I do see some manufacturers reducing plastic, fortunately. For example, my box of tea bags used to come wrapped in plastic, and now it suddenly doesn't, and I'm wondering why it ever needed plastic. But there's still so much stuff that comes wrapped in plastic, and often multiple layers of it.
Just ban it. There are excellent alternatives.
How is this calculated? I know that growing a cucumber has an environmental cost but so does producing plastic, delivering it and then using machines to shrink-wrap every cucumber.
[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sustainable-food-system...
Obviously the people who want to buy organic and the people who want to avoid plastic the most are probably almost the same group. They know this. It feels like "Fuck you environmental-aware buyers" to me.
Of course wrapping everything non-organic is a no go as well, it would be terrible for the environment. And I'm afraid stopping the production of non-organic stuff ain't happening anytime soon.
I believe the real solution if possible until they fix this is to go to a market or an organic store where nothing is in plastic, at least for fruits and vegetables.
So every step makes sense, but the end result looks ridiculous. Maybe they can use paper wrappers instead? Or maybe just settle on one type of cucumber.
They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides and I have money" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".
The "I have money" part is obviously unfortunate. Buying healthy and environmentally-friendly shouldn't be conditioned by money. The next best individual thing is voting with one's own wallet in the meantime.
The "I don't like pesticides"¹ and the "I don't like eternal plastic waste" are very compatible. Both pesticides and eternal plastic waste hurt the environment in their own ways.
I suppose the target is the restricted set of people who are interested in organic products for their own individual health and who don't push the reasoning far enough to see that their health depends on the environment being healthy in the long term. Or, people who prefer buying organic food and who will make a compromise.
Do you have a different reading?
¹ we will note that organic doesn't mean "no pesticides", and is broader than just pesticides, but I accept the shortcut.
I didn't say people buy it because it's more expensive.
> They're different types of environmental. One is "I don't like pesticides" and the other is "I don't like eternal plastic waste".
Makes its clear that both concerns would come from the same group of people, more or less.
Or not? This is my question to you. Just take my previous comment as "What do you mean, different?".
You have a point with your money thing. Supermarkets absolutely make their choices with individualistic assumptions, taking in account classes of people and their revenues, and I suspect this is how we ended up with this wrapped organic vegetables heresy.
It could be that things treated without pesticides might require more protection against things attacking them in transit? Who knows.
That would mean that we eat active pesticides when buying non organic food. Not that it would totally surprise me neither.
We do know that organic markets don't need the plastic though. But they might have shorter circuits as well (which is also a good thing).
Not necessarily. It could be microbes downstream of pests touching your crops that shorten the shelf life, for example.
> But they might have shorter circuits as well (which is also a good thing).
It's a good thing if you have the time and money to buy things that are more expensive to produce.
Again with the money! We are looping here. I really don't know what you are trying to defend, but not the same thing as me for sure.
I think I will stop there, we are not having a constructive discussion. You are just opposing random stuff without answering key points.
If you claim something is good, it's maybe okay to point out that it might not be good.
Study from Australia: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0956053X2... Article from California: https://www.siliconvalley.com/2024/11/21/when-compostables-a... German Trash Company: https://www.zakb.de/keine-fremdstoffe-im-bioabfall
There was a report in Germany, years ago, of a range of organic products that failed during testing. They discovered the packaging (recycled paper) was the issue, not the crops and the supply chain before packaging.
So, a _really_ biodegradable cellulose bag is desirable. Even if only to use it I side a brown bag (to stabilise it).
Yes they are terrible, but we shouldn't just blindly replace them with anything and call it a day but do the (continuous) investigation for best solution, poisons are these days everywhere.
It seems people are so against landfills that they're happy to sort their plastic and sent it on an epic journey of fraud where it ends up in a river in India. Meanwhile it could have been buried with their other trash and appropriately managed.
It's not like they like this outcome or are even aware of it. We can't blame the individuals who want to do things properly here.
The correct solution to "broken recycling chain" is not "let's not recycle", it's "let's fix the recycling chain".
The issue with non-reusable / non-recyclable stuff is that we have a limited amount of it and is also environmentally expensive.
Even recycling is not ideal. There's waste, and it costs energy. It's in the end not so sustainable.
The best solution to me is reusable bags and containers (washable, and possibly refundable / returnable) whenever possible.
If we boosted plastic price at point of sale by a recoverable amount, claimable when returning the container for recycling, we'd get higher participation.
Separately, we should also apply the same to the post-return lifecycle: company pays a premium for the material flow, then it rebated that premium upon proof of recycling.
tangentially--and I'm aware this sounds incredibly stupid, and I'm sure it is--but on the topic of geothermal hotspots, what is the downside of finding some lava/magma source deep, deep underground and just dumping rubbish in there? surely most of the fumes would just be absorbed before they reach the surface? is it just too expensive of an idea/has it been done/is it likely to have undesirable long term side-effects/do we simply not have safe access to such things
See prior comment about road to hell being paved with good intentions.
Take price as a proxy for resource / energy input and see that new plastic is also incredibly lite on inputs.
New plastic may have some off-gassing / contact contamination concerns though.
