Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap(lumafield.com) |
Heinz’s sustainable ketchup cap(lumafield.com) |
Think I only used one of these bottles once when they were introduced what 15-20 years ago? Then I've taken the entire lid off every single time since because of how unappetizing it is. Always go with the glass bottles too if I can for the same reason.
I guess they are trying. But still more of a "shuffling deck chairs as the Titanic sinks" than actually addressing a problem
Yachts that fly. Weird world, indeed :)
Apart from that, yes. Do they not realise that their hypocrisy makes their supposed engagement for the 'climate' and 'planet' null and void? Probably not or possibly they imagine they'll have enough money and power to force their ideology down the throats of the general population.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
So now the relatively small amount of mass in the cap is just as recyclable as the bottle itself -- neither are actually going to be recycled.
There's nothing to see here but marketing. And a an interesting engineering puzzle solved, sure.
"How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled"
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-...
One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful.
The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material.
The ideal solution is the bottle recycling machines (like Tomra) found in Northern Europe, that only accepts aluminium and plastic cans/bottles, which goes right back to making new cans/bottles. Well, the plastic bottle part is work in progress, but there are bottles made from 100% recycled materials now, and the key to that is to have a clean well-separated stream of recycled materials coming in.
Funny story: I saw a documentary from a local advanced recycling centre, where they mentioned that the bales of plastic that actually went to be reused in new products/bottles smelled really nice. Because a big portion of them was PP shampoo bottles.
In normal economy, the key to success is specialization. Instead of training each worker on each task, we divide work into chunks, and have t different workers specialize in different work. This increases efficiency tremendously.
However, since most of recycling is based on positive emotions, shaming, and wishful thinking, and not sound economic principles, it shouldn’t be surprising that instead of centralizing sorting work to make it more efficient, we demand that society wastes a lot of collective time, to offload the cost sorting onto regular people (with great inefficiency), and to shame them into getting a feeling of stake in the whole process.
Imagine what would the rest of the economy look like if it used similar model. You’d go to grocery store and waste time picking through produce to find fresh, undamaged fruits and vegetables, because the store can’t bothered to pre-sort it. You would manually add additives after filling up your car, because the gas stations only sell regular gas and can’t be bothered to premix and offer the premium. You’d go to a restaurant, and your waiter would tell you what ingredients you need to bring to get the meal cooked (by the waiter himself).
People shouldn’t need to sort recyclables by category,
Glass/plastic/contaminated cardboard and others are all required to go into the trash.
Which makes no sense, glass is infinitely recyclable, yet it is not, it is instead brought to the local dump.
Now here's the kicker, I was talking the to the trash collection people around the winter break (tip your trash collection folks well, and they will make all kinds of stuff disappear) and they mentioned to me that because there is no demand for cardboard/metal recycling while they load it into two different trucks, they end up at the exact same dump.
This was confirmed not too much later when I went with my contractor to the dump to get rid of a ton of construction material, where I saw two dump trucks right next to each other, one filled with trash and one with recyclables.
So very little actually gets recycled in the United States. Most of it ends up in giant piles, buried...
Regulations that greatly limit the total number of packaging types may be of help here.
Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.
The ideal solution is surely that the waste management industry figures out how to deal efficiently with two streams of waste, one perishable and the other not.
Yep, its all our fault.
What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.
I think a multi-pronged approach that includes but is not limited to reduction will be necessary.
I wonder if even 1% of the charge is paid out to consumers
Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.
This is what the bargaining stage of grief looks like.
We - all of us - want to believe that life can continue on as it has if we just take the right special steps in our kitchen.
In fact, the rituals of modern consumers straining to be “sustainable” is reminiscent of a rain dance - and about as effective.
It’s just cost savings that can be greenwashed.
Like if a 100% plastic and a 1% plastic end up in a landfill or elsewhere the 1% coffee cup is just going to two orders of magnitude less damage than the pure plastic one, we can't let perfect be the enemy of good but OP does have a point about the oil lobby push but that is a separate but related issue.
You know what, you're right. Here, one second...
Ok, I scooted a half foot in the direction of the peak of Everest.
Man, it's exhausting living a life of adventure like I do. At this point, I wager I must be half Sherpa.
I expected to at least see photos of the cap and the one it's replacing.
I went to a university job fair in 2014 and Heinz had a booth there. I remember asking the recruiter what kind of positions they were recruiting for, and her only response was "We are looking for top talent. Are you top talent?" I was pretty thrown off by that, so pressed her with "Top talent in what? I know statistics and programming, do you need anyone who can do that?" Her only response was "well, do you think you're top talent?" I think I tried to ask a couple more times what they were actually looking for, but she just kept repeating the top talent line. I think I eventually said something like "I think I'm pretty good" before dropping off my résumé, grabbing a pickle-shaped lapel pin, and walking away.
Totally weird experience, and very different from the usual job fair recruiter. If it wasn't for the lapel pin that I still have, I wouldn't even be sure it was a real memory.
I sometimes wonder if my life would've been different if I had had the self-esteem and confidence to look her right in the eye and say "yes, I am top talent".
I also wonder if Heinz is actually hiring and retaining "top talent". When I look at their ketchup bottle design innovations over the years, I wonder if maybe they really are!
Has anyone here ever interviewed there or worked there? Are you in fact top talent? Were you surrounded by top talent? Is a packaged food company secretly where all the really smart people go for jobs? That article about the Unilever ice cream factory the other day makes me think there's more to it than meets the eye.
There's a false negative problem, as in all interviews: interviewing well is a different skill than engineering bottle caps. Still, confident, talented people who are on their toes and accustomed to pressure may respond convincingly. So will con artists and the self-deluding types like megalomaniacs, so there's also a false positive problem ...
