuring it by apparent visual volume, but that's not a very useful measure. Mass is a lot closer to a useful number. Many things that visually appear enormous are in fact not that big a deal, many things that visually seem small actually represent a lot of resources.

Yeah I am using the visual volume measure here. Its probably 2-4 13 gallon kitchen bags of trash in there usually but that is enough to fill up the 64 gallon bin up to near the lid, sometimes push it up a little. Of course all the data in the literature out there is using weight as their metric, and I have no idea how much weight I am tossing, just a loosely packed volume of trash.

Its a 64 gallon bin but I'm not packing it in either, trash is bagged. I guess I should have figured that based on the reaction in the comments. I'm probably tossing in 2-4 13 gallon tall kitchen bags of trash into there a week and even that much is enough to have it fill up to the top of the lid. I can squeeze in two weeks of trash in there if I forget to put it out for pickup one week but no further.

That’s obscene. My family does maybe 1.5 small bags of non compostable/recyclable each week - Brabantia X size

And my household of two produces 20l of regular non-recyclable trash every month, 40l of plastic trash every month, maybe a couple of kilos of organic waste per week. But we buy a lot of organic and glass where possible.

I'm not compressing my trash or anything. I don't even push down the kitchen trash because the sooner I take it out to the main bin the less likely it starts to reek for whatever reason. Then of course I don't compress the 64 gallon roller bin because it gets collected weekly, but by visual measure I am filling it up to the lid with 2-4 of these 13 gallon bags a week. They are kind of a terrible shape to slot in efficiently into this sort of bin the city has provided. One bag falls down vertically where it narrows substantially then two more fall on top of that, and the bin is pretty much filled to the lid at that point without some force and tetris.

Chiming in to also state how absurd this sounds to me.

I live in a household with 3 adults generating trash, we don't even fill up a 190L bin every 2 weeks in between pickups, usually when I roll the bin to the street it will be about 1/3 to 2/3 filled. We have a compost bin about the same size which also gets about 1/3 to 2/3 filled every 2 weeks.

Apart from that our recycling bins (about 60L for the paper/plastic ones, 20L for glass and metal) gets filled in about 4-6 weeks which I then take to the recycling station.

In summary as 3 adults we generate in the absolute top end about 117 gallons of non-compostable trash a month (those are very rare instances), so about 30 gallons a week for 3 adults even when adding up all the recycling we do.

That would be 1.2 cubic miles a year uncompressed. Quite a lot but also not that much.

Cubic miles? Strange measurement unit...

We're in a thread that opened with chevy tahoes... I'd say it's an improvement, even if there's some way to go still :)

I wanted to go with cubic acres ...

https://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/2015/02/scrooge-math.h...

Hogsheads are more intuitive.

That's an insane amount of generated trash. My husband and I combined might fill our 13 gallon kitchen trash can once every four days. Is your lifestyle primarily eating out/prepackaged foods?

I'm not filling the thing up to the brim or tamping anything down, probably 3 13 gallon kitchen bags fit in it before the lid is pushed open.

In my country growing up, there were always random health issues popping up because the reused packaging or storage without packaging was not always hygienic.

In the beginning of 90s, when plastic packaging became popular, it was a huge change as we did not have to worry about many health issues ( food poisoning etc).

Glass is in no way environmentally friendly. It takes a huge amount of energy to produce glass, and a singel glass bottle requires a lot of it. PET bottle recycling is the closest we got to a functional plastic recycling system.

No micro plastics though which is quite nice.

People used to (and still kind of do) worry about glass chipping... ironically we can see that and deal with it. Unlike micro-plastics. Human nature right?

Glass is also very heavy, which means that transporting glass-packaged goods requires much more energy than transporting e.g. plastic bottles.

Though transporting stuff large distances requires a lot of energy either way.

The difference is that glass bottles were consigned and re-used. Also energy use does not tell the whole story and one should consider the impact of plastic that is not recycled or worse, left adrift in the sea or in our rivers.

You make a good point and it can be interesting to know how many use of a bottle are required until it becomes more energy-efficient compared to disposable plastic, etc.

The shift to the all plastic packaging paradigm was made when companies found out that they could simply let the consumers deal with the packaging once the product was consumed instead of having to get it back from their hands and process it. Hence the modern plastic dystopia.

The glass bottles of Heinz are available right next to the plastic ones. So in the case of ketchup at least I think people choose the plastic ones.

not where I live - Heinz and the major local brand here (Idun, I think?) tend to sell only in plastic bottles.

I can sometimes find fancy ketchup in glass bottles, but considering that I only buy ketchup once or twice a year, I just can't remember. The glass bottle available isn't the Mutti ketchup that I bought years ago, so I'm just buying Heinz.

At many grocery stores I go to, there are no glass bottles of ketchup available. The few that do have them, the glass bottles are significantly smaller than the plastic while also being more expensive. They also don't have the reduced sugar or no HFCS choices in glass bottles. None of the generic brands sell in glass bottles around me.

Even then, in the end I'd still end up buying it in plastic. The plastic squeeze bottles are just way more convenient. I'd probably be fine buying it in bulk and fill my own squeeze bottles to reduce plastic consumption, but buying smaller and radically more expensive glass bottles isn't really a winning choice in my book.

> I wonder why this massive change to everything-should-be-packed-in-plastic happened

I don't get why people keep pretending plastic being widely used today is due to some conspiracy instead of it's just better at its main function, even without factoring in cost.

Compared to glass container, plastic ones are much lighter, harder to break, flexible, malleable, .. the list goes on.

In the 1980s, the use of glass containers was more out of necessity than preference. People didn't opt for heavy glass containers to be environmentally friendly; they simply lacked alternatives.

The appeal of single-use (plastic) containers lies in their convenience. Although they are undoubtedly more wasteful, their ease of use cannot be denied. People favor them for this convenience, with their wasteful nature being an unfortunate byproduct. If we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth, progress in environmentalism will never be done.

> I don't get why people keep pretending plastic being widely used today is due to some conspiracy instead of it's just better at its main function, even without factoring in cost.

I don't know how you read parents comment and concluded that they're talking about some conspiracy. They seem to genuinely ask a question that I'm sure they're not the only one thinking about.

> In 80's people use more glass containers because they didn't have choices, not because they love to carry heavy glass containers around to help the environment.

Again, don't think they said that people used glass containers back then to help the environment, just that for whatever reason they used those containers, it was less harmful to the environment. Not because that was the reason, that was just a side-effect of glass being the only choice. Then they ask the community what the reasons could be for everything being wrapped in plastic now.

As it reads right now, your comment doesn't seem to assume good faith of parent comment, but instead you're arguing against some position that isn't even talked about.

> some position that isn't even talked about.

There are already lots of sibling comments saying the heavy use of plastic is "forced on people" by companies, so yes it is talked about. And that's exactly what OP implied.

I'm not even saying this point is entirely false, just want to emphasize that people actually prefer convenient things regardless if it's forced on them or not.

> There are already lots of sibling comments saying the heavy use of plastic is "forced on people" by companies, so yes it is talked about. And that's exactly what OP implied.

