Plastics: What's Recyclable, What Becomes Trash and Why
apps.npr.orgThe truth is that plastic generally can't be recycled, and we should stop pretending as such. Consequently it would make sense to tax it and generally discourage its use as much as possible.
Polluters get away with overusing plastic packaging precisely because consumers stop caring when they think it can be recycled.
It's appalling how much many containers (plastic, waxed paper, and multiple-layer) and how much packaging we go through every week. We get some bulk food from the local coop. And in the summer, we buy from farmers' markets.
But there's no practical way to buy milk, ice cream, detergent for dishes and clothes, prescription drugs, etc. So I end up saving containers, thinking that I'll find some use for them. But it's pretty hopeless.
So yes, I'd say that we need regulations.
We can still get milk delivered in glass bottles here. But everything else I agree is pretty impossible to avoid plastic.
Hell, I even saw some fruit, fruit, in plastic containers at the supermarket. I guess to stop it getting bashed. It was peaches.
This drives me bonkers. Tomatoes in little plastic crates, bananas is plastic bags, (bananas come with their own really great packaging! Why the hell do they put them in bags?!) cellophane-wrapped cucumbers. My previous employer got Fresh Direct shipments frequently, and the blackberries, raspberries, etc. came packaged in Russian doll nested plastic crates. Made my head explode.
"a wrapped cucumber lasts more than three times as long as an unwrapped one"
https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/food-and-drink/feat...
So just eat the cucumber earlier and shop more often/local?
Compared to destroying the environment sounds like a bargain!
And the cucumber will just decompose back into the environment if disposed as trash, too.
That is why I refuse to bag large fruits in their own plastic bags. My shopping cart always has apples, peaches, pears and bananas loose in the cart. Its a slight hassle during checkout but to me its worth it.
> cellophane-wrapped cucumbers
That wouldn’t be actually all too bad: Cellulose is made out of wood, cotton, hemp or other natural materials and is fully biodegradable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane
FWIW, we have a local market/co-op type thing where you can bring your containers to be filled with laundry detergent, various liquid soaps, and similar products. I wish this type of thing was more popular.
Maybe our local coop does that. I don't recall seeing it, but I'll ask.
One of the things that I liked about Mexico was the survival, at least in the sleepy little city I lived in, of old-school commerce. Market places, of course. But also stores where customers were expected to supply their own "packaging". A milk store, where you got milk in a 1L plastic bag, if you didn't bring your own container.
They have stores which only sell milk?
This was in small towns. So yes, there was a milk store. Which sold milk that people delivered directly from their farms. Not pasteurized. You were supposed to boil it at home.
Also a coffee store, which also bought directly from farms. And a bakery, with wood-fired ovens. Plus many other small stores.
And then, an hour away by motor vehicle, was a Walmart. Stuff was so inexpensive there that many local stores resold stuff that they bought there.
>>The truth is that plastic generally can't be recycled, and we should stop pretending as such.
This. Plastic _was_ developed to be long-lasting, the indestructibility is _by_design.
I mean sure, but that’s not why it’s not recyclable. I mean we don’t rust iron to recycle it!
Plastics are hard to recycle because their melts don’t mix. As a result, when cast, you end up with an interface inside your part where the plastic can delaminate and fail.
Therefore, to recycle plastic you have to classify it according to type (plastic things usually have little numbers stamped on them indicating type) and you have to be right over 99% of the time.
Yep, plastics can be wildly incompatible. Growing up my dad had a fishing tackle store with bulk plastic fishing worms. Customers, being customers would occasionally pick them up and leave them at other places in the store, like in another bin of plastic worms or some other plastic object. If not noticed quickly this could lead to a big clump of plastic goo as they reacted and melted each other down.
Right, my point is that plastic items originally were meant to replace heavier/bulkier items, but with a comparable longevity. Not to be used as single-use throw-away items. The need to recycle comes from the fact plastic stopped being used for durability, and it hence thrown away in humongous quantities.
Agreed. Incentivize the correct materials.
One cannot coercively distort the market with government power and expect that life will not, "uh, uh, find a way."
Great intentions do not always lead to great outcomes (often the opposite).
> One cannot coercively distort the market with government power and expect that life will not, "uh, uh, find a way."
Uh, yes you can. Just look at the different car fleets in Europe (where gasoline taxes are high) vs the US (where gasoline taxes are low.) The first thing I notice when driving from the airport either in Europe when I'm visiting or the US when I'm back is the different composition of cars on the road - the US has lots of pickups and SUVs, where Europe has a lot of small coupes and sedans. That's driven by gas pricing, and mpg standards.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/03/climate/us-fu...
> Great intentions do not always lead to great outcomes (often the opposite).
"Do not always" is not the same as "cannot". It is true that incentives can have unexpected results, but as another poster replied, the answer to that is to iterate and improve rather than "not try in the first place". Markets do not lead to perfection without guidance.
Why many people in the US buy trucks and SUVs over cars is due to a lot of factors. A major one that is not well known is that US auto manufactures have had a high incentive to promote them since a 1964 tax law[1] set a import 25% tax on light trucks.
I'm skeptical that the import duty had a significant effect on truck and SUV sales in the US. A lot of this is probably cultural, coupled with the fact that much of the United States wasn't really settled and developed (at scale) until after WWII. Pickups are just more useful in places that are less dense. Plus, they look cool and are fun to drive.
>Robert Z. Lawrence, professor of international trade and investment at Harvard University, contends the tax crippled the U.S. automobile industry by insulating it from real competition in light trucks for 40 years.
This comment also made me laugh. I doubt that we'd be seeing everyone drive Tatas around the ranch instead of Fords if they didn't have a 25% import duty.
(my opinion) Sorry, but trucks are some of the ugliest vehicles. They’re basically big, fat blocky designs with annoying sound and air pollution. They’re also high set and often can’t corner well.
Just look at what happened to SUV sales when gas prices went up in the 2000s. https://www.cbtnews.com/the-correlation-between-fuel-prices-...
I know what you mean. You can still buy cheap incandescent bulbs where I live, despite EU-wide phaseout, because they're clearly labeled "not for domestic use"...
But this shows that regulating the market is not a "fire and forget" deal, but an iterative process. First you make the main bad thing more expensive than good behavior. Then you look for "life finding a way", "clever entrepreneurs" abusing loopholes, and make those more expensive too, one by one. You end when you hit diminishing returns.
Eventually you create a black market like drug cartels and the Russian mob. Perhaps we should legalize narcotics and sell them in Walgreens and CVS instead of "subsidizing" SPECTRE.
