Companies like plastic because it means thicker margins for them, environment be damned; the proper solution is not to buy into the “consumers should be recycling” narrative but to thin out their margins so that using more sustainable and recyclable materials is financially attractive again.
Nobody is individually dictating plastic use, and no truly high-level system exists to prescribe it: this is all largely emergent. I think we should try, and I think we need to hold ourselves and each other accountable, but ... what if this is just how it goes?
People putting their rubbish in the bin rather than throwing it in the nearest gutter / river / garden would get us 90% of the way there.
I spend a lot of time on trails and in parks in the US. Perhaps it is different elsewhere, but we typically do not see much trash in those areas, in most cases the trash we do see being a shopping bag or candy wrapper that has blown in from elsewhere or accidentally dropped. Yes, we see some intentional, careless stuff which is upsetting (and we clean it up if we can) but I will never act liike everyone is just throwing their trash wherever. Most people throw their trash away in appropriate spots, leaving a tiny percentage that is being malicious about it. I'd say that's pretty good.
One thing we do have a problem with is overflowing trash bins. This is two-fold. The bins in parks and trails do get changed on a regular schedule, but it seems that these days it is not often enough. The second problem is packaging. So many foods and products come in ridiculous amounts of packaging that the bins get full quickly because said packaging is bulky and difficult to break down.
For the most part, I think people here are doing a good job of trying to keep the trash where it belongs, giving what I consider a reasonable effort. But we're up against companies like the ones listed in the article and their practices that are producing tons of unnecessary plastics. Knowing that, I will never put the onus entirely on the consumer. Until these companies take some responsibility (and stop pushing the idea that this is somehow our fault) in an effective way, not just lip service and hand waving as they have done, the problem will continue regardless of how hard the consumer upholds their end of the bargain.
Most trash isn't "thrown" anywhere with a direct path to the ocean anyway.
https://www.google.com/search?sca_esv=41165fec71bc817d&sxsrf...
Of course sometime I see littering in streets and parks, sometime literal feet away from bins and yeah, that's infuriating.
Consumers like plastic because it is better than the alternatives.
They like it because it's cheap, both in manufacturing raw materials, production, and weight advantages in shipping.
Which is to say, are you sure that the current powers that be are ready to withstand the backlash of their political constituencies once that consumerist policy is actively reversed?
People will do the next convenient thing, whatever it is. Re-use containers made of sustainable materials, not buy something on a whim that they do not need, pay more for plastic as an indulgence (obviously it should not be banned, just taxed), etc.
Also, not a psychologist, but I reckon if you dig into what drives people to exhibit consumerism I suspect you’d find things like 1) wealth/status signaling, 2) virtue signaling, 3) just socially having a good time out with friends (shopping is common), 4) stress relief. None of that would be substantially hindered even if disposable plastic is banned outright (which is perhaps a questionable strategy), it would just find other avenues for expression.
Cases where plastic does enable some things that are otherwise infeasible I believe are numerous, but drink containers is not one of them.
I read numbers from Norway where it says that 1/3 of the plastic that is processed is recycled.
There are also incentives from the government that helps. They add a deposit to every soda bottle sold, that is given back immediately when the bottle is returned for recycling. This incentivises many to return it, because they would otherwise basically throw money in the trash. 92% of all bottles are returned for recycling. Everyone brings their empty bottles and cans to a grocery store, and use the money as partial payment for groceries or participate in a lottery where the profit is given to charity. All stores that sell soda products are required to also process the return, so they are using reverse vending machines to handle this automatically to save time (since the 70s)
Maybe some of the plastic will not be recycled but it will at least be destroyed and not just thrown in the ocean
Leaded gasoline, asbestos, plastics (micro plastics, the Great Garbage Patch, etc), teflon, etc.
We have some real winners in there but the constant push for growth leads to these wonder materials being used 1000 - 100 000 000x more than they should be used. Usually because of convenience and profit margins.
It's just that it's close to impossible to get rid of them. Plastic is in: paint, wall covering such as wallpaper, food packaging, waste disposable bags, cars, bikes, clothes, shoes, ...
It's basically impossible to find all natural products and they're also super expensive because, well, they are, but also because we're underinvesting in them.
He found that the environmental impact created by the washing of the glass bottles was worse than the impact of the entire production and disposal cycle for the cartons. If you added in the production of the glass, the recycling of glass when it broke, and the extra impact from transport (less space due to not being able to pack as well, heavier) there was no competition at all - glass was way, way worse.
Plastic was a bit better than glass, and carton was the best available option. So they stayed with carton.
This was ~30 years ago, mind, so the equation may have changed. But I still find it important to check before deciding "Let's go glass" is the right option.