Reply to those comments instead then? Instead of assuming bad faith like "OP implied". I cannot be the only one who doesn't think parent implied anything at all and instead just asked a question why the change happened from glass to plastic.

I already replied to this guy. I honestly think his concept of convenience is overrated. I know a lot of people who would rather drink from glass than plastic. Surprisingly this convenience has never reached the beer industry and you can always have beer available in glass. I can never find milk in glass bottles though and I can't see why, I'm literally forced to use tetrapak due to the lack of options.

I think that in a lot of cases plastic is a poor container and that's why I asked the question, for me it's not obvious the convenience of the plastic nor why plastic is the only available packaging material for almost everything.

>Reply to those comments instead then?

Not every reply to a comment you make is a personal attack, and it would behoove you to recognize that. Sometimes people just want to enhance a discussion with relevant and topical information, and may even just be curious about your thoughts on related topics.

> Compared to glass container, plastic ones are much lighter, harder to break, flexible, malleable, .. the list goes on.

Yes but they also have the huge waste issue and society isn't doing enough to deal with it. The drawbacks are also huge, the cost just isn't an issue for the companies putting the plastic out into the world. It's more cost effective because we allow it to be, because we subsidise the oil industry, because we don't tax plastic waste highly enough etc etc.

> they also have the huge waste issue

That goes without saying.

The point is plastic is not only cheaper but also better (in term of functionality) and that's a problem we need solving to actually get ordinary people on the wagon. Reflecting their environment impact into cost with tax etc. is cool, but that's not enough.

Eating out and food delivery being 2x or even sometimes 10x more expensive than making food yourself never stop (some) people to do that anyway because of its convenience factor.

It also goes without saying that's its materially preferable in many cases. But for a business preferable generally comes down to profitable. The point I was driving at is that by withdrawing subsidies from these industries we can nudge the trade off point to a place that more often selects for environmental options.

> The appeal of single-use (plastic) containers lies in their convenience. Although they are undoubtedly more wasteful, their ease of use cannot be denied. People favor them for this convenience, with their wasteful nature being an unfortunate byproduct. If we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth, progress in environmentalism will never be done.

Yes, they are much more convenient in multiple ways (ease of transportation due to weight, flexible and malleable to take any shape or form, etc.) but there's no pricing of the externalities, if plastics would cost as much needed to take care of their disposal in environmentally friendly ways this convenience would have a much higher cost, naturally diminishing its uses.

While the side-effects of using plastics are not priced into the material it won't ever be solved.

I think you can speak for yourself.

I prefer glass bottles to plastic ones and I always buy soda in glass bottles if they are available(and this means almost always since they are available in the supermarket close to my home).

I don't actually expect consumer preference is or ever has been a primary factor. It's cheaper and more reliable to ship plastic bottles. Manufacturers will use them for those reasons and then we'll buy them because it's what is available. Or it's cheaper. Or we have a preference. But at that point, it hardly matters.

The carbon impact of that vs cans is enormous.

Plastic is essentially a byproduct of fuel production. My understand is that a lot of companies will pay others to take that plastic off their hands. Not only is it cheaper to use plastic than glass, it's positively subsidised.

Where "fuel" there includes natural gas.

If ethane (the feedstock for ethylene production) were not useful for plastics, it would just be left in the natural gas and burned with the methane.

A realtor friend found a lucrative side business in plastic recycling during the Great Recession. She still makes around $100k a year off of it.

I wish I knew how it worked but her and her business partner don’t talk about it much. Probably for good reason. Pretty sure they take plastic off people hands and sell it to someone who uses it, paid to take it away and then paid again by a buyer.

Probably exporting it to someone that uses it as fuel, but not labelled/indicated for such use.

It’s basically crude oil when it comes to energy/kg.

Lots of shipping containers going back empty to lots of places.

Plastic is a superior packaging material. It delivers superb cleanlines and posibility to use packaging gas(Nitrogen) in automated lines. Cleanliness is essential for shelf life, and many products have it now unheard compared to 80s paper packaging - only due to package. Amount of food spoilage prevented by plastic packaging is enormous, it is very sad to see this no plastic hysteria. Like seing dark ages returning.

I agree with you. Plastic is one of those weird issues where it gets much more prominence than it deserves. Plastic reduces food waste and items damaged in shipping. If you don't litter and have a good landfill system, there is nothing to worry about.

Convenience. In the 80s, people were starting to get over worked and so conveniences like plastic packaging, microwave meals, lunchables, plastic bottles, etc started popping up. Easy, just grab one. When you’re done, just throw it away! Except, then there was a garbage problem - so they campaigned for recycling! Then reality of recycling hit and so they say - separate and clean it first. Meanwhile people like you are wondering how we got to this madness. Convenience. And some really good marketing. Only about 9% of plastic has been recycled.

The Kodak Fling had to be renamed Funsaver because people were taking out the film and throwing away the cameras. That interfered with their plan to refill the used cameras.

I remember growing up in India and plastic was introduced to "save the trees". It took us decades for us to fully grasp the environmental devastation it caused.

Growing up in the United States, I remember plastic being introduced for the same reason. For example, there was a huge push to get people to accept plastic shopping bags rather than paper ones. There were news stories talking about how it not only saved trees, but also used less fuel because the paper bags are bulky, heavy, and expensive to ship from the manufacturer.

Its cheaper and easier to ensure sanitary products.

We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be recycled is better or worse than a plastic container.

Glass is recycled infinitely more easily and more widely. Pasabahce sells upcycled and recycled products here, and mark them clearly. Also, we have glass collection bins which has different compartments for clear and colored glass. These are periodically emptied.

Even if they are not recycled, a glass jar is used for more than five years in an household, only by replacing the caps in the process. If we don't need the jars, we give them away to people who need them, adding more usable glass to sneakernet of jars.

Glass is finicky in some forms, and expensive to make it durable during production and transport, but rarely, if ever, ends up in a trash bin.

It's well-known the total environmental impact is much less for plastic than glass. Just the weight alone should allow you to understand this [0] [1] [2].

Glass is not recyclable widely. It is a contaminant in single-stream recycling because broken glass is a hazard for sorting, and even if you are able to recycle it, the transport costs are extremely high [3].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic... [1] https://ecochain.com/case-studies/case-study-packaging-plast... [2] https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/ [3] https://www.wastedive.com/news/when-its-cheaper-to-trash-gla...

I like how you completely ignored the environmental impact of microplastics and PFAS.

I don't think anyone is completely ignoring it. I think it is an extermely complicated equation. Factoring in PFAS and microplastics gets even more difficult. I don't have research in front of me but it would be interesting to look at regions like Japan that have very tight loops on plastics. How many microplastics get out in the wild. The other problem there is the microplastics from tires, huge issue since those could get in the drinking water eventually. Its a difficult problem.

That works in some parts of the world but I still don't believe the total environmental cost is as easy to calculate even in your scenario. The total cradle-to-grave environmental cost of a product has many variables and its not always as clear. Those variables can also have different weightings depending on the user (maybe microplastics is a greater concern that total environmental cost).