"The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." -Princess Leia
For plastic? Lol.
The point isn’t to eliminate literally all plastic use. It’s to save the freaking planet. Taxing plastics based on their harm to the environment has the capability to drastically decrease their use, and possibly (help) save the planet.
> Eventually you create a black market like drug cartels and the Russian mob.
Not necessarily. These kinds of black markets form around things with specific demand profiles; plastic for packaging and disposable goods isn't one of them. Also, I'm not talking about putting people in jail for this, just making the whole thing much more expensive (through taxation and maybe extra bureaucracy). People aren't gonna start dealing plastic forks and individually plastic-wrapped cookies on the black market; they simply aren't gonna bother making them and switch to different materials.
Sure you can.
Tax products that make use of non-recyclable materials unless there is a good reason an alternative cannot be made or unless the product is a durable good that can last for 10+ years or is proven to be the most environmentally friendly of the alternatives.
You can also do things like giving back a deposit on some plastics, cans, and glass bottles. The reason Norway recycles so many of their single use bottles is because of this. IIRC, companies get a tax break for participating in the program.
Fund recycling centers and subsidise them so they are more standardised. Require that centers send plastics that they cannot recycle to a place that can. Subsidise this as well.
And lastly, when problems come up with your solutions, fix them. You don't have to have great outcomes at first, merely sufficient ones or ones that are better than the current system. Things happen, and anyone should be prepared for it.
I agree with your sentiment. But usually I see “life finding a way” when there is just an outright ban or law, with plenty of loopholes. I think banning the wrong things is much less effective than providing the correct incentives to do the right thing. Ie tax plastic bottles or something. However I will give you that there well may be unseen consequences to this, and sometimes the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, but ya gotta try something...
>>> One cannot coercively distort the market with government power and expect that life will not, "uh, uh, find a way."
Incorrect. Taxation has proven to be a very effective way to incentivize certain behaviors and disincentivize others. It's a very powerful tool to deal with many types of problems that typically ail free markets, such as tragedy of the commons.
Right, this is why only use Radium based lip balm, the light green glow is perfect for attracting attention at the local nightclub.
Oh, so that's why the market phased out leaded gasoline? :-)
Regulation makes the market. No regulation (rules), no market.
What you oppose are incentives you disagree with.
Maybe a solution is the same with cigarettes in the UK. Any packaging which is non-recyclable must be a standard color (i.e. red), and may not contain any creative branding on it. If advertisers want to market their products and make them look attractive on the shelves, they'll find creative solutions to using recyclable packaging.
I have been thinking that it could also work to force all material which is not in direct contact with food to be single-process recyclable. No layers, made from a select number of materials, and no extra labels. Just drop the package in the recycle and it can be re-used as-is.
I wonder whether a standardized product container could gain market share. One option, make containers that consumers can purchase and then refill with standard disbursement containers at stores. Maybe the disbursement container would label the container with the usual store label. Another would be to strictly enforce containment options for different form factors ala the other comments here.
>If advertisers want to market their products and make them look attractive on the shelves, they'll find creative solutions to using recyclable packaging.
The real problem is recycling is itself a charade. Most of what is "recycled" just ends up in landfills in the developing world.
The idea however is nice: I'd say let's make all packaging of any product a standard color (we could also allow a picture of the product as is). Less crap to falsely differentiate a product from another, less visual clutter, less messing with our brains to consume! Products would have to be attractive for what they are!
nice idea :)
I live in New Haven and saw on our handy recycling flyer [0] that pizza boxes are listed, with no caveat, as being a single stream curbside recyclable item.
Which is great, because pizza is a whole thing in this town. We eat a lot of it.
So I was surprised to learn, if you go poking around and find the RecycleCT website [1] and hover your mouse over the pizza box, up pops this note. "No food residue. No liner."
Never in my life have I had a pizza box without grease soaked through it.
Maybe they've just given up, and knowing it won't be recycled anyway, they don't bother to make a fuss about what can go in the bin? Is this flyer just there to make us feel better about our waste? Because otherwise that's a pretty major note to forget to mention. Pizza boxes are recyclable, just as long as there's never been any pizza in it.
[0] https://www.newhavenct.gov/civicax/filebank/blobdload.aspx?b...
This is a common misconception and one which has led to me having many 'conversations' with housemates and neighbours over the years.
You might find that greasy, unlaminated cardboard is recyclable in the food/organic waste stream, as it is here in London.
The only food/organic waste stream I've got here is the sewer, curbside pickup has trash and recycling
Shouldn't a pizza box be compostable anyway? It's mostly cardboard?
AFAIK composting or compost collection is not available everywhere.
Correct, no city compost here and I'm in an apartment building so I can't put a pile of it in the backyard
You can tear the top off and recycle that, and discard the greasy bottom. While some pizzas will also soil the top of the box, you sometimes get one that's pristine.
A used pizza box can almost always only be composted.
It's worse than you realize: a single pizza box can contaminate an entire bale of (otherwise recyclable) cardboard.
A lot of the local guidelines I've seen mention that light grease is ok.
This is LUDICROUS. Recycling is harder than doing your taxes. We desperately need uniformity on this.
"BEVERAGE BOTTLES Recyclable. Be sure to remove the plastic film label, which isn’t recyclable." FFS. Have you ever tried to remove one of those labels? It's impossible.
"A bottle with a cap or an opening the same size or smaller than the base of the bottle is probably going to be recyclable." -- WTF does the size of the opening have to do with it?
"The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?!
This is not a consumer-level problem. It's completely ridiculous to expect millions of ordinary people to succeed at this kind of task on a daily or weekly basis. It needs to be solved further up the supply chain, or processors need to be centralized and standardized. Period.
I found a simple 80% solution for home plastic: I avoid packaged food in favor of fresh, unwrapped fruits, vegetables, and foods from bulk bins.
Now I have a load of garbage to empty a little less than once a year and a load of metal and plastic recycling once or twice a year.
Plus my food tastes better and costs less.
Everyone is free to do what they want, and experience shows someone will have to tell me the solution doesn't work for someone, but I hope people do similar so the manufacturers' warehouses fill with plastic instead of the oceans and they stop producing it.
My niece has now stopped eating meat... because of plastic. She started out avoiding plastic wrapped meats, and went to a butcher instead, only to find (due to food handling laws in my country) that they used one disposable glove per customer! I applaud her resilience in this aspect: we need to do what we can to stop buying stuff that uses plastic - especially when it doesn't need to.
Wouldn't the lost productivity of sick people due to lower hygiene be more harmful to the environment than the plastic gloves?