The bottle is PET and is easily and commonly recycled, if it actually makes it to the recycling facility. About 30% of PET sold in the US actually gets recycled. It's the clear soda bottle plastic.
The cap was previously 99% PP and 1% Silicone and was not recyclable at all.
The cap is now 100% PP and therefore recyclable in theory, but in practice there are limited facilities that can recycle PP.
And if you can't even recycle it in Seattle...
I love the idea of recycling but I just don’t do it anymore when I realized my city’s single stream recycling was likely just ending up being shipped to Asia with fossil fuels and dumped in the ocean eventually and adding to the Pacific plastic gyre. Burying it in a landfill seems highly more optimal than that.
Anyone with a modicum of product and process exp. knows progress > perfection.
> The new cap's uniform composition of polypropylene (PP) simplifies recycling and ...
> Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States.
Cost savings often benefit sustainability. You probably heard the "reduce, reuse, recycle, in that order" thing. The "reduce" part also reduces costs.
Here it looks like there is one less part (the silicone ring), which I believe makes it cheaper to build, cuts on supplies (no more need for silicone), and improves recyclability, which is good for the image and maybe some regulations. I don't know how good it is at delivering ketchup, but if it is as good or better, then we all win. Granted, it is still disposable plastic, but I don't see why that design would be unsuitable for a reusable bottle.
Exactly the kind of R&D I like.
So do the shareholders. Less cost == more profit.
Maybe the same push is not present in the US, but creating a new cap for European market makes sense. Also using the better cap across the whole world to save costs makes sense again.
All engineering is a tradeoff, and I would be interested to see how those factors were considered when doing the redesign.
Isn't the whole reason Heinz ketchup is self stable is because it's too high in acidity for mold to even grow
Here is an innovation Heinz can work on... go back to glass bottles.
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2023/05/plastics-rec...
Even if the majority of people hate it, so what. They hate turning off lights and monitoring electricity usage and driving under the speed limit and wiping their ass.
Traditional clay (earthen) "bhar" cups are pretty awesome. Sanitary (kiln fired), no glazes, durable, water proof, single use, non-toxic, etc.
When you're done sipping your chai, just smash your bhar cup on the ground. It simply becomes earth again.
Surely we can come up with some spiffy new modern variations.
All it'd take is investment and policy.
--
For the eeyores:
Startups are now developing and deploying out carbon-free cement and carbon-free steel.
All it took was investment, cheap energy, and policy.
--
Aside: Since the early '90s, Howard Schultz (Starbucks) has promised us an eco-friendly coffee cup. Any day now, right? I'm so tired of waiting.
I want our governments to force a single type of robust, completely reusable and recyclable packaging for each major type of product.
At a supermarket, if buying meat, it comes in a sturdy reusable plastic container that we pay a deposit on. The next time you shop you bring them back for them to be cleaned/reused and you get your deposit back (or use the credit for cleaned containers for the current shopping trip).
Every bottle of any kind of sauce should be the exact same. Every packaging for every product should be standardised and exactly the same. Glass door or open refrigerators should be banned, open hot areas should be banned.
This'll never happen, but I'm so disappointed with every single shopping trip I make, walking past open hot areas with rotisserie chickens RIGHT NEXT TO open fucking fridges, all filled with products in their own unique multi-plastic-cardboard printed colour bomb packaging. It's just so despicable that we don't care about this for some reason?
Environmentalism has become a sad joke because we're gonna kill this planet, no doubt about it. :/
> The new cap appears as a uniform color in Voyager’s range map... compare it to the old cap, whose silicone valve is denser than the surrounding plastic.
Author: you must be completely blind. Both photos show a wide gradient of colors including blue, green, yellow, and deep orange!
Why does orange in the left photo mean "it is silicone" but orange on the right means "it is PP"?
The picture shows the screw threads of the bottle opening meeting the threads of the cap. And you can see some asymmetry where the part on the left side of the bottle opening is vertically lower than the part on the right side, which is consistent with the thread being a spiral shape.
Instead, lets destroy the world :)
All the rest is a very marginal reduction unlikely to have an effect in the long run.
In a complex environment, where we can't make predictions, is better to be cautious.
Is it really necessary to do all this engineering for this??
Wonder how much this costs? Medically speaking they're pretty damn cheap (compared to other modalities anyway)
In my area they recycle #5 but not something as small as a bottle cap.
We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be recycled is better or worse than a plastic container.
Even if they are not recycled, a glass jar is used for more than five years in an household, only by replacing the caps in the process. If we don't need the jars, we give them away to people who need them, adding more usable glass to sneakernet of jars.
Glass is finicky in some forms, and expensive to make it durable during production and transport, but rarely, if ever, ends up in a trash bin.
And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.
In 70s after an all night party I nearly got run over by one. The only moving vehicle in sight!
Was brilliant during lockdown because you could order food stuffs the night before 3 times a week as part of regular delivery.
What a really nice, fully reusable bottle with no waste at all.
I always loved dandelion & burdock.
https://www.sunderlandecho.com/heritage-and-retro/retro/sars...
Alas cost of living took hold and they stopped the service, so sadly off to the store for the milk now. They didn't even put up an option of 'we can't afford to keep this going, so how much would you pay extra for it'
I bet they would have been surprised what people would illogically pay to have their milk and eggs delivered...
Nothing compared to https://www.google.com/search?q=landfill+plastic&tbm=isch
In the beginning of 90s, when plastic packaging became popular, it was a huge change as we did not have to worry about many health issues ( food poisoning etc).