In the past, even when accounting for recycling of the glass, plastic bottles for example had a lower environmental impact that glass.

edit: And I enjoy using glass myself, especially for items I am storing longer term but I also try to think about the total environmental cost of the item. I know in the US people often do things that feel good, like buying reusable shopping bags instead of plastic bags given my the store. The problem is the number of times that reusable bags needs to be used to be better for the environment is often many more times than they often get used.

What's the definition of environmental impact you're working with?

I think microplastic pollution is horrible. It's arguably worth putting extra carbon in the atmosphere to avoid plastic pollution. I'm not actually sure.

Up until most recent history the equation has been something about net energy cost or co2 cost. There is indeed a new variable which is microplastics. Something that needs to be researched more. For all we know that ketchup bottle has little to no impact on your health but it’s plastics further upstream in processing or the farm itself.

There's a practical concern there which is really relevant with little ones running around: glass breaks easily. A plastic bottle or cup or whatever vessel can fall from a shelf or counter to the floor and be unharmed and not harm any people. Glass containers, not so much. It's only viable for sensible humans with good coordination, and a lot of fully-grown ones don't even have that!

Should plastic containers shedding millions of nano particles be considered sanitary? The only reason it’s used is that the externalities aren’t properly taxed (or not banned IMO). Maybe we should not use things that are “easier” when they’re contributing to a massive amount of pollution. I mean there was an article posted here about finding microplastics in a human fetus. Yet we still continue to use it.

Biologically it is. You could argue on long term effects of microplastics but it's clearly less of a risk than food poisoning.

We're seriously going to say that a substance that was very recently introduced to human society is as risky as food poisoning? How often do the commoners have to suffer through businesses ill-attempt to save money while poisoning us?

Leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, asbestos, pet food laced with poisons and filler, baby food laced with heavy metals, opioids, cigarettes, campaigns about seat belts being unsafe, round up, fracking that poisons the ground water, etc.

Excuse me if I doubt the corporations, that continue to poison the the world around us unless literally forced by nation states not to, are being honest when they safe "oh it's not harmful" and not the reality of the situation. Wanting to save a buck, repercussions be damned.

Why are you saying "clearly" as if it's 100% guaranteed? We have no idea the repercussions of introducing a new substance that has literally infiltrated all organic life on earth. This is completely new territory and acting like it's all "solved science" is extremely disingenuous.

People die from food poisoning. No one has died from microplastics, so far as we can tell.

you don't actually know that. if, imagine, the increase in dementia or cancer or any major illness is increased at all by microplastics, and we will find this out before long, and it will indict Big Plastic and Big Oil, we will learn it's killed far more of us that you whoring for Big Oil and Big Plastic suggests.

These subthreads from my comments are absolutely bonkers, people are willing to give companies that routinely lie to us again and again sometimes lying for literal generations to us!

and people STILL give them the benefit of the doubt.

People willing to allow others to poison us so they can earn money.

Do bottles shed microplastics?

Manufacturer > store > pantry > garbage can > dump.

Isn’t the majority of this buried in the ground in dumps that are sealed off from groundwater?

I suspect our clothes, cars/tires, houses, and other things that live outside contribute more to microplastics than food containers.

Yes, they shed plastics:

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/01/12/plastic-bottles-n...

The question should be reversed, is there anything made of plastic that doesn't shed particles? It seems likely not, they all tend to shed.

Do air molecules in gaseous form colliding with the plastic contribute to micro-plastic production? Oxygen is a notoriously active element....

Fair point, but I don’t store very much of my food in a tire and I rarely, if ever put food in a shirt before I microwave it.

In the other hand, I probably have about a pound of Tupperware in my body. I guess my point is that you’re right about micro plastics in the environment, but I’m more concerned about the ones in me.

(Strenuously agree that both are bad).

I don’t know the exact sources and that’s what we should be studying. For all we know it’s tires to roadways to rain runoff that makes it into ground water or bodies of water that we eventually treat for drinking.

Fair point. Needs more study before dummies like me make assumptions.

(Still not buying any Tupperware, though).

Me too! I use glass at home.

Use the same rule for tupperware that you apply to shirts! I store and buy food in plastic containers often, but I always move it onto a ceramic dish before I microwave it.

Ditto here but only recently. Currently working all the plastic I can put of my food prep workflow. Insidious situation we find ourselves in.

That’s a fair point reusable containers are a great candidate for replacement with glass. You are right overall though we definitely seem to be polluting our environment with plastics that will never go away.

Unfortunately your kind of argument is what often comes up in ecological debates. I am not denying the impact of microplastics but raising the point that it is a complicated equation. Banning plastics is just a silly comment. What about tires, medical devices, plastic jugs to get water to people with no access to clean water. It is an easy argument to make if you might be in a place of privilege and you can hand wave most of those problems away. My posistion is that yes microplastics pose a possible issue on a go forward basis, I don't know the totality and I believe that humans are still better off than we were before plastics.

I'm not talking about just banning plastics (it should be banned involving anything food related IMO) but actually taxing these materials as the hazardous materials they surely are.

Why would you ever expect a bottling plant to move away from plastic when there is no incentive? Why would anyone move to better materials or continue researching when there are cheaper alternatives that aren't rightfully taxed against their externalities?

Why are we as a society, one which has banned lead from gasoline (resulting in lower crime rates across the world) or banning CFCs to repair the ozone layer, feel so helpless trying to hold these corporations accountable for not polluting our world around us today?

Is it really that impossible?

It's possible but there is no voting solution to achieve it

I don't think I generally agree with a plastic tax but lets imagine there was one. I am honestly not even sure how you would set the price, my whole point is the externalities are hard to measure. I also suspect the cost of the implementation will be on the shoulders of the consumer. We can hand wave it away and say we can create more rules to prevent it but at the end of the day that is most likely what will happen.

There's no reason the tax needs to directly reflect the environmental impact. We figure out an amount that is enough to change corporate behavior without bankrupting them, maybe with some kind of sliding scale to put more responsibility on larger businesses who would otherwise benefit from regulatory capture, throw in some exceptions for the aforementioned medical devices, etc. "Pricing the externalities in" is a nice political justification but in reality this kind of thing happens because we've already decided that plastics are significantly worse than the alternative and we want to incentivize change.

Regarding consumers shouldering the cost - well, yeah, regulation drives prices up; even my liberal self agrees that that's broadly true. Those same consumers will be shouldering the cost of an environment permeated by toxic microplastics, which we are increasingly being driven to believe will be a greater impact than that of more expensive consumer goods.

and when they jack up prices, we use the tax revenue to subsidize the poor so only the well off pay that assholery, we can do this for carbon in all forms.

For someone so skeptical, why buy the 'cost increases will be passed on to the consumer' BS? Clearly that's not true.

First, price increases depend on elasticity. I'm guessing that ketchup demand is pretty elastic; it's not diabetes medication or higher education.

Also, we can assume Heinz, being sophisticated, has already priced it for the highest possible marginal return; there's not necessarily room for increasing the price without reducing return (by driving down sales).