This assumes that:
- the plastic glove (and not e.g. hand washing) is the only way to solve this problem
- eating meat is necessary at all, as the OP states, it's not; certainly not in typically accepted volumes, anyway
Yes
Plastics have helped a lot in the hygiene aspects of food, as much as some people think (very naively) that food can't make you sick. Especially if you live in a country with warmer temperatures and low infrastructure (hello Climate Change)
I ran a restaurant in college and had to become a certified food manager (a step up from the line food handler). So while I won’t prentend to have all the data, it was clear that simple processes prevent 99.99% of food borne illness, and not one law required plastic gloves! In fact they expressly warned NOT to use gloves if you were not sure they were food grade.
If you follow the simple rules, most illness is caused by tainted supply.
The most common infraction I saw was failing to wash hands, followed by not separating meats from other stations. (Work surface, knives, hand washing, etc)
In a busy kitchen, you would be shocked at how much cross contamination occurs every single day, plastic or not. Plastic is not the solution, training and oversight is the essential thing.
I don't disagree with the points you make, but you're thinking of "the last mile". Think of the steps before the food got to the restaurant or consumer:
For example: delivery of water to locations where the local source is suspected to be contaminated, packaging of meat products from market to consumer, handling of refrigerated or wet products, to name a few
Of course it's not the whole story, a lot of food-borne illnesses have their origin at the producing farm.
Yep. Not only do you avoid plastic but you eat better too because you have hard lines that are not to be crossed.
No more chocolate bars, ready meals, pot noodles, bags of crisps or whatever else.
Even if you end up buying a bag of rice in plastic you're cutting down the waste by a huge amount because even a small one gives you ten or more servings.
And larger containers have less surface area:volume —> less packaging.
Which is why I really hate it when manufacturers reduce pack sizes.
Small pack sizes are such a load of shite.
Some small number of people are travelling.
For the rest, 500g of rice is a pointlessly small amount. It lasts forever, is dense enough to stash, etc.
I once got a 10KG sack of rice from an Asian store once. After a year it got full of tiny bugs less than 1mm in size. Now I buy 1kg bags that I can more easily seal airtight with pegs.
I divide the 10kg sack into a bunch of mason jars and avoid the pests.
Thats the correct way to go about it really. I will do it this way next time.
Buy a canning funnel!
But you're missing out on all that extra protein!
For bulk foods, like grains, you can use aluminized polyester film bags, and blow in pure nitrogen or drop in an oxygen-absorber packets while sealing the bag. Then you put the bags in a food-grade bucket and seal it. The bags can have resealable zip-locks on them.
Yes, this uses plastic, but all of it is reusable when using certain bag-sealing methods.
I’ve seen OJ go from 2L to 1.89, and now 1.75L.
Pasta: 1kg to 908g.
It’s bullshit.
Juice tastes good, but it removes the fiber from the ingestion of that fructose that tells our body how to digest it. It is not healthful. Juice is basically a refined food, and I prefer raw food.
They're going from metric to US measures?
They're increasing the price without changing the price tag.
A.k.a. shrinkflation. Search for it, right here on HN.
It goes the other way too. Pop used to be in 591mL bottles, now it’s 500. Jerks.
I mean c'mon, individually plastic-wrapped apples? It's crazy how much unnecessary packaging there is at the grocery store.
But yeah, it is possible to avoid a lot of it. And if you're really dedicated, you can essentially get to zero waste. Here's someone that was able to fit 5 years of their trash into mason jar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT0uqEPzbd0
Been there. Complained about this very thing on HN, and got shot down. Apparently, individually plastic-wrapped fruits exist because of people with motor disabilities.
I accept that, and I understand that under our economy, it's better (cheaper) for people with such aliments that these fruits are just another item in grocery stores, and not specialty item in special stores (which would be sold for a much higher price). Still, I can't shake the feeling that this is wrong, there must be a better way of supporting people with motor problems than carpet-bombing shops with environmentally absurd individually packaged fruits, and exposing those to regular people without motor problems, some of which will start buying (and thus creating demand) out of convenience or false perception of quality...
I think the pre cut/wrapped apple slices and oranges and such are arguably for disabled people (or children, or convenience, and priced at a 5-10x premium) but the individually wrapped whole fruit, which are sold in much higher volumes, make less sense.
What's worse than individually plastic-wrapped apples? Individually plastic-wrapped bananas or oranges. They do already have their own natural wrapping.
Worse yet are styrofoam padded pears
I like the boiled eggs in plastic at Walmarts. As though it's just a stretch too far to expect someone to take eggs in their existing shells and boil them briefly!
You can even provide boiled eggs plastic free. In the UK and Germany I've seen eggs painted with a special paint that seals the cooked egg and lets you keep it outside a fridge for weeks.
I get those in the summer when too hot to cook.
One absolutely crazy problem, at least in the UK, is that supermarkets sell pre-packed fruits and vegetables cheaper than the equivalent weight loose. I can't think of any logical reason why.
Produce sold loose have to be nicer, bigger, with fewer flaws. The customers will pick those, and the less perfect produce is left to spoil. You have to remember that the retail prices of produce are as much function of the wholesale cost as it is of the spoilage rates.
I assume the prepackaged varieties take less time to check out.
I just found I have one of those bulk bin stores near my office. Its slightly more expensive and I have to bring my own containers but I will never again buy a single use packaged item that I could get packaging free from this store.
The insane amounts of damage we are doing with all this plastic needs to be controlled. Recycling is not the answer, reduce and reuse is.
I'm so glad to hear its not just me. If anyone else is reading this, I highly recommend these reusable mesh bags:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07BW1DSMV
Way better than the plastic bags at the store.
Local farmers markets and reusable canvas bags. I know not everyone lives in areas with these options, though.
We were able to reduce our garbage and recycling in half.
But I also think taxing and or regulating packaging at the manufacturer for the rest is needed.
It's really pretty simple if you actually care about results.
Is it aluminum? Recycle it.
Is is not aluminum? Don't recycle it.
Plastic bottles are pretty much all included according to this site. There's no reason not to include them too.
It takes more energy to ship and reprocess them than you save. That's why you don't.
If you do, it's explicitly because it makes you feel good - it's worse for the planet.
In my city, plastic bottles are shredded and converted into filament for 3D printers: https://www.greenbatch.com/
Maybe it takes more energy because of the diversity of materials? If we used an order of magnitude less types of plastic than we currently do, it might become more economical because it wouldnt require as much mechanical labor to sort and process. Removing shipping from the equation seems like the removal of quite a bit of carbon.
