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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
and people STILL give them the benefit of the doubt.
People willing to allow others to poison us so they can earn money.
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.
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.
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).
(Still not buying any Tupperware, though).
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?
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Agree the incentives are screwed up, and that could help.
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.
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.
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
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.
Also Stop'n'Shop, a very much NOT a bougie food store, has bulk coffee with a grinder. At least in some locations.
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.
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”
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.
Source on this?
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.
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
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.
What a really nice, fully reusable bottle with no waste at all.
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.
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 always loved dandelion & burdock.
https://www.sunderlandecho.com/heritage-and-retro/retro/sars...
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...
Nothing compared to https://www.google.com/search?q=landfill+plastic&tbm=isch
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.
Even the ubiquitous 3 Rs logo with arrows has now become shorthand for just recycle.
Ah, nothing to worry about then
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).
The catch is they're obscenely expensive.
What does this actually mean and what are you basing it on? Without any sources or references it reads a bit like FUD.
If recycling were widespread, you'd expect the vast majority of products to be made with recycled plastic.
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.
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].
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%.
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.
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.
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?
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.
The only people that have plastic in this future society are extremely wealthy and poor people "mine" old landfills looking for plastic to sell.
[0] https://www.research-in-germany.org/idw-news/en_US/2023/10/2...
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 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.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/coca-cola-s...
https://www.vox.com/money/23979340/diet-coke-price-coca-cola...
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.
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.
It’s basically crude oil when it comes to energy/kg.
Lots of shipping containers going back empty to lots of places.
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.
i store the ketchup bottle upside down and when i open it, it is immediately ready to pour and is mostly controllable
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.
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.
Most of my plastic waste is from prescriptions. OMG so wasteful. Wax paper bags would be just fine.
YMMV.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’ll try again with more dry leaves. Spring is close to starting in my area.
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.
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...
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.
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.
https://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/2015/02/scrooge-math.h...
Easy - it's way cheaper.
The local milkman of the 50s, did better with glass collecting and delivering milk. The national enterprise benefits, as you say, from weight reduction.
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".
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.
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.
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)_/¯
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).
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)