Yeah that will never happen in many countries.

Banning micro-plastic sources from consumer purposes isn't so silly if it contributes to dementia and other neurological issues long term.

They're finding they stuff embedded in utero lining; your argument strikes me as the same old rebuttal to the things we can't political agree to study. You can't deny there is a lot of business momentum to keep plastics in production, no? And yet the more we learn the more checkmarks in the minus column for petro-chemicals accumulate.

Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it.

We most definitely need to fully study the impacts of plastics on the human body. We don’t know the full extent of what it’s doing and it’s important we figure it out.

It’s a complicated equation that we do not fully understand. It’s easy to say just ban it but there is are a lot of other negative consequences that will come out of that decision. That’s my point, none of us know the exact outcome either way so it’s silly and all too easy to just make proclamations like yours and then sprinkle in some dementia with it. I am certain you can pull out a study that has a link between the two but I suspect we still don’t know the true origins of dementia and we do not know the full impacts of plastics on human health.

I bet you don’t even know the source of microplastics fully. I sure don’t. For all I know it is from car tires that makes it into the water ways and we eventually drink it or consume meat that has drunk it.

We don’t know the equation enough to know what concerns we should weight heavier on a global/population scale.

> Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it.

Politics is the struggle to gain, retain, and use power. The use of plastics creates a huge amount of wealth and power for many, by definition anything that could affect this is political.

Sorry but that drags this conversation in such a wild direction. You have gone so off track that it no longer makes sense.

But we should keep producing more year on year until it's studied properly?

Studied by whom? Petrochemical companies have studies on their stuff back for decades. They'd never endanger the public to improve their bottom line. Plastics are fine, dontchaknow?

I think this has taken too much of an emotional turn instead of logical. You will not be able to get plastics banned until there is conclusive evidence that a significant portion of the population is dead from it. Ignoring corporations, I do not believe you can get any large enough portion of population to ban it or even limit it in any meaningful amount.

I personally am excited for the coming years and hopefully us having a better idea how we can use plastic more efficiently. In the near term we should be able to get a better idea of major contributors to microplastics and maybe be able to reduce those.

Most microplastics in your environment are from tires and textiles. Blow molded PE is way down the list on what I'm worried about.

> Should plastic containers shedding millions of nano particles be considered sanitary?

It's not really on the scale of sanitariness. It's a pollutant and a problem. You can even say it's not worth the tradeoff. But no, plastics are not unsanitary because they can produce microsplastics.

I've read the main contributor to microplastics is car tires. Do you have an idea if these types of consumer containers are a significant source?

Agree the incentives are screwed up, and that could help.

You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container.

And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.

> You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container.

yeah, that would be a great use of everyone's time. line up at the olive oil station, line up at the beer station, line up at the flour station, line up at the coffee station, line up at the ketchup station, ....

and then on top of that, add up the time and expense of everyone getting a different price based on how much their unique container holds.

Better go on polluting up the world for generations to come. Wouldn't want to make anyone wait a few moments for essential goods.

Bulk sections have existed in grocery stores for a very long time, and work perfectly fine lol.

They’re common, but A) generally make up a tiny portion of floor space (at least in the U.S., apart from rare specialty stores) and B) I would hazard a guess that they are less sanitary and even less fresh on average than comparable packaged foods.

You clearly have no idea about what you are talking about. I've been buying bulk everything I can for a long time and I don't see any downside to it.

It's smarter in every single point: - I buy what I need instead of what was decided by the packager. - I don't buy a package to throw it away and buy a new one next time. What a waste of money on top of the environmental impact. - It's way more efficient for shopping. When things are organised in bulk it's visually much easier to spot in comparison with packaged stuff with random designs in aisles. - Never experience "queues at stations" so this is a non problem in my 2 decades experiences of shopping in bulk in various cities/countries

Your time is worth zero, and other folks time is worth non-zero. That's one way to get your conclusion. The other way, is you're just wrong.

Many (most?) nicer grocery stores in the US already do bulk packaging for coffee, to no discernible detrimental effect.

Compared to narrow aisles and decision paralysis from 60 different plastic bottles with the same ingredients but different scents/dyes, I think any inefficiencies in bulk shopping are probably pretty small.

This might be a local thing for you. The only store around me that has bulk coffee is the very bougie food co-op. Even nice stores like whole foods, wegmans, trader joes don't have that.

Possibly. I know for a fact that Whole Foods in NYC has bulk coffee, as well as bulk rice and other grains. It's also the norm in local mid-range chains (Westside Market, Fairway) and greenmarket-style stores.

Wegman's definitely has bulk food sections. The memorable part is the candy but there are other foods. I'm not sure if they have bulk coffee? Their name brand coffee bags have the roast date on them (vs. "best by" BS dates) so I zeroed in on that and didn't look back.

Also Stop'n'Shop, a very much NOT a bougie food store, has bulk coffee with a grinder. At least in some locations.

Wegmans has always had the bulk candy, nuts, etc. as far back as a I can remember, I've never seen coffee though.

I'd love if there were just dispensers for the soaps and juices and what not I buy. Just tap my credit card, press a button, and fill a big jug. I agree I probably wouldn't want everything sold as such but loads of staples where I am probably going to go through a lot of it all the time or are already going to have a short shelf life, sure.

And yeah, I actually do go with the "line up at the beer station and get bulk beer", a number of breweries around me have walk-up growler filling stations. It is pretty nice getting fresh beer straight from the source. A few groceries near me fill growlers as well.

Sorry, I just got Black Mirror flashbacks to the Merits episode...

You know what’s actually a waste of my time? Cleaning out my fridge of all the food waste generated because I couldn’t actually buy just 1 carrot, I have to buy 3 pounds wrapped in plastic for some reason.

I know this will blow your mind, but where I do my shopping (France) this exists in many places and there are no queues.

It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.

Perhaps you prefer the “old” way. Perhaps it is faster. But if we can not make tiny changes like that, how will we explain ourselves in 30 years time to our grandchildren?

“Yea I know sweety we messed up your planet. But I’ll be dead in 5 years and in the mean time it was really convenient. Sucks to be you”

Do you know why medicines have a seal on them in the USA?

https://www.packaging-gateway.com/comment/tylenol-murders-fo...

There are psychos all over America. Wanton violence and anti-social behaviour are cultural norm. You can get shot because someone else looked at another person. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Kansas_City_parade_shoo...

We can't have nice things because we don't enforce any standard of conduct. Progressives are more concerned about git branch names than ensuring children actually learn something in school.

>Progressives are more concerned about git branch names than ensuring children actually learn something in school.

Source on this?

> It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.

1 minute for each product, vs like 1 second for each product. I think it's a similar efficiency loss as containerized vs break bulk shipping.

While I’m a big fan of being able to buy quantities in bulk, it’s worth remembering we did just go through a 3 year period that should illuminate why “every Tom, Dick and Harry brings their likely barely washed if not fully contaminated packaging from home and uses the community ladle to scoop out of the community bin into their bag” might not be the best default. At least with factory -> sanitized individual wrappings you can spend a lot of effort stopping contamination at specific points in the supply chain. Bulk -> consumer reused packaging is much much harder to prevent contamination.