When you melt plastic down, you get lower quality material than what you fed in. It's not a closed loop. Plus, the wide variety of available properties are what makes plastic so useful in the first place.
Source?
This is what the big kerfuffle is all about.
All we’ve been doing is paying the Chinese and Malaysians to feed our plastics to the dolphins for us.
Now they won’t take it, and people here get upset if you feed the animals, we’re realise the whole deception for what it is.
Edit to add sources:
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/03/whale...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/29/malaysia-to-se...
Self evident that if it were economically & environmentally sound to recycle we wouldn’t be shipping it around the planet to do so.
Asian companies undercut all the domestic recyclers, putting them out of business. This is why you might not want to trust say Chinese companies with prices that are too good to be true (because they are probably cutting huge corners somewhere). The same thing happened with rare earths (very dirty to refine, but China didn’t really care about their environment giving them a huge price advantage that shut everyone in the developed world down).
Thomas Kinnaman was interviewed on Planet Money recently and mentioned roughly this conclusion based on his 2014 study. More details here: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2019/07/15/why_its_pro...
Plastic and Glass recycling can be borderline and it depends on the specific local implementation. Either way, the savings are never going to be massive and it is an open question if it is worth the effort. (Glass re-use is different)
Aluminum is completely different. Prices for aluminum recycling per ton is an order of magnitude higher than other recyclables.
What's even better than putting your plastic bottle in recycle is not using plastic bottle at all. Is there any use case where plastic bottle is better or required?
Apparently manufacturing glass uses way more resources/energy and has a much bigger carbon footprint. (No source at hand, sorry.) It also weighs more so is more expensive to transport. Plastic is good for some things, no doubt about that.
I'm under the impression glass is worth recycling as well. Prove me wrong.
Earlier this year, Arlington County, Virginia removed glass from their curbside recycling program, "A significant drop in the market value of glass recyclables means it is no longer economically or environmentally sustainable for the County to collect them via single-stream recycling."
They have two drop-of locations, where residents can drop off glass "for crushing and reuse as construction and landscaping material."
(https://newsroom.arlingtonva.us/release/arlington-shifting-g...)
The answer, unless you want to check the price of commodities each morning, is to recycle glass and bottles anyway and let the recycler decide if it’s economically efficient to send it to the landfill or to reprocessing.
Depends on the area, or so I learned recently upon moving to Montana, where they don't recycle it. Apparently most recycled glass is crushed up and used as roadbase. In MT, gravel is dirt cheap, and so it's not economical to use glass for construction, so into the landfill it goes.
As for recycling glass into other glass, I can't say.
Making glass from scratch is incredibly energy intensive, and glass impurities can be handled (purified), so it always makes sense to recycle glass. Don't let your officials tell you any different.
I heard on a recent podcast from a Dutch recycler that recycling glas only saves ~10% of energy creating new glass. Melting the glass requires heat, and the raw material is not much more expensive than collecting used glass.
You're not filling a landfill and you're not gathering more raw material. Both seem like a win, especially if it's cheaper, even by just a little.
> Making glass from scratch is incredibly energy intensive
Not much more than melting existing glass. It's not like aluminum, where melting is much cheaper than refining in the first place.
> glass impurities can be handled (purified)
It's much easier to handle impurities when you start with clean sand.
Not in single stream recycling. The problem? Glass gets crushed and ruins other recyclable materials.
Also glass is very heavy when compared to a similar strength container made of plastic. That is why plastic took over the market.
Don't forget about steel ("tin") cans too.
Steel can be recycled many times with virtually no degradation.
Also good quality cardboard or nice letter paper, I'm told. (Not junk mail & phone books)
That’s not an entirely terrible idea.
Could all(?) packaging intended for recycling by made from aluminium?
Well aluminum does take a whole lot of energy to manufacture, so if it doesn’t all get recycled there would likely be a lot of waste there.
Heaps of energy. Here in Tasmania the aluminium refinery consumes something like 56% of the states electricity.
This site https://www.aluminum.org/industries/production/recycling claims that 75% of all aluminium is recycled and that over 70% of all aluminium ever produced is still in use.
I've noticed that people aren't actually fully capable of just sorting the recycling correctly. There's always stuff in the wrong bins in my building despite an ongoing education effort to fix that and helpful illustrated rules above the bins. Rules about lids and labels is a joke.
Since lids and labels and such seem to actually matter, the only sensible solution is for the governments of the world to legislate to mandate specific shapes and material compositions for things like drink containers. Standardize it all.
I've been thinking about this more and more, and it just makes so much sense. No one cares what shape a beer bottle is, the label is enough to tell them apart. Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging, but less of them isn't something to worry about either
> Marketing people will complain if they can't differentiate on packaging
Cigarette companies have already fought and lost legal battles forcing them to use standard plain packaging, so complaining is about all they can do.
I’m in total agreement. We give corporations a lot of freedom even when that freedom is unnecessary and leads to significant environmental and societal harm. We’ve got to get some power back for the people so we can say “no, you don’t get any shape. You have to agree to a limited number of shapes and they have to be totally recyclable.”
I think in general the government should mandate that companies take care of their goods from start to end including negative externalities. If you produce something in plastic packaging then you have to make sure it's recyclable in the markets where is sold or pay an environmental impact fee. Ditto if you sell oil that produces CO2. Buy equivalent carbon credits. If it means no body can afford your product anymore, you shouldn't be selling it anyway.
Have the mfr pay a small fee when their wrappers end up in the garbage. A little like the deposit on cans but the consumer doesn't have to do anything.
The rules are just insanely complicated and depend entirely on what suburb you are in. There are countless different kinds of plastics which all have the recycling triangle on them but you have to actually check the number inside and remember all the kinds of plastics there are and which ones your local council can recycle as well as keeping up to date if this changes. And then you have to deal with the fact that loads of products use 2-3 different kinds of plastics on one product so you have to sit there breaking it up in to its basic materials.
And then you're supposed to wash the plastic if it's a food container, which completely defeats the point of recycling. There's no way individuals hand-washing plastic bottles with hot water and detergent aren't wasting significantly more water and energy in total than a centralized solution would, and you can't rely on people doing it anyway, because it makes dealing with trash two orders of magnitude more complicated.
I actually suspect that even with actually recyclable materials, if individuals have to wash them before giving for recycling, it would be a net benefit for the planet for them to just throw that trash into a landfill.
I love the bottles that have the recycling symbol, but the number is so small an ill defined you can't actually read it.
Recycling bins at my office are always particularly effective at demonstrating this. Single stream recycling makes things easy!.. Or so I thought, before witnessing an endless stream of banana peels in the recycling bins and plastic bags in the compost bins.