If soda drinkers cared about plastic consumption, they would switch to anything that has glass containers and spend more - or just cut the habit due to the waste generated. But that's not happening.
Sure, there can be political will to force Coke to switch to something else - bypassing the need for the customer to do anything - but that would result in higher prices which makes people mad. Good luck asking a politician to do something that will upset their constituents
[0] https://www.research-in-germany.org/idw-news/en_US/2023/10/2...
I wish I knew how it worked but her and her business partner don’t talk about it much. Probably for good reason. Pretty sure they take plastic off people hands and sell it to someone who uses it, paid to take it away and then paid again by a buyer.
If ethane (the feedstock for ethylene production) were not useful for plastics, it would just be left in the natural gas and burned with the methane.
Aside from the ketchup dispensing utility, you also escape tedious discussions about the best way to get ketchup out of a glass bottle. Do you tap the side? Shake the bottle? Angle it? Smack the bottom? Just sit there patiently? Warm it up? Stick a knife in it? You can be pretty sure that if you use any of these methods, someone is going to tell you about one of the others.
i store the ketchup bottle upside down and when i open it, it is immediately ready to pour and is mostly controllable
You make a good point and it can be interesting to know how many use of a bottle are required until it becomes more energy-efficient compared to disposable plastic, etc.
The shift to the all plastic packaging paradigm was made when companies found out that they could simply let the consumers deal with the packaging once the product was consumed instead of having to get it back from their hands and process it. Hence the modern plastic dystopia.
EDIT: The bottles for sale on the website are specifically "non-returnable", not sure if that implies no more returns, or only store-purchased bottles are returnable.
Most of my plastic waste is from prescriptions. OMG so wasteful. Wax paper bags would be just fine.
YMMV.
I don't get why people keep pretending plastic being widely used today is due to some conspiracy instead of it's just better at its main function, even without factoring in cost.
Compared to glass container, plastic ones are much lighter, harder to break, flexible, malleable, .. the list goes on.
In the 1980s, the use of glass containers was more out of necessity than preference. People didn't opt for heavy glass containers to be environmentally friendly; they simply lacked alternatives.
The appeal of single-use (plastic) containers lies in their convenience. Although they are undoubtedly more wasteful, their ease of use cannot be denied. People favor them for this convenience, with their wasteful nature being an unfortunate byproduct. If we refuse to acknowledge this fundamental truth, progress in environmentalism will never be done.
Yes but they also have the huge waste issue and society isn't doing enough to deal with it. The drawbacks are also huge, the cost just isn't an issue for the companies putting the plastic out into the world. It's more cost effective because we allow it to be, because we subsidise the oil industry, because we don't tax plastic waste highly enough etc etc.
Yes, they are much more convenient in multiple ways (ease of transportation due to weight, flexible and malleable to take any shape or form, etc.) but there's no pricing of the externalities, if plastics would cost as much needed to take care of their disposal in environmentally friendly ways this convenience would have a much higher cost, naturally diminishing its uses.
While the side-effects of using plastics are not priced into the material it won't ever be solved.
I prefer glass bottles to plastic ones and I always buy soda in glass bottles if they are available(and this means almost always since they are available in the supermarket close to my home).
I don't know how you read parents comment and concluded that they're talking about some conspiracy. They seem to genuinely ask a question that I'm sure they're not the only one thinking about.
> In 80's people use more glass containers because they didn't have choices, not because they love to carry heavy glass containers around to help the environment.
Again, don't think they said that people used glass containers back then to help the environment, just that for whatever reason they used those containers, it was less harmful to the environment. Not because that was the reason, that was just a side-effect of glass being the only choice. Then they ask the community what the reasons could be for everything being wrapped in plastic now.
As it reads right now, your comment doesn't seem to assume good faith of parent comment, but instead you're arguing against some position that isn't even talked about.
Even then, in the end I'd still end up buying it in plastic. The plastic squeeze bottles are just way more convenient. I'd probably be fine buying it in bulk and fill my own squeeze bottles to reduce plastic consumption, but buying smaller and radically more expensive glass bottles isn't really a winning choice in my book.
I can sometimes find fancy ketchup in glass bottles, but considering that I only buy ketchup once or twice a year, I just can't remember. The glass bottle available isn't the Mutti ketchup that I bought years ago, so I'm just buying Heinz.
That seems absurdly large to me.
64 gallons is 250 litres. We're four and we use about one 30 litres (8 gallons) bag for "rest" trash per week (everything not recyclable, including diapers which take a lot of space, so hopefully soon we can at least halve that trash volume) one 30 litres bag for recyclable plastic/metal every two weeks and maybe one 30 litres bag for compostable stuff (mostly just vegetable and fruit peels from cooking) every two weeks or so.
That's about 60 litres or 15 gallons per week for a normal-sized family. I can see some of my neighbours having somewhat larger bags, some with smaller bags, but I feel like we are mostly average for our area (in Belgium).
In fact, a quick search tells me that Belgians have produced on average 683 kg of trash per year in 2022, which comes to 13 kg per week per person and seems rather consistent with my numbers.
I live in a household with 3 adults generating trash, we don't even fill up a 190L bin every 2 weeks in between pickups, usually when I roll the bin to the street it will be about 1/3 to 2/3 filled. We have a compost bin about the same size which also gets about 1/3 to 2/3 filled every 2 weeks.
Apart from that our recycling bins (about 60L for the paper/plastic ones, 20L for glass and metal) gets filled in about 4-6 weeks which I then take to the recycling station.
In summary as 3 adults we generate in the absolute top end about 117 gallons of non-compostable trash a month (those are very rare instances), so about 30 gallons a week for 3 adults even when adding up all the recycling we do.