Last time I checked, energetically we’re better off using plastic over paper or recycled plastic, and burying the waste… if we could do that reliably, which we don’t seem to be able to.
One is "People don't like bags stuck in the branches of trees and clogging waterways in their parks". Lightweight plastic shopping bags are so thin that a light breeze can pick them up and loft them up into the air easily. They cost approximately nothing - <2 cents retail, significantly less in bulk. It is incredibly expensive by comparison to pay someone to remove them from tree branches and riparian zones - tens of dollars in wages, equipment, and liability insurance. This is a pragmatic reason why municipalities passed bag taxes or bans. Forcing people to use paper or heavier-weight plastic bags that don't blow in the wind, even if they're not in practice "reusable", solves this one. Taxing them 5 cents or 10 cents or 25 cents per bag nudges a high percentage away.
My family returned six cases of 15 bottles each to Costco, then found that the other brands at local stores were the same way. A couple of months later the bottles went back to normal. I still wonder if they switched back due to customer rejection of the new plastic, or if they found the new plastic was in some way leeching contaminants.
At some point there are so many bricks in the road, it's direction is so clear, that the intentions are not longer good. At best they are ignorant, but too often they are self serving malice sailing under the flag of ignorance.
Because plastic is cheaper. As I understand it it's often got a negative cost to it, the companies are paid to take it and use it.
The feed stock is basically worth nothing, it's the labor and energy investment that you add to it at every step that adds the value.
So when doing the calculus for brown paper bags don't forget to include the cost goods wasted when they fail.
The white plastic bags they replaced are magnitudes of order more durable and able to carry, I should test this, at a guess ten times the weight. Basically you can fill a white plastic bag with 1.25 litre water bottles to the extent no more can physically fit in the bag and it will be safe to carry and reuse 50 times.
Fortunately the white plastic bags are still available online (eBay / Amazon / etc) so I just buy 50 for my own use as required and use them till they nearly fall apart then repurpose them as bin liners.
They’re incredibly cheap, don’t really get dirty in an unhygienic way, can be washed if something does spill in them, and they fold up in to almost no space.
Yeah that's not good, the way they do that is with more plastic in the bags. A single bag weighs as much as 5-10 old timey single use bags.
Incidentally, given that I'm _not_ old enough to remember a time before supermarkets had plastic bags, either the invention of attaching handles to paper bags took a very long time to migrate to my corner of California, or this comment makes no sense
I haven't seen those in decades unfortunately. It was a great way to reuse those boxes.
But I can't take the brown paper bag thing seriously! They are a UX nightmare in my workflows. Carry one bag per trip in multiple trips (Instead of ~4 I can do with reusable or plastic). Or try the handled ones which tear off end up with groceries all over. Reusable bags are nice though.
The push was from plastic manufacturers.
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/birth-ban-histor...
What you see in a lot of places that have people heavily relying on things like delivery services, is people using the reusable bags like they would use single-use bags - so now you have spent even more resources on a bag that's still being used as single-use. Oops.
Most of the plastic involved in getting food from farm to home isn't the carrier bag or even the food wrappers. It's the massive amount of plastic that pallets of goods are wrapped in for shipping, which happens several times throughout the supply chain.
We should focus on the latter, instead of the former. Pretty much all we're doing is virtue signalling and maybe hoping that it'll make a tiny difference.
Heck, even a marginal improvement in fuel efficiency of trucks delivering to grocery stores would probably do more than these plastic bag shennanigans.
Then, when I'm in town I see building projects where the entire building is wrapped in plastic sheeting: eight story buildings wrapped like a parcel in plastic. Even the ground-level hoarding that used to plywood boards is now typically covered in plastic sheeting printed with branding.
And the roadworks: what used to be reusable metal signs and barriers have recently switched to plastic signs and plastic barriers. I get these get battered and broken quickly but at least the steel ones would typically get melted down and reused at their end-of-life. I imagine the plastic ones just end up in landfill or incinerated.
It does kinda make my home recycling efforts seems futile when commercial enterprises are moving in the opposite direction towards more plastic.
Not all pollution is fungible.
Greenhouse gas emissions and the microplastic epidemic are two related, but separate issues.
There is no amount of fuel efficiency that would stop a plastic bag from blowing into a stream or tree and shedding microplastics as it breaks down.
I hope you're right. Here in Norway, the sensible people did what you describe. A large minority has, on the other hand, turned the lack of plastic bags (and straws, which I'm sure they barely even used once in a blue moon before) into a battlefield of the culture wars. And far right politicans of course cater to them. They manage to capture discourse talking about "environmentalism gone wild" and "EU overreach". It's terribly annoying and they manage to waste everyone's time and derail important debates with this nonsense.
My conspiracy theory is corporate propaganda changed it because reduce and reuse decreases demand, while recycle potentially only lowers production cost
Maybe that's an acceptable tradeoff, but most people don't even realize there is a tradeoff being made...
When I get to the car I unload into the bags. I'm sure it's not a thing for everyone, but I feel like I'm cutting out a fair bit of shuffling.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/plastic-bags...
I just put my fruits and vegetables directly on the conveyor belt.
Thats easily solved though by simple buying some reusable fruit/veggie net. Essentially the same as what you would use for socks or underwear in the laundry.