While I'm sure this is true in general, my impression is that the PET used in drink-bottles recycle well. For drink bottles I don't think we have a good option either? Glass is too heavy, aluminum is more energy intensive (I assume) even when it's recycled. Reusable bottles is unlikely to be realistic.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030438942...
Interestingly, both have different environmental externalities, and not sure how those have changed over the decades and will in the future.
Lego drops plans to make bricks from recycled plastic bottles https://edition.cnn.com/2023/09/25/business/lego-abandons-re...
Lego plans to make half the plastic in bricks from renewable materials by 2026 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/aug/28...
It used to be the norm in the UK for milk.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has made a resealable aluminium can. Until that is solved aluminium is inferior to PET for many use cases. In fact this is the primary reason I hardly ever buy soda in cans.
I mean you could have a screw cap on a can too if that is important. Dunno why 33cl/50cl and whatever the oz. sizes are, are metal and plastic respectivly.
Using one time cannisters for water feels fundamentally unsubstainable.
Enrages me how huge corporations churning out consumer slop aren't held to any standards.
Would love to see ringfenced taxes on domestic revenue for such companies, which go into cleaning up the streets of their shite, research into more sustainable materials, recycling and bottle collection schemes, etc.
Quite incredible the amount of guilt and societal pressure the little man has in 'saving the planet', when companies with nation state resources seem to be devoid of any responsibility.
Plastic waste is not a problem if it's handled correctly is what I'm saying. In big chunks of europe you pay a deposit for even small plastic bottles nowadays, to be returned if you (or someone else) returns it to a collection point from where it's (theoretically) disposed of properly. If it ends up in general waste or the environment, that deposit is theoretically used for its cleanup.
And what would they do?
Tight regulations and additional tax on single use plastics can reduce plastic waste.
I do not see congress ever agreeing to limit plastic due to the outsized influence of the industries and companies involved. Regulatory action has been almost non-existent, regardless of which administration was in power. No federal agency has the legal authority to limit the flow of plastic into America, and as stated, it is unlikely congress will ever give them that authority; not to mention a decade of litigation ahead.
The only thing that can be done to have some impact is a high tariff on plastics, including packaging and as a percentage of the product. At the same time, there should be no tariff on replacements for plastics such as aluminum and glass bottling.
Short of a strong tariff, I do not see the government ever having meaningful impact on plastic waste.
And if you buy water in plastic bottles, doesn't the plastic leach into the water? Why drink that?
I grew up in Arizona, where you drink a couple of gallons of water a day. Nobody drank water from bottles. There were water fountains everywhere, every store had one. When hiking, you just bought a canteen and filled it from the tap.
Reusable: strong, durable but also easy to clean, both for hydrophillic and hydrophobic goods. Can synthetic corundum or diamond ever become a viable alternative? A standardized symbol could indicate that the box is intended for hydrophobic or hydrophillic goods. Is UV-C transparency a desiderata for easy sterilization after cleaning?
Transparent: so people can see the food they are buying, transparent and reusable seems to imply scratch and minimal corrosion resistance as well.
Storable & transportable: a 3D equivalent to the paper sizes used in Europe: 2 A5-sheets side by side are the same dimension as an A4 sheet, 2 A4-sheets side by side are the same dimensions as an A3 poster size paper. Can a similar scheme be made for 3D boxes instead of 2D sheets? For 2D Ax system: the long side has a constant ratio to the short side, so perhaps side lengths L x W x H such that L / W = W / H = cube root 2 ?
There will always be a cost to cleaning containers, and while we can optimize the properties of the boxes for cleaning, there will always be some cost to cleaning, and a cleaning facility will feel financial pressure to clean less thoroughly but also a financial / legal / reputational pressure to clean more thoroughly. Having unique QR codes for individual boxes means any spoilt product brought back by consumers can be traced to its last cleaning, and the previous meal it contained, so a cleaning facility can then adjust the cleaning parameters for the type of previous meal, previous sale date, return date etc to understand if it would benefit from longer soaking, more percusive water jetting etc...
It's not a perfect system but most bottles and cans are collected this way and recycled. That would cover most of the bottles produced by the five companies mentioned in the article. You also don't get a plastic bag for free anymore but you can buy one. In most places it's going to be a paper bag. Simple solutions that work pretty well. And once people adjust, it isn't the end of the world.
The real issue is of course people dumping their trash all over the place instead of putting it in a trash can from where most of it would end up in a landfill, incinerator, or even being recycled. Some places have steep fines for littering, which works. IMHO not a bad thing. If you are too lazy to use a trashcan and get caught, there should be a penalty for being a jerk.
>they used data from brand information on plastic litter and found that 24 percent of the waste with an identifiable brand came from just five companies: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone, and Altria.