Easy - it's way cheaper.
That was surprising to me and, uh, no, they don't, unless you're considering building materials (i.e. rocks).
It's not easy to find numbers, but for milk in Germany, it appears to be around 10%, about the same as packaging. Milk should be worse than many other products because it's cheap and heavy, on the other hand it's rarely shipped over great distances. [1]
Another report [2] considers transportation costs relative to the value of the goods transported, which isn't exactly the same as "how much of the consumer price is transportation", but surely related, and has 2.7% for foodstuffs (and 55% for rocks).
I mean, I'm sure it varies widely for different kinds of consumables, but overall, transporting stuff is cheap. I think even in terms of CO2, which is certainly underrepresented in cost currently, production dominates transport for most goods in a grocery store, apart from produce shipped by air.
[1] https://www.agrarheute.com/tier/rind/78-cent-fuer-trinkmilch...
[2] https://bmdv.bund.de/SharedDocs/DE/Anlage/G/MKS-Wissenschaft... (Tabelle 8)
The local milkman of the 50s, did better with glass collecting and delivering milk. The national enterprise benefits, as you say, from weight reduction.
The common 2kg×6 PET bottles format is too heavy for glass bottles, so you end up paying more for heavier 1.5kgx6 bottles that are going to last you less.
Short term benefit and profit margin dominate the calculation of if life environments deserve to continue unpolluted or they deserve to be destroyed in the name of compound interest.
It's sad, but realistically almost all plastic one disposes of needs to go in the trash can rather than recycling.
You can't even rely on dedicated collection - https://abcnews.go.com/US/put-dozens-trackers-plastic-bags-r...
Almost all plastic packaging is collected, including wrappers and trays.
https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-plas... (in Danish)
Funny you phrase it like that, because that's exactly what the STEINERT UniSort does. Plastic waste is finely shredded, dumped onto a conveyor belt, imaged, then passed over air puff sorters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3QHa9oQshw
Is it worth it? Of course not. Far cheaper and easier just to burn it. But for EU nations that are really dedicated to recycling, it can be done.
(we're working to solve this problem though in the classic VC backed way - DM for more information!)
Here in germany some sort of plastic recycling actually works, because there is a deposit fee on all plastic bottles - you bring them back to the supermarket to get it back - and then there is one source of the same plastic, that does get used for new products.
There is obviously hope, just not enough incentive because it costs.
This is obviously false from the start. the entire problem is that it does require training and people don’t perform the task very effectively as a result.
Picking damaged fruit from undamaged fruit or mixing a low-entropy fuel with a low-entropy additive to make a high entropy product is cheap.
Sorting through trash is much more expensive because the entropy in a trash stream is massive, and it only gets worse downstream in the chain. You’ve got all sorts of different types of things mixed together, some possibly dangerous.
And we already offload a lot of this sorting to third-world countries and this is not exactly an ethical solution.
If these guys also started selling sauces like ketchup or mustard etc, where I could fill my bottle with them, I would absolutely get it from there. I guess most sauces can't be made on site, but its still a net win for the shop to get a bulk keg for them and customers to refill their bottles.
The application of ridicule and dimissal to everything associated with progressivism is a common pattern these days. Effectively, it's reactionary; the reactionaries have done a great job at spreading their messaging and demonizing their perceived enemies, and at the same time making people argue for their own powerlessness.
Demonization, despair (powerlessness), and ridicule are tools for people whose agenda loses on the merits.
https://www.infographicsarchive.com/which-states-recycling-t... (which in turn cites https://www.ball.com/sustainability/real-circularity/50-stat... ) seems to show deposits correlating with better recycling rates. MI got a poor score overall, but in cans it's on top.
Were they looking for chemists? Programmers? Mechanical engineers? Project managers? Janitors?
I'm top talent with a vacuum cleaner (at least according to my mom), but I wasn't thinking along those lines at the job fair.
It’s basically crude oil when it comes to energy/kg.
Lots of shipping containers going back empty to lots of places.
Last time I bought parchment paper, I settled on Costco/Kirkland brand, for that reason. I dimly recall it has a silicon-based coating for non-stick feature. Quick look at the box has no info.
I anticipate we'll learn that all this fancy new silicon is toxic as well.
FML.
I still think paper is preferable to plastic. IIRC, Amazon Rx is using paper now.
I see 42% “energy recovery” from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/topics/en/article/20181212STO... from 2018.
I found this from January 2024: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-new-b...
> In Europe, about 40 % of post-consumer plastic waste is incinerated with energy recovery, and the rest is either landfilled or recycled. About half of the plastic waste collected and recycled is treated in the European Union; the other half is exported, mainly to China.
It's more than the supermarket prices but those are insanely low for the product. I understand many feel the pinch more but if you can, skipping the supermarket can mean more to the actual producers.
I'm all for making sure farmers get paid properly instead of ripped off by the supermarkets but when it comes down to it had to count the pennies at home first
https://sundaycomicsdebt.blogspot.com/2015/02/scrooge-math.h...
>They discovered that a massive 46 per cent of European separated plastic waste is exported outside the country of origin.
Do you have a sense for what the collection and reprocessing costs were for the reused glass containers where you are?
I suspect that the warehousing and distribution systems we use in the US complicate collection of empty containers, i.e. there are several warehousing and stocking steps between the manufacturer and the retailer.
If you have a product made locally and distributed in a van, it's no problem to collect the empties. If you supply a distributor who supplies a supermarket chain that warehouses product regionally... It's a lot of steps for the bottle to get back to the manufacturer for reuse.