Are you aware that fruits and vegetables are sold individually without packaging?

Because they (usually) have their own natural skin which protects the flesh. You can wash it too!

Standardised packaging with a deposit. Automatic dispensation rather than manual.

Ale-8-One[0] sold their feature soda/pop/coke/soft drink in some areas in returnable bottles at least as late as 2010. Word was that if their bottle washing and sanitizing machine died, they'd have to stop that. It turns out nobody's making parts for those machines any more.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ale-8-One

I know they were still accepting returns back in 2020 (I was looking forwards buying some on a road trip and returning it as we came back through KY), but their new website redesign doesn't seem to mention it anymore.

EDIT: The bottles for sale on the website are specifically "non-returnable", not sure if that implies no more returns, or only store-purchased bottles are returnable.

I remember that as kid, custard in glass bottles. I'd let them fall out of my hands from the fridge and my parents would get angry.

There are concerns that breathing in and ingesting microplastics from clothing, car tires, and packaging is causing some of the health epidemics we see in the last decades. Like rising rates of obesity, cancer, mental disorders (autism, ADHD, gender dysphoria) and decreasing sperm count and quality. But no definitive evidence exists yet. If this turns out to be true, there is a case against plastic even if it is economically superior to the alternatives.

There are "concerns without definitive evidence" that everything causes everything. If this turns out to be true, there is a case against everything.

With ketchup (and mustard, mayo, etc.), squeezable bottles are way more convenient. Gone are the days of wanting to get X amount of ketchup out of the bottle but ending up with either 0X or 10X.

Aside from the ketchup dispensing utility, you also escape tedious discussions about the best way to get ketchup out of a glass bottle. Do you tap the side? Shake the bottle? Angle it? Smack the bottom? Just sit there patiently? Warm it up? Stick a knife in it? You can be pretty sure that if you use any of these methods, someone is going to tell you about one of the others.

> best way to get ketchup out of a glass bottle.

i store the ketchup bottle upside down and when i open it, it is immediately ready to pour and is mostly controllable

I've mostly switched to pressure cooker, bulk foods (25 lb bags of rice, beans, porridge), and the local produce stand (BYOB). Both my food and packaging waste is now minimal.

Most of my plastic waste is from prescriptions. OMG so wasteful. Wax paper bags would be just fine.

YMMV.

Remember that these days “waxed” paper is actually PFAS.

Right you are. I did forget.

Last time I bought parchment paper, I settled on Costco/Kirkland brand, for that reason. I dimly recall it has a silicon-based coating for non-stick feature. Quick look at the box has no info.

I anticipate we'll learn that all this fancy new silicon is toxic as well.

FML.

I still think paper is preferable to plastic. IIRC, Amazon Rx is using paper now.

Glass containers are heavy. Switching to plastic containers was lighter and reduced shipping expenses.

> Sometimes I wonder why this massive change to everything-should-be-packed-in-plastic happened

Easy - it's way cheaper.

In fairness, for ketchup specifically, glass bottles are an incredible nuisance.

That used to be part of the excitement.

It was always a surprise how ketchupy your food would be! Maybe a little, maybe completely!

you got scammed by Big Oil. that's what happened.

It's cheaper to manufacture and ship = higher executive bonuses and investor dividends.

> Heinz has taken a major step forward for sustainable packaging with the introduction of ....

> The new cap's uniform composition of polypropylene (PP) simplifies recycling and ...

> Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States.

Until someone develops some sort of multi-spectral imaging that can reliably sort plastic based on it's composition there's little hope of recycling plastic. And then you still need different enzymes that can break down different compositions.

It's sad, but realistically almost all plastic one disposes of needs to go in the trash can rather than recycling.

You can't even rely on dedicated collection - https://abcnews.go.com/US/put-dozens-trackers-plastic-bags-r...

I wonder how much plastic you'd need to pile up to start pressing out oil again at the bottom of the pile?

You mean ... by gravity? :-D

Conventional multispectral and hyperspectral can't keep up (and integrate well) into existing sorting lines. They induce a slow-down in conveyer belt speeds or you have to install splitters and buy multiple $100K cameras.

(we're working to solve this problem though in the classic VC backed way - DM for more information!)

Ah, another factorio fan I see.

Got me there...

How does Germany recycle 60% of its plastic waste?

There is obviously hope, just not enough incentive because it costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container-deposit_legislation

I can't even begin to imagine the discourse (and "experts" brought on-air at Fox News) that would take place if such legislation was proposed in the US.

A few states in the US as per your link, do have this system

Differences:

* Single-use plastic bottle have a 25 cent deposit in Germany. This is 5x the 5cents in California.

* Germany has enacted this legislation federally.

* The legislation also requires that any retailer that sells plastic bottles (and glass bottles) must also facilitate the return of these bottles.

I lived in California for a couple of years. I never saw a recycling machine at any Safeway, Walgreens or even Whole Foods while I was there. The closest thing to a "recycling machine" is the army of homeless people pushing trollies filled with bottles to take to a recycling center. I don't think that really counts.

Michigan does have the sorting machines at supermarkets, just like in Germany. Michigan also has a 10¢ deposit.

We do. As Fox News likes to point out, it's hard to find a place that'll actually let you recycle for the full refund.

In Europe the store that sold the deposit bottles has to also accept them back.

That used to be true here, but they added so many exceptions that the law isn't really enforced

In Michigan, I never ran into difficulty outside of needing to take it to a store that sells it (Trader Joe's is the biggest pain). Supposedly there were a lot of places putting arbitrary hours on when they accept them now, but I've never heard anyone not get the "full refund" unless a machine malfunctions.

Step one: virtually eliminate uneccesary plastic so there's far less waste and ideally most is of the type that can be recycled.

I've not been in Germany for a long while, but I was impressed when last there by a near complete absence of excess packaging, nails in big boxes sold by weight rather than pre sorted into tiny plastic packets, etc.

No idea if they kept that up.

Addendum: Apparently so, and they have 5 types of household bins for seperating waste: https://greenendeavour.com.au/is-germanys-waste-management-s...

Yea, that's basic culture here. The bins are also sized according, and using the recycle bins is cheaper. There is still unsorted/compound waste, but plastics + metals go into the yellow/recycle bin automatically. Same for paper. Municipal waste centers are basically recycling sorters, where you have to declare waste type. You can offload recyclables for free and other waste costs you an arm and a leg, so there most certainly is incentive to follow.

Not that I'd take the recycling percentage at face value, there are certainly challenges. But the overall system is fairly solid.

Culture and regulation, and.. enforcement. In the Netherlands we have separate garbabe bins for various waste streams for many years. Culturally accepted by now. But there's not much enforcement of people who make a mess in these bins. In Switzerland when hiring a vacation appartment I noticed how people are frantically trying to separate correctly, and you receive strict instructions to do so too. There's enforcement and fines if you are too lax.

German waste processing is however known for simply dumping things in Eastern Europe. In terms of actual processing I think only the Netherlands breaches 50%. I don't like the 9 trash streams though.