> FFS. Have you ever tried to remove [beverage bottle] labels? It's impossible.
As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle.
So, agreed on your final point. It can be done easily, and not necessarily at additional cost. Manufacturers just haven't been motivated to do so.
> As a consumer in North America, it's not easy. Japan has stronger national regulations, however, and beverage bottles universally have labels with either perforated strips or peel-up corners, to facilitate removal. Plastic caps are also easily removed from glass bottles - peel the cover back and it splits in half and releases from the bottle.
OTOH Japan wraps pretty much everything in plastic, usually multiple times over.
And they burn their garbage, turning thin-film plastics into fuel pretty much as cleanly as the stock used to make the plastic. I much prefer that to making a huge hill with poorly-compacted trash, covering with soil and claiming "problem solved".
Their usage of plastic is higher in some specific instances (omiyage, cookie or snack packages, and convenience stores come to mind), but equivalent to North America in others (standard meat comes in a shrink-wrapped styrofoam tray, vegetables/fruit come loose or a single layer of packaging, grocery stores charge for plastic bags). Despite the meme, I don't think their plastic usage is all that significantly higher outside a few specific instances.
> "The How2Recycle label is showing up on more products at the grocery store ... GreenBlue says that there are more than 2,500 variations of the label in circulation" 2500 different recycling rules?!
I don't think 2500 variations is actually excessive, when you look at how the labels actually work.
The label has four parts [1]:
• One part tells what preparation is needed, such as whether you need to rinse the item before recycling, whether you need to remove the label, and things like that. There are 13 possible options for this part.
• The next part tells you if the item is widely recycled, not yet recycled, requires store drop off, or varies from place to place. There are 4 possible options for this part.
• The next part lists the type of material the item is made from, such as paper or glass. There are 6 options.
• Finally, the last part tells what part of the item the label applies to. Values include bottle, tray, insert, and 6 others, for a total of 9 options.
13 x 4 x 6 x 9 = 2808.
Also, a given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in.
It's still ridiculous to make this a problem of every individual, though.
> last part tells what part of the item the label applies to (...) given product can have more than one label. E.g., a frozen entree might have a label for the plastic tray it is in, another label for the plastic film that covers the tray, and a third label for the box that the tray is sold in.
This alone cuts down on amount of useful/correct sorting done. The worst is packaging you actually have to disassemble yourself - e.g. something that looks like cardboard (but probably has a thin layer of plastic on top of it; you can't easily tell), but has inserts of thin transparent plastic.
> whether you need to rinse the item before recycling
And this, I believe, essentially kills of recycling as an idea. Not only most people won't bother (and it's a coin toss whether they'll throw the dirty container into general/non-recyclable or recyclable bin), individuals cleaning plastic packaging is a ridiculously inefficient use of water, energy for heating that water, and likely detergent too. I don't have numbers on it, but I wouldn't be surprised if the resource use delta between individuals cleaning and doing the cleaning at recycling plant is actually greater than recycling process itself saves.
It's only ludicrous because the plastics industry wants to pretend that plastics are recyclable when, mostly, they're not (because it's impractical or uneconomic).
The rules for recycling when you exclude all plastics are pretty simple.
Yes it's pretty bad. What it comes down to is: follow the local rules. If you don't know the local rules or are unsure, err on the side of keeping the recycling clean and throw it out.
(Landfills are quite good at keeping plastic out of the environment. It's the stuff that doesn't make it into the landfill that you have to worry about.)
Then keep checking, as local rules keep evolving so that products they used to consider acceptable stop being so. Sometimes new items become acceptable, but our experience is mostly of things being removed from recycling over the years.
It's insane.
Yes, someone needs to write a really good web app, like those that exist for transit.
But also some regulations to keep the permutations down would be super helpful. Mandating that all the things are recyclable would be super helpful.
reduce and reuse are much easier than doing taxes, but they're not in speculative shareholder corporate interest
Hey, you should see how they do it in Japan (there are about 20 containers for recycling, everything must be disassembled). And...people actually do it.
In Japan like anywhere else, recycling depends on the municipality.
Where I live, we have like 6 different containers (PET bottles, other plastic, glass+cans, cardboard/paper, burnable garbage, unburnable garbage).
Coming from Sweden, it's actually a bit easier here (e.g. in Sweden cans, clear glass, colored glass were all separate, and aluminum drink cans had a deposit so you took them to the supermarket)
Absolutely 100% what you said.
But now the question is: why pretty much NO government has ever succeeded in this?
My view is that the only hope is an EU-wide requirement to change packaging, etc to be able to still sell to the EU. That would be a big enough market for every single company to comply.
Belgium allegedly had an 85+% recycling rate, though I have no idea what all this stuff gets recycled to, and I suspect it gets downcycled to useless garbage.
"Recycling is harder than doing your taxes"
Living in a country where the majority, including me doesnt have to deal with their taxes, I cant help thinking maybe that's the solution. Whether the onus is put on manufacturers to make things trivially recyclable, or on recyclers to sort of a big bag of mixed waste, or some combination I don't know. Does seem silly for everyone to have to become domain experts in recycling though.
Instead of raging against. Perhaps consider solutions.
Example: In Japan, the plastic film label is perforated no glue is utilized. It is fairly easily removed.
More difficult simply tossing a bottle, sure.
Think for a moment instead of raging. 2500 variations does not mean 2500 different recycling rules. There are more than 2500 variations of your potential mate, that doesn't mean there's 2500 different ways to mate.
It is a consumer problem, consumers will have to deal with the results.
You just suggested a way that manufacturers can make it easier for consumers to recycle, did you not? You seem to be confirming the OP's point, which is that the current state of recycling is rage-inducing.
The sorting absolutely should be done downstream, ideally with robots doing the vast majority of the work.
It is done that way. Thats how you can put a aluminum can and cardboard in the same bin. But what does a robot do when a tictac container comes in with a Polyethylene body and a Polypropylene lid. Does it sit there with high precision fingers trying to pick the glued in lid off?
It uses its fricking lasers, obviously!
regarding the size of the bottle opening, my understanding is that the automatic sorting machines at the recyclery 'work better' on bottles with a narrow opening because they are easier to push around with jets of air, but they could also be concerned that other items will get trapped inside a wide mouth plastic container and confound the sorting machine...
I toured the Recology recycling facility a few months ago. The sorting technology is impressive, but the amount of material that they remove and send to the landfill had me questioning the efficacy of the program.
It sucks to push the packaging crimes of businesses onto consumers, but I think improving the public's understanding of what can and cannot be recycled can still have a massive impact on the effectiveness of recycling programs.