Any change requires doing things that people are unfamiliar with. Most of human history - 99.9..% of it - didn't have single-use disposable packaging, and did heavily reuse 'packaging' (containers).
That goes without saying.
The point is plastic is not only cheaper but also better (in term of functionality) and that's a problem we need solving to actually get ordinary people on the wagon. Reflecting their environment impact into cost with tax etc. is cool, but that's not enough.
Eating out and food delivery being 2x or even sometimes 10x more expensive than making food yourself never stop (some) people to do that anyway because of its convenience factor.
Currently we recycle 9% of plastics, sorting through the cheaper grades is non-trivial, we can't recycle our way out of this mess.
Burning plastic will just create more pollution, capturing outgassing from burning is also non-trivial.
We should instead use less plastic, the 3 Rs start with Reduce, then Re-use and only after that Recycle.
Even the ubiquitous 3 Rs logo with arrows has now become shorthand for just recycle.
Ah, nothing to worry about then
I'm sure glass is far more environmentally sound, but to claim that glass production, glass cleaning(and the harsh chemicals and their production cost to the environment), and water for flushing afterwards are not relevant, would be wrong.
So every business off-loads some environmental impact to the tax payer.
My point? While your statement is true, it has nothing to do with how the business decision is made re: cost to the business. The metric used there is "what saves the business money".
Glass is not recyclable widely. It is a contaminant in single-stream recycling because broken glass is a hazard for sorting, and even if you are able to recycle it, the transport costs are extremely high [3].
[0] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic... [1] https://ecochain.com/case-studies/case-study-packaging-plast... [2] https://earth.org/glass-bottles-environmental-impact/ [3] https://www.wastedive.com/news/when-its-cheaper-to-trash-gla...
In the past, even when accounting for recycling of the glass, plastic bottles for example had a lower environmental impact that glass.
edit: And I enjoy using glass myself, especially for items I am storing longer term but I also try to think about the total environmental cost of the item. I know in the US people often do things that feel good, like buying reusable shopping bags instead of plastic bags given my the store. The problem is the number of times that reusable bags needs to be used to be better for the environment is often many more times than they often get used.
I think microplastic pollution is horrible. It's arguably worth putting extra carbon in the atmosphere to avoid plastic pollution. I'm not actually sure.
Effectively this news story can be reduced to 'Plastic lid swapped for new plastic lid which makes company more money.'
Its not cynical, its the truth.
There are already lots of sibling comments saying the heavy use of plastic is "forced on people" by companies, so yes it is talked about. And that's exactly what OP implied.
I'm not even saying this point is entirely false, just want to emphasize that people actually prefer convenient things regardless if it's forced on them or not.
Reply to those comments instead then? Instead of assuming bad faith like "OP implied". I cannot be the only one who doesn't think parent implied anything at all and instead just asked a question why the change happened from glass to plastic.
I think that in a lot of cases plastic is a poor container and that's why I asked the question, for me it's not obvious the convenience of the plastic nor why plastic is the only available packaging material for almost everything.
Not every reply to a comment you make is a personal attack, and it would behoove you to recognize that. Sometimes people just want to enhance a discussion with relevant and topical information, and may even just be curious about your thoughts on related topics.
there are no economic incentives to use recycled plastic, and regulation mandating its use is minimal to non-existing. so most plastic that could be recycled isn't, and not because it isn't available/collected/sorted.
So maybe it's more expensive but there seems to be some kind of incentive for these companies, even if it's just marketing.
IMO it's simply habits
no one would buy beer or wine in a plastic bottle, because it feels wrong (and it is if you ask me).
Here in Italy nobody in their right mind buys tomato sauce in plastic bottles, our granmas would come to haunt us at night if we did.
but we buy water in plastic bottles ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Where I come from beers come almost exclusively in glass bottles for the large ones (66cl), aluminum cans are only used for the small ones (33cl) but you can buy them in glass as well.
There is usually no price difference whatsoever
For example
https://www.amazon.it/Peroni-Italiano-Moderatamente-Gradazio...
https://www.amazon.it/Peroni-175-Anniversario-Birra-Cassa-dp...
Many of the cheapest beers are imports, for example Bavaria, that you usually find in aluminum cans in Holland but in glass bottles in Italy.
I can't explain why, but for us some things must be bottled in glass or they aren't "good".
Tomatoes is another example: you can find cans of tomato pulp or peeled tomatoes, but not the sauce, it always comes in glass bottles (it exists of course, but it's a very weird choice to us).
Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), commonly known as mad cow disease, is an incurable and invariably fatal neurodegenerative disease of cattle. . . . Spread to humans is believed to result in variant Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (vCJD). As of 2018, a total of 231 cases of vCJD had been reported globally.
BSE is thought to be due to an infection by a misfolded protein, known as a prion. Cattle are believed to have been infected by being fed meat-and-bone meal (MBM) that contained either the remains of cattle who spontaneously developed the disease or scrapie-infected sheep products. The outbreak increased throughout the United Kingdom due to the practice of feeding meat-and-bone meal to young calves of dairy cows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...
It's reusable, sure. Glass milk bottles you return to be washed and refilled are great.
Glass recycling though makes little sense in many areas of the world. You are basically trucking sand around. Just far less efficiently. Glass takes about 40% less energy to melt than sand does, so you need to have a relatively efficient recycling supply chain to make up for that.
I haven't looked into it for over a decade, but the RoEI on that was exceedingly negative for my locality when I did.
Energy is not the only metric. We need metrics to roughly quantify ecological destruction due to mining, and account for those in our calculations.
Mine even stops, gets out, and puts my bins away. Only for my neighbor and me, because we take care of him at the holidays.