Do you have a source for that? I'd be interested to read more, because there are similar statistics that only count the percentage collected, not the percentage actually recycled. e.g. there's quite a bit of "mixed" recycling in the UK, which firms count as "being recycled", but when they get to the recycling plant if there's "too much" contamination (e.g. food, non-recyclable plastic etc.) then it's sent to the incinerator.

https://www.sustainableplastics.com/news/germanys-plastic-re...

https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/waste-recyc...

I am unaware of the percentage of rejected contaminated plastics you mentioned, but Germans being Germans I assume it is not scandalous

Thanks, will take a look.

The number is greenwashing because it's including "thermal Recycling" aka burning.

https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/ressourcen-abfall/verwe...

How is that even allowed to be called recycling? As in, is it genuinely a term defined legally and, if so, who allowed this to happen? Because burning is most certainly not recycling.

Recycled as fuel. Its not that bad energy-wise. We have power plants running off that stuff.

Some people consider it a better use of oil than burning it directly.

Goverment can make it's own rules I guess...

Copenhagen recycles 70% of collected plastic, with the rest incinerated (used for heating homes, I think).

Almost all plastic packaging is collected, including wrappers and trays.

https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-plas... (in Danish)

The last time I saw such numbers for impractical-to-recycle stuff like thins and foamed plastics, it ended up that the companies were just lying

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-30/redcycle-soft-plastic...

It's just not possible in any way to recycle 70%! Politician number fudging like this completely destroys the reputation of these initiatives.

I'm still not convinced after looking at the actual numbers, that "recycling", putting stuff into 6 different bins etc, makes any difference at all in the grand scheme og things. Instead it's a big show hiding the fact that the problem is with over-consumption and non degradable materials being legal in the first place. Bottle and glass recycling for money seems to be semi working though but then we'll need QR codes on each item, better but still not eliminating the transport and seperation issues, and the fact that a lot of recycling is actually dumping stuff on poor people far away, and that industry is polluting way more than end consumers.

As some people have pointed out it's actually the opposite, a smokescreen invented by the industry in the 90's to shift responsibility to the consumer so you do "some magic complex performance" at home and think now it's ok while everything just continues as is defacto, ie. worse than doing nothing. Instead we should ban or tax non degradable materials, and stick to the few working areas while regulating industry and materials even though it'l be rough until we're forced to create better materials.

I have 3 bins (rubbish; garden waste; paper/soft plastic/glass), and take thin plastic and tetrapaks to the supermarket to be recycled.

Takes me months to fill the rubbish bin

https://cphsolutionslab.dk/media/pages/cc/about/behandling-o...

The fourth page "PLAST" (plastic) has a pie chart showing the composition of collected plastic waste. The red 23% is "residue for incineration".

The other text includes "The Municipality of Copenhagen has demanded that at least 75% must set aside for recycling and a maximum of 25% as residual fraction for incineration."

Does "recyling" include paying Chinese "recyclers" to take it? Because if so then I don't think it's actually being recycled.

What, pray tell, are they doing with this low-grade recycled plastic? Putting park benches out into the environment that will degrade faster, distributing microplastics everywhere?

Or are they investing a ton of time and energy to recycle the plastic into higher use (than park benches), which likely has significant input energy costs, which in turn is probably harming the environment?

You can't get anything for free, and recycling plastics least of all. The most environmentally friendly solution I'm aware of today is to simply relocate it all into one contained location and incinerating it as cleanly as possible or burying it in a landfill with protective sheeting. We're not even close to running out of landfill acreage on this planet.

All your snarky points are answered in the linked site.

Hardly? It says the plastic is shuffled off to other recyclers in the EEA, but gives no indication how much of the material those recyclers actually recycle. Maybe it doesn't end up in a Chinese landfill, but substitute "China" with "Latvia" or "Estonia" and the point still stands. Show me the miraculous Estonian recycling industry where 90% of consumer plastics comes from recycled material and I'll take my words back.

What are they actually doing with the recycled plastic? Making it into pellets and flakes. They call out that you could use these to make shampoo bottles, but dare not actually claim that such a thing is happening. My understanding of recycled plastic is that it is inherently lower grade than new plastic. If recycled plastic is that much cheaper but still as useable, then surely manufacturers are jumping at the bit to use it everywhere?

Finally, there is no mention of the energy cost or environmental impact of the recycling.

I would argue burning it (and maybe capture the generated CO2) is the only recycling making any sense with the plastic garbage we have. And then stop using it for everything and start classifying/labeling the plastics where we neee them, so they can be sorted automatically later so then you can recycle them.

Here in germany some sort of plastic recycling actually works, because there is a deposit fee on all plastic bottles - you bring them back to the supermarket to get it back - and then there is one source of the same plastic, that does get used for new products.

>Until someone develops some sort of multi-spectral imaging that can reliably sort plastic based on it's composition

Funny you phrase it like that, because that's exactly what the STEINERT UniSort does. Plastic waste is finely shredded, dumped onto a conveyor belt, imaged, then passed over air puff sorters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3QHa9oQshw

Is it worth it? Of course not. Far cheaper and easier just to burn it. But for EU nations that are really dedicated to recycling, it can be done.

A lots of recycled plastic (I mean what people put in the plastic recycling bin) in the EU ends up being burned. They are sorted, cleaned up, then packaged into burnable units, because it’s the most cost effective way to reuse it

I see 42% “energy recovery” from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20181212STO... from 2018.

I found this from January 2024: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-new-b...

> In Europe, about 40 % of post-consumer plastic waste is incinerated with energy recovery, and the rest is either landfilled or recycled. About half of the plastic waste collected and recycled is treated in the European Union; the other half is exported, mainly to China.

The recycling also doesn't achieve anything environmentally

The recycling reduces the amount of oil that goes into new plastic, which eventually will be incinerated and contribute to the climate crisis.

the demand for non-virgin plastic is practically zero, while the cost is higher

there are no economic incentives to use recycled plastic, and regulation mandating its use is minimal to non-existing. so most plastic that could be recycled isn't, and not because it isn't available/collected/sorted.

It seems though like many of the throwaway plastic containers I can find here like shampoo, water bottles, containers for sauces - NOT the Heinz ketchup bottle in my fridge though (which does say the body is recyclable but the cap is not) mention some percent of recycled plastic contents, from 90% to 20% in the items around me.

So maybe it's more expensive but there seems to be some kind of incentive for these companies, even if it's just marketing.

Food containers are tricky. Huel ready-to-drink seems to be 49%, because they need the inner coating to be virgin plastic.

Yes, processes that are bad for the environment is cheaper. I find that a failing of the capitalist system, not the recycling process. If externalities were properly priced, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

I fully expect that what's really happening here is that it's slightly cheaper to manufacture the caps as a single mold, rather than needing to combine two parts.

I’m willing to bet this has nothing to do with recyclability and everything to do with less expensive manufacturing.

It can be both.

I don't think so. There's a huge push for recycling in EU. Every recyclable item either says to be put in the correct recycle bin, or has information about reusing with concentrated refills or by repurposing.

