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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

> 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-...

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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