I'm still not convinced after looking at the actual numbers, that "recycling", putting stuff into 6 different bins etc, makes any difference at all in the grand scheme og things. Instead it's a big show hiding the fact that the problem is with over-consumption and non degradable materials being legal in the first place. Bottle and glass recycling for money seems to be semi working though but then we'll need QR codes on each item, better but still not eliminating the transport and seperation issues, and the fact that a lot of recycling is actually dumping stuff on poor people far away, and that industry is polluting way more than end consumers.
As some people have pointed out it's actually the opposite, a smokescreen invented by the industry in the 90's to shift responsibility to the consumer so you do "some magic complex performance" at home and think now it's ok while everything just continues as is defacto, ie. worse than doing nothing. Instead we should ban or tax non degradable materials, and stick to the few working areas while regulating industry and materials even though it'l be rough until we're forced to create better materials.
The fourth page "PLAST" (plastic) has a pie chart showing the composition of collected plastic waste. The red 23% is "residue for incineration".
The other text includes "The Municipality of Copenhagen has demanded that at least 75% must set aside for recycling and a maximum of 25% as residual fraction for incineration."
Takes me months to fill the rubbish bin
What, pray tell, are they doing with this low-grade recycled plastic? Putting park benches out into the environment that will degrade faster, distributing microplastics everywhere?
Or are they investing a ton of time and energy to recycle the plastic into higher use (than park benches), which likely has significant input energy costs, which in turn is probably harming the environment?
You can't get anything for free, and recycling plastics least of all. The most environmentally friendly solution I'm aware of today is to simply relocate it all into one contained location and incinerating it as cleanly as possible or burying it in a landfill with protective sheeting. We're not even close to running out of landfill acreage on this planet.
What are they actually doing with the recycled plastic? Making it into pellets and flakes. They call out that you could use these to make shampoo bottles, but dare not actually claim that such a thing is happening. My understanding of recycled plastic is that it is inherently lower grade than new plastic. If recycled plastic is that much cheaper but still as useable, then surely manufacturers are jumping at the bit to use it everywhere?
Finally, there is no mention of the energy cost or environmental impact of the recycling.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-11-30/redcycle-soft-plastic...
It might cost a buck more per 6pack for Coke right now - but people aren't going to get it if it costs 2-3x more than Pepsi.
https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/coca-cola-s...
https://www.vox.com/money/23979340/diet-coke-price-coca-cola...
-- https://www.heinz.com/products/00013000006408-tomato-ketchup
- tomatoes (148g for 100g of ketchup)
- distilled vinegar
- sugar
- salt
- spice and herb extract
- spices
Both bacteria and fungi prefer more acidic than alkaline environments, with a "happy range" for each. Tomatoes are only weakly acidic, at 4.3 to 4.9. But molds commonly grow at pH 3.5 to 8. Aspergillus niger and Penicillium funiculosum can grow at pH 2 and below.
Extremely low pH is certainly useful at inhibiting some forms of life, but the world contains many different forms of life, and some are a lot more adaptive than others. Research shows that the best way to preserve food is a combination of chemical preservatives and low pH. Which is why the commercial food industry uses preservatives...
We saw a significant drop after they started collecting plastics separately. We have a 120 litre bin that we put to the curb every two months or so. I don't quite understand what people are throwing out all the time that you can fill a large bin every week...
What goes into this since you already recycle bio, cardboard, plastics and metal? My "generic trash" is a 25 liter bag that I empty about once a month or so. Since most things go to the specific recycling containers, the generic waste is dominantly just napkins and tissues that shouldn't go to bio.
I don't have kids so no diapers or anything like that, but 120l weekly sounds still a lot after recycling.
I have lots of kitchen waste, grass waste, and plenty of brown organic matter I can add that’s around my yard. The bugs love it.
I think a lot of people make the mistake of looking at a quantity of trash and measuring it by apparent visual volume, but that's not a very useful measure. Mass is a lot closer to a useful number. Many things that visually appear enormous are in fact not that big a deal, many things that visually seem small actually represent a lot of resources.
Here in Japan we are sorting and packaging our trash all at home and putting it out to be collected individually.
There is
- cardboard (to be cut flat and bundled with string)
- unlaminated and clean paper (to be bundled with string or collected in a paper bag)
- PET (clean, no bottle cap, label removed)
- Milk cartons above 1l (cut open, flattened and tied up with string)
- glass
- cans
- aluminum
- other plastics (if clean)
- other metals
Of the top of my head ;)
What’s left over is classified as Burnable or non-Burnable and collected separately.
Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know.
Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.
I spend about an hour sorting trash each week. Given the opportunity cost, I really consider what to buy, order online etc.
That gets to the clear difference between Japanese culture and US culture.
Americans will sort their trash, but they won't spend that much time sorting their trash.
Japanese culture has an immense amount of civic pride and responsibility that isn't present in the US.
>Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.
Part of it is the fact that neighbors police each other. Culturally we tend to reject when others are intruding in our business. Note the disdain for HOA and busybodies.
Having that culture might be a good thing in respect to recycling but it is also a brake to other societal change as it is a consecutive force.
Here in Germany, the only additional breakdown is that "glass" is separated into brown glass, green glass, and white (or clear) glass. Usually thought as beer / wine / other.
> Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind.
See, that's the key. In my area, we have compost, recycling and trash bins for each home. What you put in it is up to your moral compass. Nobody is checking or seeing what you put in there. If there was some peer pressure around that, things would change rather quickly, I'd imagine. Though I can't see such a system emerging in the states. People like to do their own thing, individually, and not be bothered with it.
