Plastic producers have known for more than 30 years that recycling is not an economically or technically feasible plastic waste management solution. That has not stopped them from promoting it, according to a new report.
“The companies lied,” said Richard Wiles, president of fossil-fuel accountability advocacy group the Center for Climate Integrity (CCI), which published the report. “It’s time to hold them accountable for the damage they’ve caused.”
I worked in packaging for 20 years. A bottle CAN be recycled indefinitely… if it’s made from GLASS.
Source: I worked 8 years for a glass bottle manufacturer.
The real key is local bottling where local production isn’t possible.
Ship vats of Coca-Cola syrup to the 200 largest cities (more or less) in North America and create local bottle circulation.
Spice it up with local bottle designs or recycling marks. Now you’ve got novelty sales, collector sales, eco-conscious sales, ‘support local’ sales…
I am so confused. Isn’t that the coca cola model? Each area has some coca cola bottling franchise that services them, and they already have regional differences.
Too bad most of those bottles got replaced with plastic completely disregarding the impact of the environment they are causing. Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon, the same can’t be said for oil.
Not to mention that glass also comes from abundant resources like sand and we don’t risk running out of it anytime soon
Is now a bad time to point out that not only is sand not as an abundant resource as you think, but we’re actually running short of it?
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a39880899/earth-is-running-out-of-sand/
https://theweek.com/news/science-health/960931/why-is-the-world-running-out-of-sand
Isn’t this specifically about sand for construction which needs to be coarse enough? For glass packaging you melt that stuff anyway, SiO₂ is SiO₂. Also I imagine the amount of sand needed for glass bottles would be way smaller than what construction industry uses, even less so if you recycle.
Those glass bottles used to cause an awful lot of horrific deaths and injuries during handling, so from a safety perspective, there is no desire at all to return to glass. Glass bottles are also much heavier than plastic, so have a commensurate environmental impact due to the increased consumption of fossil fuels for shipping as well. Fixing the problems with plastic was a big PR win and saved companies millions in law suits and shipping costs. They won’t go back to glass. The answer is probably re-usable plastic containers purchased by the customer and refilled at stores for the same price (or more) than when sold in disposable plastic packaging. Another PR win in the offing, no doubt.
IIRC, plastic is byproduct of oil being refined into gas. As long as there are gas vehicles and engines in general, we ain’t gonna get rid of plastic. It’s so cheap because is has to be produced.
The sad thing is that we don’t even need 99.9% of this plastic in the first place. People were making disposable packaging, clothing, building materials etc out of non-toxic and biodegradable materials for most of history and it was fine. I seriously detest plastic and wish it was banned/not made unless for exceptional uses e.g replacement heart valves.
It feels inevitable that our descendents will eventually say “holy shit, you stored your FOOD in it?!”, after we discover we’ve been literally killing ourselves the whole time
I mean we pretty much know that micro and nanoplastic cause all sorts of various cancers, and especially leech into water, so like, those disposable spring water bottles are all just a helping gulp of liquid plastic into bodies who are desperately repairing cellular damage and inflammation caused by said plastic shards lodging themselves deep into every membrane.
But yes have you heard of our friend leaded gasoline, yet? C:
Yup. Plastic contamination is absolutely insane already. A recent study found that each person ingests about a credit card sized amount of plastic every day. And it’s been fucking with our metabolism and fertility, and causing other long-term health issues for decades now.
We rightly talk about the long-term impact of tobacco and lead on the human body. But somehow the impact of plastic (and, unrelated, sugar) has been flying under the cultural radar for many years. Good to see it’s finally getting the long-overdue attention it deserves.
Last week I decided to count every time my body touched plastic or ingested something that had touched plastic. I gave up within a couple of hours because my internal monologue was constantly saying “touching plastic!”
That shit is everywhere. Sometimes it makes sense (e.g. technology). But it’s also in our clothing, stores our food, etc.
I wish there were better options for storing food and drinks in containers made from materials other than plastic (like, for example tin cans - but even they are often lined with some plastic). But there aren’t. At least not ones that wouldn’t cause the economy to get hit hard You go to a grocery store and almost everything is housed or carried in plastic to some degree. Would be nice to have a database that promoted products that don’t use plastic.
I would say that we as a society need to decide which path to take: the hard path of getting rid of most plastic products and packaging from our lives, or continuing down the current path. But realistically, it’s outside our control, at least for right now.
Credit card sized amount every week, not day. And the data that went into that claim isn’t great:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666911022000247
Any amount of mp we consume is still terrible of course
That last part is driving me crazy with frustration. If I identify a health hazard in my life, I take reasonable precautions against it, but when the whole system is inundated with that same issue, its hard to feel like you’re aligned with “society”. Like you said, it’s literally in everything we eat, drink and do. I’ll continue to support the plastics industry as little as possible, but it still has a stranglehold on industry. I’ve heard some promising reports from India about new developments in more sustainable packaging, but nothing’s hit the mainstream yet.
Really. For the vast majority of packaging, what the fuck was wrong with just using cardboard? Even if 99.99999999% of the stuff winds up in a landfill, at least cardboard is theoretically renewable and will biodegrade in less than a thousand lifetimes.
Cardboard and paper bags went out of style because of the “save the rainforest” narrative. Even though most paper products are made from trees specifically grown to be harvested for their wood.
That’s why we started using plastic bags at grocery stores, remember?
Hemp is very versatile and can be used to make similar paper products while growing at a much faster rate, which potentially makes it a good replacement. The association with marijuana is part of what prevented it from catching on though.