San Francisco has a great website to help you figure out what goes in which bin: https://sfrecycles.org/
(Note that you can recycle fabrics -- this isn't possible through most recycling programs!)
Public awareness at the unrecyle-ability of the majority of products should hopefully upstream business packaging change.
Hopefully. Recycling almost feels like it has been a trick by corporations
"Don't worry, you can consume as much as you want and as long as you put it in the recycling bin its all good"
It was a trick, and by politicians and people themselves, who wanted to be seen as being environmentally conscious.
The only solution has always been to reduce consumption, but deep down, everyone wants to consume more and more, while at the same time feel better about and blissfully ignore that they are destroying the environment.
>The only solution has always been to reduce consumption, but deep down, everyone wants to consume more and more, while at the same time feel better about and blissfully ignore that they are destroying the environment.
Maybe I'm only thinking of this because I've been reading Tocqueville, but might not religion be the thing to encourage restraint here?
Maybe Buddhism, other than that I see lots of consumption in other religions.
Be carefull with this info, much depends on the factory. In the Netherlands we separate plastic and much cannot be recycled but new techniques and factories are being developed as a results of the constant stream of (at the moment!) worthless plastics. [0]
[0] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2018/06/18/weg-met-plastic-in-laag...
> Be carefull with this info, much depends on the factory.
Indeed, recently we were looking into getting bio-degradable / compostable cups for an event, however:
* you need "industrial" (high-temperature) composting, your garden's compost pile is not going to work (it will probably degrade over time but very slowly)
* the average collection center can't easily differentiate between bio-degradable and regular plastic (you have to check each cup individually) so they just reject everything
The bio-degradable items won't degrade at the expected rate, as you say it's an industrial composting facility that's needed, but they _will_ degrade far, far, more readily and won't leave the environment strewn with microplastics. That's what we seek.
I've tested composting a couple of compostable nappies (aka diapers) in my under-used, low temperature, domestic compost bin. After about 3 years we emptied it out and there was no sign of the nappies at all.
If an animal eats the corn-starch (or whatever compostable type it is) cup then it's not going to be especially harmful to them. Moreover, it appears from what I've seen that the compostable materials will not retain mechanical integrity after a small time of exposure to weather, this is good too.
It's not all sunbeams though, we had a fairtrade chocolate bar for sale in our store that was wrapped entirely in compostable wrapping (with vegetable dye printing, etc.), the compostable "cellophane" wrap was incredible. Completely transparent, flexible, shiny. But [I believe] the humidity was too high and the wrap grew sticky before the shelf life of the chocolate [<1y] had come.
It mightn't be perfect but it's a good way better.
I concur, everything on that list is recycled curbside in my city, Paris [0].
Those rules can evolve very fast, and unfortunately the communication is lacking. A lot of people still use the rules of several years ago, not recycling things that are now accepted.
There is also an issue on products labels: a lot of them will say something isn't recyclable, while it can be in some cities. Only the most dedicated consumers will be able to correctly understand what they should do.
[0][French] https://www.paris.fr/pages/en-2019-paris-vous-facilite-le-tr...
Indeed, and I feel that way to contribute is to just add all your plastics to the recycle bin, hoping that even the most difficult types will reach a threshold amount that will trigger research into their recycle-ability, or at least into better separation techniques. Please show me I'm wrong if I am.
Well the article asks you not to "wishcycle"—that is to put something in the recycling bin in the hopes that it will recycle.
Please don't do that.
It makes recycling more costly, as the recycling factory have to spend more time sorting it, or just refuse recyclable garbage because it's mixed with non-recyclable and sorting is too costly.
Well, as I don't have spectroscopic eyes to identify the nature of the polymers I have in my hand as I make a choice between bins. And the fact that plastic is a rather broad term combined with the vague communication, I'm going to keep doing this as do many others. So I just hope innovators will find ways to separate better.
I use to do this but it's actually contributing to the problem of wish cycling and why other countries have begun refusing to buy our recycling due to impurities from sorting. Just Google your city name + recycling rules and you'll be able to contribute without being the problem.
Except in my country they refuse to use resin codes. It's "rigid" or not, regardless of composite material. https://www.mywaste.ie/
I tried to engage, and was told it was about reducing confusion.
Polyethylene is rather inert, but our ability to further utilize it beyond a single use is imperative. I grew up with paper grocery bags and glass bottled soda, and plastic was seen as the "green" solution at that time.
The plastics and chemicals industries -- as a chemistry professor used to put it -- are but a pimple on the butt of the petroleum fuels industry.
They are a tiny portion of what's getting produced every day. And as long as petroleum keeps getting pumped out of the ground for dirt cheap and getting burned, plastics will be an inevitable byproduct.
It just costs pretty much $0 to make new plastic from that stream of petroleum, versus recycling which takes human effort, more equipment, logistics, etc.
Until we tax petroleum coming out of the ground for all the later problems it causes us, I too am disappointed but resigned to having recycling being a further waste of resources.
There are 2 separate externalities with different costs:
* CO2 emissions through burning fossil fuel
* plastic garbage with 1000 year lifetimes being littered around the planet
While we should absolutely be addressing both, you have to target these 2 problems separately
Edit: To clarify what I'd propose would be a tax on fossil fuel production, and then an additional, much higher tax on production of things like plastic bags
I've sort of wondered if recycling plastics is actually maybe bad from a CO2 angle.
It seems that using mined virgin oil for plastics that gets tossed in a landfill means that at least a little more of the oil we are mining ends up not getting burned and emitted as CO2. In this way, we're creating non-global warming demand for oil which competes with the energy demand in the market. I don't know if this is a reasonable way of thinking about it.
Of course, the energy required to haul a bottle of water hundreds of miles is huge, so I'm not arguing for buying more plastic waste, just not sure how recycling existing plastic waste affects global warming in particular.
The amount of oil in the ground is effectively infinite with regard to any sane carbon budget, so this could only really make sense in the short term.
Ultimately in time I suppose you could consider plastics recycling as a way to extract less oil. If, for example, you could recycle 80%, then you only need to extract 20% of the oil, which is likely to be far better for the environment (less fracking etc).
On geological timescales a lot of the stuff we are doing is bonkers. It looks sort of OK now because we've 'only' had 100 years of it.
That's a good point. It's not as though adding a little demand is likely to do anything other than increase supply in this case.
Does anyone have a article that clearly shows the energy costs for different container options? Let's use a 12 oz / 330 mL container of soda as the example. What I'd like to see would be something like this:
New Recycle
Glass: GN Kwh GR Kwh
Plastic: PN Kwh PR Kwh
Aluminum: AN Kwh AR Kwh
It's kWh not Kwh
SI prefixes and units are case sensitive.