The trash men check our bins in Seattle (although not very thoroughly). We can be fined for throwing compostable material in the trash (has never happened to me) and your recycling can be rejected for throwing away non-recyclables (has happened to me when someone dumped their trash in my recycling bin.)
Assume the bottles don't have to be super clear.
- 86% of plastics are "recycled", of which 56% is "thermally recycled", the rest 25% is only quoted as "chemical recycling and material recycling combined" in most PR materials, which I think is enough indication that it's not going back into bottles.[1][2]
- I was wrong about glasses: 70% of glass bottle source materials comes from recycled materials[3], and use of reusable bottles have declined over the years and converging into 50%[4](by numbers of bottles?).
- Papers and milk cartons[5] are fine as had always been; I think those were recycled to toilet papers.
0: https://www-cycle.nies.go.jp/magazine/kenkyu/202008.html
1: https://www.sustainability-hub.jp/column/learn/about-chemica...
2: https://www.wbsj.org/activity/conservation/law/plastic-pollu...
3: https://www.glass-3r.jp/data/
It used to be that people smoked everywhere, 10 years ago certain districts started prohibiting smoking in the street and relegated smokers to certain corners, today this corners have been replaced by closed containers with air conditioning and filtration systems.
It sometimes feels magical…
Putting so many hours into recycling... well it depends on how much that actually accomplishes. Because that is a huge amount of labor.
They're finding they stuff embedded in utero lining; your argument strikes me as the same old rebuttal to the things we can't political agree to study. You can't deny there is a lot of business momentum to keep plastics in production, no? And yet the more we learn the more checkmarks in the minus column for petro-chemicals accumulate.
We most definitely need to fully study the impacts of plastics on the human body. We don’t know the full extent of what it’s doing and it’s important we figure it out.
It’s a complicated equation that we do not fully understand. It’s easy to say just ban it but there is are a lot of other negative consequences that will come out of that decision. That’s my point, none of us know the exact outcome either way so it’s silly and all too easy to just make proclamations like yours and then sprinkle in some dementia with it. I am certain you can pull out a study that has a link between the two but I suspect we still don’t know the true origins of dementia and we do not know the full impacts of plastics on human health.
I bet you don’t even know the source of microplastics fully. I sure don’t. For all I know it is from car tires that makes it into the water ways and we eventually drink it or consume meat that has drunk it.
We don’t know the equation enough to know what concerns we should weight heavier on a global/population scale.
Why would you ever expect a bottling plant to move away from plastic when there is no incentive? Why would anyone move to better materials or continue researching when there are cheaper alternatives that aren't rightfully taxed against their externalities?
Why are we as a society, one which has banned lead from gasoline (resulting in lower crime rates across the world) or banning CFCs to repair the ozone layer, feel so helpless trying to hold these corporations accountable for not polluting our world around us today?
Is it really that impossible?
Leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, asbestos, pet food laced with poisons and filler, baby food laced with heavy metals, opioids, cigarettes, campaigns about seat belts being unsafe, round up, fracking that poisons the ground water, etc.
Excuse me if I doubt the corporations, that continue to poison the the world around us unless literally forced by nation states not to, are being honest when they safe "oh it's not harmful" and not the reality of the situation. Wanting to save a buck, repercussions be damned.
Why are you saying "clearly" as if it's 100% guaranteed? We have no idea the repercussions of introducing a new substance that has literally infiltrated all organic life on earth. This is completely new territory and acting like it's all "solved science" is extremely disingenuous.
Manufacturer > store > pantry > garbage can > dump.
Isn’t the majority of this buried in the ground in dumps that are sealed off from groundwater?
I suspect our clothes, cars/tires, houses, and other things that live outside contribute more to microplastics than food containers.
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/01/12/plastic-bottles-n...
The question should be reversed, is there anything made of plastic that doesn't shed particles? It seems likely not, they all tend to shed.
In the other hand, I probably have about a pound of Tupperware in my body. I guess my point is that you’re right about micro plastics in the environment, but I’m more concerned about the ones in me.
(Strenuously agree that both are bad).
It's not really on the scale of sanitariness. It's a pollutant and a problem. You can even say it's not worth the tradeoff. But no, plastics are not unsanitary because they can produce microsplastics.
Agree the incentives are screwed up, and that could help.
yeah, that would be a great use of everyone's time. line up at the olive oil station, line up at the beer station, line up at the flour station, line up at the coffee station, line up at the ketchup station, ....
and then on top of that, add up the time and expense of everyone getting a different price based on how much their unique container holds.
And yeah, I actually do go with the "line up at the beer station and get bulk beer", a number of breweries around me have walk-up growler filling stations. It is pretty nice getting fresh beer straight from the source. A few groceries near me fill growlers as well.
It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.
Perhaps you prefer the “old” way. Perhaps it is faster. But if we can not make tiny changes like that, how will we explain ourselves in 30 years time to our grandchildren?
“Yea I know sweety we messed up your planet. But I’ll be dead in 5 years and in the mean time it was really convenient. Sucks to be you”
1 minute for each product, vs like 1 second for each product. I think it's a similar efficiency loss as containerized vs break bulk shipping.
https://www.packaging-gateway.com/comment/tylenol-murders-fo...
There are psychos all over America. Wanton violence and anti-social behaviour are cultural norm. You can get shot because someone else looked at another person. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Kansas_City_parade_shoo...
We can't have nice things because we don't enforce any standard of conduct. Progressives are more concerned about git branch names than ensuring children actually learn something in school.
Compared to narrow aisles and decision paralysis from 60 different plastic bottles with the same ingredients but different scents/dyes, I think any inefficiencies in bulk shopping are probably pretty small.