So what about samples (amongst other parts of the entire process) for food-grade products from the manufacturer? I work at a corn syrup manufacturing plant, and there’s no way you can ship corn syrup in cardboard. You would get mold, easily.
I think about this sort of thing from time to time, and every time I come to the same conclusion that manufacturers of bulk goods need to take more responsibility for the entire life cycle of their products. They’re getting a free ride with municipalities stuck footing the bill for recycling plastics, and have zero incentive to solve the problem.
Let’s say the city sent all the recyclables to some regional warehousing facility where they would get sorted by barcode according to manufacturer. Then the companies would be charged for storage and would have strong incentive to come collect their property before it really starts to pile up.
Initially, they will no doubt gripe about it, but in the long term, it may be a win-win in that if say Coca-Cola realizes it can get all its bottles back, it could switch to a more reusable design that could reduce bottling costs?
Yeah. Every time I try to envision some small change that would bring us closer to a utopian ideal, it invariably smacks of socialism. I just can’t help myself! lol
I mean, in a lot of places outside the US, there are small pallets of bottles that, when emptied, get sent back to the bottler to be refilled.
I do remember a time before widespread recycling when you’d pay a small deposit on a drink and get it back when you returned the bottle to the store. Where I live, alcohol sales still follow that model to some extent.
That was the old school approach and I have no problem with it. But it largely disappeared as municipalities started up recycling programs. I guess it was reasoned that when you do it at a city-wide scale, you cast a broader net and divert more material from the landfill. But as this article mentions, recycling has proven to be a sketchy prospect. It loses money for most cities with exception to aluminum cans where the metal still has some resale value.
One way or another, it would be better if we can get back to more of a reuse approach as opposed to breaking everything down to recycle the raw materials. That just doesn’t seem to be working.
This used to be the case with glass bottles in England back in the 80s. Seemed to work well, certainly I and a lot of other kids used to return as many of those bottles as we could to supplement pocket money. These days all the bottles are plastic and there’s no returns policy.
I’m pretty sure coke and pepsi successfully lobbied to have the bottle/can deposit on pop/soda eliminated
A better system is to require all grocery/food/packaging, customer facing retailers to record all sales and from which suppliers those products were bought.
Then charge the retailer the average cost of ‘recycling’ or ‘to the planet’, or another measure of cost.
This will increase costs on all products, but by design more on the costs of hard to recycle goods and packaging.
Charge retailers that daily, watch end to end, from supplier/producer to consumer, behaviour change and iterate accordingly.
Start off with an industry sector though, like grocery stores, most are bricks and mortar, and have high brand acknowledgement so can’t easily escape regulation. The key is to charge the location of sale, not the companies ‘HQ’.
It would be relatively easy to implement, as retailers already collect this info for inventory management.
But I fear it wouldn’t go far enough? What we really need to do is close the loop so that product packaging winds up back at the manufacturer for reuse. And everyone needs to be at the table to discuss how that’s going to work, as it is a significant technological and logistical challenge for both the private and public sectors.
Closed loops are a pretty steep expectation. I’m pretty sure (with no evidence to back me up) with the amount of importers, suppliers, manufacturers, retailers in the supply chain for a product on a shelf, it would be a costly proposition to attempt closed loop.
More costly than using a system of levys to promote behavioural change. Which is the idea behind the system i’s suggesting in the previous comment.
Its about changing the system for the better to generate the fewest negative externalities possible. If a closed loop increases costs more than a system of levys, then everyone will be squeezed more than necessary to get the same result, making negative externalities, like black markets, fraud, more likely than they need be.
Cigarettes in Australia are a great example of this in action. There is a black market for Cigarettes here because they are so expensive from the retailers, but the barriers to widespread black market adoption are still perceived as too high for the greater majority of smokers. The result is a small black market, which will almost always exist for any product you can think of, but the government has tightened the screws on smokers in the public market to make it as uncomfortable process as possible for the sale and purchase of Cigarettes. Until the introduction of younger generations vaping, and the lack of younger generations similar experiences with Cigarettes ill effects, the policy position led to a hard disincentive that worked to decrease smoking rates. But, as always, time and creativity need a reaction that we are still trying to get right.
And like, when I bring it up people call me crazy.
Wouldn’t be so bad if people would just stop reminding us how shitty they are. We get it, you’re here to nut and die angry, good job.
Penn and Teller did an episode of Bullshit on this in 2004. They also concluded that paper and glass recycling were similarly worse that throwing it away. Glass because the energy required to grind, melt, and separate the raw material, and paper because the process uses toxic solvents and produces just as much waste as throwing it away.
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly. That’s another myth that plastic producers push to prevent people reducing their plastic use.
I worked for a glass bottle manufacturer and using cullet (broken glass) lowers the melting point and saves a significant percentage of costs to heat the furnace. Before the lightweight single use bottles became the standard in the 80-90’s, bottles were thicker and heavier, made to be returned, washed and reused.
Also don’t be fooled by people claiming plastics can be burnt cleanly.
Not seeing why not. I did help work on a place that did that. Could you explain what you mean?
best case, you’re releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you’re also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.
Yeah but that CO2 is already up here. Why is it better to pull up more oil instead?
As for the incomplete combustion products we had scrubbers.
I think the takeaway is: everything is hopeless so our species should either go back to hunting and gathering or go extinct.
Nah, hunting and gathering is how we got ourselves into this mess. It’s a mentality that leads to fascism and hoarding of resources.
We need to try some things we haven’t before, like meeting the basic needs of every human, and being OK with being OK. Nobody needs a billionaire, and anyone seeking to consolidate that much wealth and power should be stripped of their lands and titles.