Maybe the same push is not present in the US, but creating a new cap for European market makes sense. Also using the better cap across the whole world to save costs makes sense again.

I hope it is less expensive.

Cost savings often benefit sustainability. You probably heard the "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order" thing. The "reduce" part also reduces costs.

Here it looks like there is one less part (the silicone ring), which I believe makes it cheaper to build, cuts on supplies (no more need for silicone), and improves recyclability, which is good for the image and maybe some regulations. I don't know how good it is at delivering ketchup, but if it is as good or better, then we all win. Granted, it is still disposable plastic, but I don't see why that design would be unsuitable for a reusable bottle.

Exactly the kind of R&D I like.

> I hope it is less expensive.

So do the shareholders. Less cost == more profit.

You say this as if it's a bad thing? I don't see the need to be pesemistic about this.

The issue is in a capitalist society that saving of cost is not going towards a more efficient production method, or even being passed on to the consumer, its going in the pockets of the board and shareholders.

Effectively this news story can be reduced to 'Plastic lid swapped for new plastic lid which makes company more money.'

Its not cynical, its the truth.

'The public' does accrue benefits from a cheaper and less environmentally toxic production method though.

Wealth creation isn't zero sum. If it was we'd still be quibbling over sticks in caves. In a competitive environment, innovations can and does lead to lower-cost products for consumers, especially from new entrants in the market.

No, I state the fact.

My grandad worked for Heinz in the big 57 factory. When I was a student he used to get me loads of cans of food, all without labels, you had to just know the little codes stamped on top to know if it was sponge pudding or chicken soup. I don't think they stamp the codes in the metal any more.

It does mean this cap is practically impossible to clean, and provides a lot of surface area and crevices for mould to grow or plasticizers to leak from the packaging into the product.

All engineering is a tradeoff, and I would be interested to see how those factors were considered when doing the redesign.

> and provides a lot of surface area and crevices for mould to grow

Isn't the whole reason Heinz ketchup is self stable is because it's too high in acidity for mold to even grow

It's probably from added stabilizers and not acidity. Molds do well with acidic food, as well as sugary and salty

Heinz ketchup ingredients: TOMATO CONCENTRATE FROM RED RIPE TOMATOES, DISTILLED VINEGAR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, CORN SYRUP, SALT, SPICE, ONION POWDER, NATURAL FLAVORING.

-- https://www.heinz.com/products/00013000006408-tomato-ketchup

I checked for my country (Slovakia in Europe) just out of curiosity:

- tomatoes (148g for 100g of ketchup)

- distilled vinegar

- sugar

- salt

- spice and herb extract

- spices

https://www.grizly.sk/heinz-paradajkovy-kecup-jemny-570-g

It does look like there's no preservatives added to heinz. It appears the lack of mold growth in ketchup comes down to a combination of lower pH from the vinegar, and low water content by cooking it out of the tomatoes. According to some food safety experts, it's possible for mold to grow on ketchup, less so for pathogens. Keeping it cold will definitely extend the time it would take mold to root.

The story is that Heinz specifically developed their recipe to avoid the use of benzoate over 100 years ago. Ketchup at the time was a completely different condiment: much thinner and not nearly as sweet, salty and vinegary, and also absolutely loaded with preservatives.

Molds and bacteria do not do well with acidic foods — that’s why you can leave an opened jar of salsa in the fridge for, like, a year. It’s also why it’s safe to can tomato sauce in a hot water bath, versus other less acidic food which need to be pressure canned.

Wrong! Both bacteria and fungi can thrive in a variety of pH. Acidophiles are a group specialized to highly acidic environments, and there are alkaliphiles as well. Fungi and bacteria also have methods to both change the pH of their environment, and adapt to it. Google it, there's plenty of research papers.

Both bacteria and fungi prefer more acidic than alkaline environments, with a "happy range" for each. Tomatoes are only weakly acidic, at 4.3 to 4.9. But molds commonly grow at pH 3.5 to 8. Aspergillus niger and Penicillium funiculosum can grow at pH 2 and below.

Extremely low pH is certainly useful at inhibiting some forms of life, but the world contains many different forms of life, and some are a lot more adaptive than others. Research shows that the best way to preserve food is a combination of chemical preservatives and low pH. Which is why the commercial food industry uses preservatives...

Are the mold that grow at acidic pHs common in the household?

If mold is growing on the cap, it's probably growing on the inside too. Throw it out.

All this work and plastic recycling still is a horrible and toxic practice.

Here is an innovation Heinz can work on... go back to glass bottles.

https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/05/plastics-rec...

and metal caps...

Everyone hates those.

Who is everyone? I prefer a glass jar with a spoon.

Even if the majority of people hate it, so what. They hate turning off lights and monitoring electricity usage and driving under the speed limit and wiping their ass.

Maybe ceramics could provide a third choice.

Traditional clay (earthen) "bhar" cups are pretty awesome. Sanitary (kiln fired), no glazes, durable, water proof, single use, non-toxic, etc.

When you're done sipping your chai, just smash your bhar cup on the ground. It simply becomes earth again.

Surely we can come up with some spiffy new modern variations.

All it'd take is investment and policy.

For the eeyores:

Startups are now developing and deploying out carbon-free cement and carbon-free steel.

All it took was investment, cheap energy, and policy.

Aside: Since the early '90s, Howard Schultz (Starbucks) has promised us an eco-friendly coffee cup. Any day now, right? I'm so tired of waiting.

Couldn't be worse than the old caps with the silicone-it's impossible to get a small squirt from those things. You've either got nothing, or you're swimming in ketchup.

I always popped out the silicone valve for that very reason. You would have to squeeze until the pressure overcame the resistance of the silicone valve then the ketchup would squirt out at high velocity. It was nearly impossible to get exactly the amount you wanted. With the valve removed it only takes a gentle squeeze.

Who gives a damn, Heinz? Just another corporation.

I want our governments to force a single type of robust, completely reusable and recyclable packaging for each major type of product.

At a supermarket, if buying meat, it comes in a sturdy reusable plastic container that we pay a deposit on. The next time you shop you bring them back for them to be cleaned/reused and you get your deposit back (or use the credit for cleaned containers for the current shopping trip).

Every bottle of any kind of sauce should be the exact same. Every packaging for every product should be standardised and exactly the same. Glass door or open refrigerators should be banned, open hot areas should be banned.

This'll never happen, but I'm so disappointed with every single shopping trip I make, walking past open hot areas with rotisserie chickens RIGHT NEXT TO open fucking fridges, all filled with products in their own unique multi-plastic-cardboard printed colour bomb packaging. It's just so despicable that we don't care about this for some reason?

Environmentalism has become a sad joke because we're gonna kill this planet, no doubt about it. :/

In the third paragraph:

> The new cap appears as a uniform color in Voyager’s range map... compare it to the old cap, whose silicone valve is denser than the surrounding plastic.

Author: you must be completely blind. Both photos show a wide gradient of colors including blue, green, yellow, and deep orange!

Why does orange in the left photo mean "it is silicone" but orange on the right means "it is PP"?