It's smarter in every single point: - I buy what I need instead of what was decided by the packager. - I don't buy a package to throw it away and buy a new one next time. What a waste of money on top of the environmental impact. - It's way more efficient for shopping. When things are organised in bulk it's visually much easier to spot in comparison with packaged stuff with random designs in aisles. - Never experience "queues at stations" so this is a non problem in my 2 decades experiences of shopping in bulk in various cities/countries
Sounds like too much water content and/or not enough air for aerobic bacteria to get to work. Tossing the pile with a pitchfork somewhat frequently should help it.
Unfortunately, compositing when you live with wildlife is a challenge. I don't bother because if the raccoons didn't get into it, the bears would, and both are annoyingly messy when they do. I even had a bear do structure damage to my garage when she broke in to get at the garbage one year.
I’ll try again with more dry leaves. Spring is close to starting in my area.
Your local hardware store may also have some compost kickstarter liquids as well, which might be helpful if you want to get it going before too many flies or ants come out to infest the pile.
How large is your property? I can put the actual pile some distance away on a > 1 acre lot.
In the past, I composted cat litter (paper variety, not clay) in a compost pile, and that did cause serious odor problems. Don't do that.
Source on this?
and people STILL give them the benefit of the doubt.
People willing to allow others to poison us so they can earn money.
(Still not buying any Tupperware, though).
Also Stop'n'Shop, a very much NOT a bougie food store, has bulk coffee with a grinder. At least in some locations.
Politics is the struggle to gain, retain, and use power. The use of plastics creates a huge amount of wealth and power for many, by definition anything that could affect this is political.
Studied by whom? Petrochemical companies have studies on their stuff back for decades. They'd never endanger the public to improve their bottom line. Plastics are fine, dontchaknow?
I personally am excited for the coming years and hopefully us having a better idea how we can use plastic more efficiently. In the near term we should be able to get a better idea of major contributors to microplastics and maybe be able to reduce those.
I've not been in Germany for a long while, but I was impressed when last there by a near complete absence of excess packaging, nails in big boxes sold by weight rather than pre sorted into tiny plastic packets, etc.
No idea if they kept that up.
Addendum: Apparently so, and they have 5 types of household bins for seperating waste: https://greenendeavour.com.au/is-germanys-waste-management-s...
Not that I'd take the recycling percentage at face value, there are certainly challenges. But the overall system is fairly solid.
https://www.umweltbundesamt.de/daten/ressourcen-abfall/verwe...
https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/indicators/waste-recyc...
I am unaware of the percentage of rejected contaminated plastics you mentioned, but Germans being Germans I assume it is not scandalous
I can't even begin to imagine the discourse (and "experts" brought on-air at Fox News) that would take place if such legislation was proposed in the US.
* Single-use plastic bottle have a 25 cent deposit in Germany. This is 5x the 5cents in California.
* Germany has enacted this legislation federally.
* The legislation also requires that any retailer that sells plastic bottles (and glass bottles) must also facilitate the return of these bottles.
I lived in California for a couple of years. I never saw a recycling machine at any Safeway, Walgreens or even Whole Foods while I was there. The closest thing to a "recycling machine" is the army of homeless people pushing trollies filled with bottles to take to a recycling center. I don't think that really counts.
Regarding consumers shouldering the cost - well, yeah, regulation drives prices up; even my liberal self agrees that that's broadly true. Those same consumers will be shouldering the cost of an environment permeated by toxic microplastics, which we are increasingly being driven to believe will be a greater impact than that of more expensive consumer goods.
First, price increases depend on elasticity. I'm guessing that ketchup demand is pretty elastic; it's not diabetes medication or higher education.
Also, we can assume Heinz, being sophisticated, has already priced it for the highest possible marginal return; there's not necessarily room for increasing the price without reducing return (by driving down sales).
After fossil fuels are done, the reduced carbon in the waste stream (including plastics, but also cellulosic materials) will become more valuable as feedstock for various chemical processes. Garbage refining will be a thing. It will be an aggressive chemical endeavor, more akin to petroleum refining than to recycling.
The only people that have plastic in this future society are extremely wealthy and poor people "mine" old landfills looking for plastic to sell.
The catch is they're obscenely expensive.
What does this actually mean and what are you basing it on? Without any sources or references it reads a bit like FUD.
The gist: similar to Big Tobacco, etc., internally with the plastics industry, there seems to have been a much greater degree of pessimism about the long-term economic viability of plastics recycling, but it was sold to the public anyway via ad campaigns and lobbying to forestall regulation or legislation limiting plastics as public sentiment was shifting towards a greater sense of environmental awareness.
Also there are several different types of plastic that do not melt together, or do not melt at all, and can't be easily recycled or reused. It also degrades and becomes more toxic on every cycle and, unlike glass, health safety of recycled plastic cannot be guaranteed so to package food the only safe option is to make new plastic.
Some countries like Sweden and Finland use incineration to such extent that they have a lack of domestic waste and have to import it [0].
You would have to be naive to believe that executives in the petroleum and plastic industries are unaware of how little plastic is actually recycled rather than complicit.
If recycling were widespread, you'd expect the vast majority of products to be made with recycled plastic.
While we might think that much of the world's plastic waste is recycled, only 9% is. Half of the world's plastic still goes straight to landfill. Another fifth is mismanaged – meaning it is not recycled, incinerated, or kept in sealed landfills – putting it at risk of being leaked into rivers, lakes, and the ocean.
I misworded my first sentence, I meant that 80% either goes to the landfill or it's not recycled, but apparently it's more like 70%.
Homes that don't have electric or district heating are often heated with oil anyway, might as well have some utility to that oil before it's burned?