"k" is the prefix for kilo; "K" is Kelvin.
Similarly, "W" is Watt. "w", as far as I'm aware, doesn't mean anything.
"h" is the accepted symbol for the use of hour with the SI.
I think that is brilliant. Just extend existing labeling rules to add a couple extra figures.
You can recycle polyethylene pretty easily on its own, and a lot of those plastic wraps that the article says aren't recycled are made out of LDPE. HDPE and LDPE are great materials for a lot of things that you might otherwise make out of wood or 3D-print. It's easy to machine, and it can be very strong and rigid for its weight.
Basically, you just shred the donor plastic, heat it to 300-350F, press the air out, and let it cool. With LDPE plastic wrap, you can fold and stack it instead of shredding it. You can also get cool tie-dye effects by using multiple colors in the same batch.
You can use plywood for the walls of your molds, and a toaster oven that you don't plan on cooking with ever again can be a reasonable furnace. To compress the hot plastic, try making a loose-fitting lid and tamping or clamping it down while the plastic heats.
But make sure that it is polyethylene - some plastics, like PVC, release highly toxic fumes. And others, like polypropylene, are often mixed with plasticizers which evaporate into nasty fumes and reduce the quality of the recycled plastic.
Notably, plastic bags are a plentiful source of nearly pure polyethylene, which being composed entirely of only hydrogen and carbon essentially in the form of a petroleum wax, is also one of the safest plastics to work with. The decomposition products of fluoro/chloropolymers can be deadly.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpXq6mnbCus&
>How To Recycle HDPE Bottle Lids Into Flawless Flat Sheet Material
Decent video on how to make HDPE into new materials
The US actually sends a lot of its unrecyclable plastic trash in boats across the world to Asia (in return ships that delivered goods), but it's coming back more and more.
Here is a cool video that explains this - Asian Nations Reject Western Trash - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htnUTN4mH0
For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body.
Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled. Single use plastics are everywhere where I live and more prevalent than ever: you want to buy 4 peaches at the supermarket? They come in a small plastic box wrapped in a plastic sheet.
The only way is going to be to make it illegal and force people to use paper bags or reusable bags, not only for carrying the groceries but also to separate fruit, use reusable containers for grains, etc.
But it has to be mandatory for everyone in order to make any significant difference.
> force people
Force companies. Individuals don't get to choose what the packaging is made of. And making it too inconvenient for end users is going to get pushback we don't need.
I'm wondering if there should be a mandatory deposit scheme on all packaging as there currently is on glass bottles in some place. Give people a few cents for returning a plastic bottle, and make it the manufacturer's problem to recycle or dispose of it. If your deposit-return system scans the barcode, it knows what product it is and which recycling stream to put it into ...
> For example, for recycling plastic bottles, we are supposed to take the plastic lid off, and even remove the attachment of the lid and separate it from the main plastic body. Otherwise, the bottle can't actually be recycled
This will vary depending on the recycling facility, but where I live in Japan, you're supposed to separate the plastic label and the screwcap. According to a documentary about the recycling facilities here, the machines are able to automatically separate out the different kinds of plastic on PET bottles (bottle/cap/label), but the more there is that gets separated off, the more it slows down the process. So if one person forgets to separate their bottle's components, it's fine, the machine handles it, but if nobody separates, then the process takes too long and they can't keep up and have to divert unprocessed plastic to the incinerators.
Worth noting for anyone who thinks "why bother recycling", this is specifically about plastics.
If you have metal, aluminum especially is a very valuable recyclable, so definitely keep recycling that.
Even then, your curbside recycling probably can't deal with random scrap metal. The one at our house only wants aluminum and tin containers. Anything else, you should probably give to a scrap metal recycler.
It doesn't matter what is theoretically recyclable. All that matters is what the recycler can handle.
So the rule of thumb is: there is no rule of thumb. Follow the local rules.
Dépends on your area. Around here, scrappers roam around on garbage day and pickup the scrap metal or anything salvageable.
I like the "wishcycle" term - have never heard that before. Where I life in Southern California we have "single stream recycling" -- you throw all of your recyclables into one bin. I used to have a roommate who I had to continually remind "leftover burritos and hair extensions are not recyclable". Her attitude was "I just throw everything in there... they'll pick out what they don't want." Some days I really wonder how effective such a recycling system is at recycling vs. how much it only serves to make us feel good about ourselves.
Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline.
Plastics is a term which applies to thousands of different polymers. Some it makes sense to recycle, some don’t.
We can then begin to whittle down on the plastics we allow on the items which make most sense. For example we don’t needs tends of different plastics just because one vendor prefers the aesthetics of one over the other. Give them a select choice rather than an infinite choice.
Then label the packaging simply with simple easy to understand labels which are clearly visible. Avoid mixing incompatible plastics.
There's a few plastics that are used for most packaging, the type is labeled on most such packaging. It can be hard to see.
https://www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/recycling-by-the-nu...
>Someone has run the numbers and figure out energy cost and total tonnage and figure out what makes sense to streamline.
Prices are dynamic though. Some things make sense to recycle today, but may not tomorrow, and some things may not make sense to recycle today, but may tomorrow.
I was wondering if we should put "seller unique rfids" on everything so the trash can be sorted and returned to the seller. Then we just add the cost of recycling to the cost of the product. Alternatively, add a "recycler unique rfid" and every seller has to partner with a recycler in order to sell a product.
Now you've got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor. Plus the added cost/waste of the RFID tag.
> Now you’ve got to ship everything back to the seller, and then the seller has to ship the waste to their actual processor
That’s actually an interesting idea.
If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste.
It would also have a side effect of making high-waste packaged goods much more expensive than low-waste packaged food, promoting the purchase of eco-friendly packaging.
I wonder if there’s a less radical way to implement these kind of market incentives.
>If it actually worked that way, there would be an amazingly high incentive for sellers to minimize packaging waste.
But why? Adding a nonsense convoluted disincentive is inane. Landfills are cheap and plentiful and filling them with plastic doesn't hurt anything (and can be billed to either supplier or consumer) If something is worth recycling the market will sort it.
Well if it was some sort of "bounty" that involves handling it the solution could be more logistically sane. No sense adding in needless shipping. Say that packaging comes with a N cost tax stamp deposit. If it doesn't wind up processed in an acceptable way then it is forfeit.