I agree with what you're saying, but the general statement by the author seems to hold up. They don't appear to be the exact same shade of orange, as the silicone tip is a bright, deep orange, and the cap on the right only has little mixtures of orange in the overall shape.

In the right image the dark orange is the bottle which is a separate (uniform) piece.

I believe both photos must show the cap while screwed onto the bottle. In the photo of the new cap, the orange stuff is the bottle.

The picture shows the screw threads of the bottle opening meeting the threads of the cap. And you can see some asymmetry where the part on the left side of the bottle opening is vertically lower than the part on the right side, which is consistent with the thread being a spiral shape.

We had sustainable caps. They were made from metal. The bottle was made from glass. Both are infinitely recyclable.

Instead, lets destroy the world :)

Is recycling really worthwhile and is burning such waste and using it to generate energy not more efficient?

Last time I looked this up, I found out that recycling being worth is is highly dependent on where you live and what laws and regulations apply there. Don't quote me on this, do your own research, but I think some of the "recycled" plastic just ends up being shipped overseas and then ends up in the ocean.

There is no sustainable or recyclable. If you want to reduce pollution and trash, you should reduce consumption first. Heinz and grocery store could move to allowing users to re-fill bottles, but instead they waste our time on stuff like this.

And how would that work in a sanitary and efficient way?

You ever been to a fast food place in the U.S? They have ketchup dispensers.

A glass bottle/jar with a metal cap is far superior if the goal was sustainability. Maybe the user experience isn't as desirable but more plastic that isn't going to get recycled doesn't' seem great...

How is packaging that weighs hundreds of times as much, requiring burning hundreds of times as much fuel to transport, more sustainable?

Good point, might be bad for certain transport modes, I was mostly trying to reduce the impact of single use packaging.

Local manufacturing + renewable energy for transportation.

You can refill the jars at the nearest railroad tank car, they don't have to go all the way back to the tomato factory.

you know what could be sustainable? A bring-your-own bottle policy in stores. Deliver big dispensers to stores, and let people refill.

All the rest is a very marginal reduction unlikely to have an effect in the long run.

In a complex environment, where we can't make predictions, is better to be cautious.

Stores don't have the space for that currently. Though it may be possible to redesign them in such a way that they do.

A lot of stores have a "bulk food" section where you can get nuts or granola this way. It takes less space than the same amount of product in individual packages.

Bottle exchange is better than that. People don't want people bringing filthy containers into the store.

how would that work? Would dirty containers be washed or recycled?

Either, yes. This is how bottled air orks. (Propane, CO2). But cleaning is easier in those cases.

The term I have heard used is Refillery. I have seen small businesses do this for soaps, shampoos, and conditioners at farmers markets. Check your local area!

yes, I know, I didn't invent anything but it could be good if it were widespread.

Really smart move by Heinz--if only for the marketing and brand awareness alone. I doubt the environment outcomes will be significant, but the Heinz brand name has shown up in my feeds quite a bit in the past 24 hours because of this change.

And yet my mustard bottle uses a simple hole and I'm frustrated by the current ketchup silicone cap requiring too much pressure and over dispensing on the initial squeeze. So, worse!

Is it really necessary to do all this engineering for this??

$1.2 million seems so low of a dollar amount, for an multi year effort. Isn't that just like... 1 engineer's salary? $150k/year, 1.5x multiplier to account for benefits and other expenses of hiring somebody.

Reduce, reuse, recycle. If they really want to make an impact, they should sell ketchup in bulk at grocery stores, with us bringing in our own reusable ketchup bottle to refill. Disposable packaging creates unnecessary waste.

OK, but how would one keep the texture of the ketchup from thickening up during the day?

I just got this new cap recently (before reading this article) and it snapped in half when I first opened it. So not too promising lol

Never knew i needed a CT scanner.

Wonder how much this costs? Medically speaking they're pretty damn cheap (compared to other modalities anyway)

The company where that article is hosted sells the CT scanners used to create that scan. Starting at $75,000/year (industrial CT is much less expensive than medical)

If it was actually made from recycled plastic, that would be something.

In my area they recycle #5 but not something as small as a bottle cap.

That 3D scan WebGL viewer is sooooo good.

It's Three.JS r152. It doesn't look like it even has an acceleration structure. That's just raw rendering of 3D textures.

Doesn't load in Firefox (macOS), though.

maxOS hasn't supported floating point 3D textures for a long time. Perhaps they still don't.

Once we couldn’t ship trash to China, American recycling became cost prohibitive.

Me - grabbing a wallet and rushing to a nearest grocery store. Yeah right ...

Calling a polypropylene cap sustainable is a joke, right?

Just serve ketchup out of glass jars with spoons.

Maybe I'm alone in this but I always found the silicone cap design choice to be particularly disgusting and unappetizing. Having your sauce fired to the plate at high velocity thin stream with a gross noise just isn't what I want when I'm about to eat. Doesn't take much imagination to think what it resembles in nature when you look at it.

Think I only used one of these bottles once when they were introduced what 15-20 years ago? Then I've taken the entire lid off every single time since because of how unappetizing it is. Always go with the glass bottles too if I can for the same reason.

Meh. Still plastic, it just piggybacks on the semi big lie of "recycling plastics works!"

I guess they are trying. But still more of a "shuffling deck chairs as the Titanic sinks" than actually addressing a problem

As a side note regarding bottle caps, the new EU bottle cap regulation that requires soda bottle and milk carton etc caps to be captive is absolutely idiotic, and just causes more problems.

All my ketchup comes in glass

Great to see some progress, I'm still quite disappointed with the innovation and speed of adoption of new sustainable materials.

Sustainability talk being about ketchup caps while rich people fly to climate conferences in their yachts. Weird world.

Don't forget to stop eating meat, while we heavily subsidize the resources industry and frack the land.

Certain senators flying in private planes too!

> fly to climate conferences in their yachts. Weird world.

Yachts that fly. Weird world, indeed :)

Its a reference to this meme format: https://www.reddit.com/r/me_irl/comments/11ayxqc/me_irl/

It's missing a Porsche hanging below on ropes. Someone fix the meme.

"We can't do everything, therefore we should do nothing". This kind of thing is just content-free dismissal.

Given the budget, resources, and executive power I have - yup - nothing is exactly I can do.

Bad straw man. The ketchup cups are green-washing and its right to call them out as such.

It is rather baffling that there are no zillionaires flying airborne yachts yet, you'd have thought that one of 'm would have gotten others to build him a modern Graf Zeppelin or similar.

Apart from that, yes. Do they not realise that their hypocrisy makes their supposed engagement for the 'climate' and 'planet' null and void? Probably not or possibly they imagine they'll have enough money and power to force their ideology down the throats of the general population.

The Ministry for the Future presents these ideas where the ruling class and then the proletariat is forced into using ecofriendly modes of transportation like fast yachts and dirigibles for long distance travel. I imagine a future where we'll see this but it's going to take some serious unrest before the ultra wealthy give up their private jets.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

I wonder how many cross country business trips were necessary while designing the cap.

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