If anyone reprocesses it in an acceptable way (recycling to a valueable material, trash to steam) the manufacturer gets some portion of the value back and the recycler gets some just to ensure that they do the proper paperwork to ensure the system is working correctly.
A company can also be their own recycler to get a full refund.
Bill the manufacturer for the waste it creates, as it gets scanned and sorted.
Honestly there ought to be a law that if you sell things in plastic, you also have to pay for or provide recycling for that volume of plastic.
I think taxing packaging along with a country-wide standard for recycling AND for standardised containers (as per other posts here) would be the best option - win-win for governments. Non-homogeneous packaging eg. Cardboard food containers with plastic windows would be taxed heavily.
Taxing packaging by weight and type would theoretically work to minimise packaging and encourage eg. Bringing a tupperware container to the shops. The standardised (countrywide) container types would mean you could eg. Put your standard coffebean container under the supermarket dispenser and do away with packaging.
The taxation would apply to manufacturers (import) not consumers, thus incentivising them to advertise green credentials as a feature, and to cut down packaging or pass the cost on (at which point most customers would move to the cheaper product).
As far as non-homogeneous packaging goes, if it takes longer than 5sec to separate each bit into homogeneous parts, then I'd class it as non-homogeneous.
Something I've wondered about but never been able to find a clear answer: what is the cost of putting a non recyclable item in the recycling?
I'm sure there's a lot of "it depends" in this answer, just as there is for most parts of this article. Still, even a ballpark answer would really help with the applied question of how much confidence in an item's recyclability one should have before putting it in the bin.
If I'm 95% sure then I'll do it. If I think the odds are 10% I won't. But where is the line? This depends on the cost of being wrong in terms of processing effort/energy, potential to ruin surrounding goods items, etc
Lately I've been playing around with melting down and reforming plastics that aren't recyclable in my area. It has been enjoyable and I've made a few usable things already.
The https://preciousplastic.com/ project takes this much further.
Coffee cups are a no too - https://envirobank.com.au/coffee-cups-recyclable-or-not/. You can't just split into lid and cup and chuck one in the paper bin and the other in the plastic bin.
Recently I got some 9V batteries from Amazon (for the smoke detector). They all came individualy shrink wrapped in plastic - all 8 of them - despite coming in a box that was surely strong enough to protect them from damage on the short trip from the fulfillment center. Why? Protect from corrosion?
This is probably a poor example, as I'm sure there must be some reason to do this with batteries, but so many things we buy online now come with mountains of non-recyclable plastics that just create more waste. I'm with other commenters here: tax the hell out of this stuff and force retailers, especially ones with clout like Amazon, to develop different packaging technologies that don't overuse plastics for literally everything.
Considering the success of neural network image classifiers, it seems garbage sorting would be a slam dunk application for these reasons:
(1) the training data is readily available. there are human sorters who already are classifying everything in real-time as they pick stuff off the conveyor and move the item to the right bin. train cameras on the conveyor belt and the analyze which items are picked out and which bin they get tossed in.
(2) the NN doesn't have to be anywhere near as accurate as, say, a self-driving car. tune the classifier to minimize false positives. If the resulting NN can classify only 70% of the items, but accurately, that means 70% of the garbage stream can be automated and run 24/7. Humans can still go through the remaining 30% if it economically makes sense.
oh so it seems my strategy “put everything that has some plastic in it, maybe, who knows, it looks plasticky” to the yellow bins is actually harmful
Why can't we just package more food items in aluminum? Every time I read about the mess that is recycling, I am reassured that aluminum is the absolute best case material. Why are we only using it for soda cans?
It is somewhat common, but usually as a sub-packaging rather than the main e.g. chocolates are commonly individually wrapped in aluminium foil, it's also commonly used for meal trays (but I guess has become less common due to microwaves?).
Sealed packets are also commonly foiled though mixed with plastic (for e.g. quick-close bits). Dunno how that works out for recycling, just burn out the plastic?
A cylinder full of liquid can be made with very thin walls and still be pretty strong.
I would guess that most other kinds of foods need other shapes of packages, for which aluminum is likely to be more expensive than e.g. plastic.
Aluminum production takes a ton of energy.
Soda can designs have to be under pressure to be strong.
Thanks, that does answer my second question, and implicitly my first - other containers would need to be thicker and more expensive.
What I mean to ask is, why don't we incentivize manufacturers to use more expensive aluminum packaging? It seems reasonable that the cost of manufacturing aluminum may be less than the sum of all costs of using plastic. It also seems that no companies will choose to do this without incentives.
We have an all-generation family vacation each year in TN (lots of food and drink). Coming from MA, we are used to recycling and so would collect recyclables and take them to the grocery store collection point (curbside was garbage only).
This year, we did the same and noticed the recycling collection bins were gone. Went inside to inquire and were proudly told, “Oh, we got a big new landfill opened up with plenty of space; we don’t have to recycle anymore!”
Ugh.
Just stop buying things in plastic . There are alternatives - stores that sell products in bulk, growing your own food, reusing containers. The solutions are there.
I'm not sure if you've bought much at the store, but trying to eliminate plastic from your purchases sounds like a great way to spend a lot more money currently. You are limited to a tiny number of options.
Also when it comes to products that present contamination risks, plastic is an excellent barrier to prevent the spread of microbes.
What I don't see anywhere is chemical-based recycling. Many plastics can be dissolved in acetone, for example. Shred it all to flakes, put it in a vat of acetone, burn the stuff that isn't dissolvable and then take the raw materials out of the acetone?
Or is the dissolving-into-acetone part a non-reversible operation and one ends up with a boatload of contaminated acetone?
Before reading this, I thought that non-reusable plastics should be banned, and that only reusable packaging should be allowed, should it be high quality plastics, glass, stainless steel...
Some plastic types should be banned, it would make recycling more viable...
I'm really curious how much plastic China was importing, and what they were doing with it.
I always joke that we'll have robots that take care of this problem before we have self-driving cars.
On a more serious note: This is far too confusing, and most of this burden belongs to the recycling processor, not the consumer.
nearly everything we acquire ends up in a landfill eventually, plastic or not. Plastic unlike metals can never be restored as good as new. The recycled plastic will always be inferior. Metals do not have that problem.
Interesting, four statements in a row that are obviously false. Can you tell us anything that's true?
Someday you will have to sell an estate then you will understand.
Does anyone have this info in a nice info graphic? I would love to hang this in my kitchen as a quick reference.
We all know recycling is a scam. Packaging should all be compostable, not recyclable.
I think the packaging waste would be more than the actual food waste and ruin the compost balance if we just tried to blindly mix it all. I compost my food waste and I definitely have more packaging waste each week than food waste.