>Over five years, volunteers in 84 countries analyzed over 1,800,000 pieces of plastic that they collected during clean-up events. Just over half the analyzed items had a visible brand.
1) It wasn't 24%, it was 24% of the half that could be identified.
2) It's only of the litter collected during clean-up events, so will be skewed towards waste from products used outside. This will ignore things like industrial plastic waste, fishing nets (which is a big issue in ocean plastics), etc.
That said it still seems like an important study.
There's also the question of what is actually problematic waste, that causes issues for humans or animals. Plastic in landfill isn't "good", but as long as it doesn't contaminate groundwater AFAIK it's harmless.
My guess would be that in some countries, the stores provide disposable plastic bags with any purchase and that these bags include ads for tobacco brands. This study would associate the brand with the generation of trash while the trash should rather be associated with the store.
I'll personally classify this study as unreliable.
with a large enough data set the chance that the half that cannot be identified is also 24% looks pretty good, unless there is something specifically about these brands that makes the identifying of them easier than other brands - which is also a pretty good chance I would say.
If there is a good likelihood of identifying these brands specifically then I guess it is actually pretty close to 12% (assuming there are still some small amount which cannot be identified)
Not sure about the other companies, but Coca-Cola could also try to weasel out of their responsibility this way: it's not widely known, but they operate on a franchise system, the actual regional bottlers operating independently from the Coca-Cola Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coca-Cola_Company#Bottlers).
But the company can't do that. The tax people can. It would be useful thing the government can do instead of regulation and punishment.
A tiny island, I walked all around the island in the water in about two hours.
There were hundreds, probably thousands of plastic drink bottles in the water and on the sand.
Every step brought fresh plastic drink bottles into view.
Humans don't deserve this planet.
It also seems to think that the finding showing a correlation to production numbers is proof that the producers are not taking effective efforts.
I can't and don't say the results are worthless. I do question any study that doesn't mention the fashion industry on plastics. My gut is I pollute more plastic from my drier vent than makes any sense. And yet most people I talk to are unaware that drier lint is plastic.
https://www.seattle.gov/sweetened-beverage-tax-community-adv...
that should put an ever so slight pressure on Coca Cola Company to clean up their act.
Maybe we could tax companies based on how much of their litter can be identified on randomly selected areas for sampling.
So eg instead of having lots of piecemeal regulation that bans straws and plastic bags and Kinder Surprise eggs etc, you can have a single relatively simple tax on plastic garbage. The total amount of regulation would go down, but effectiveness would go up.
(You can give companies who collect and deal with their plastic trash a discount on the tax, if you want to.)
Similar for carbon dioxide emissions tax, instead of silly gameable things like CAFE car standards.
Regulators, producers and consumers are all following the same interconnected incentive structures, many of which have been designed with efficient production and an exponential increase of consumption in mind, not environmental concern.
It makes sense for these companies to operate, following their obligation to shareholders. They are, by definition, successful and so the idea that they should be diminished in any way by taxation/regulation creates a dissonance that can easily be loopholed or simply undone by the next gov't. Tax is a political lever, but the incentives are emergent economic atttributes. This means that, as soon as there is enough economic influence within politics, the lever doesn't do much anyway.
Plastic not going into stable landfill is the real issue : so actually consumer plastic is kind of bad like that, whereas industrial plastic basically fine (i.e. infrastructure plastics like pipes).
Wouldn't the micro plastics risk leaking into the ground when it is broken down eventually? When it rains, the water has to go somewhere and unless you invest in expensive filtration systems, this does not seem economically viable. The micro plastics may even leak into the ground water and spread far beyond the land fill.
Even if we do find an economic way to build a stable landfill that lasts a few decades, it will probably just postpone the pollution to a later generation when it is no longer maintained.
But at least it is better than just dumping it in the nature as many do today.
The article is about trash from littering. Surely the consumers fault.
Though... I also agree with the GP. It seems to be too hard to educate or enforce littering laws on consumers (edit: in some countries. Some other countries like Japan have better non-littering cultures). It might be easier to mandate things like biodecomposable plastic or... glass? That would be less harmful even if disposed of improperly. (How else are we going to get sweet drinks? Drink dispensers and enforced personal bottles?)
Finding fault is not the same thing as finding a solution. Does it get us in any way closer to a solution if we blame the company, the consumers, or both, or neither? I don't think so.
The US figured that out themselves with highways.
If their goods are being used irresponsibly, they have a responsibility to educate those they manipulate into consuming their slop, and to develop systems to ensure that those who opt out of their nonsense aren't affected by the negative externalities of their operations.
Yeah consumers “won’t change”. Because that’s an asinine focus if you want the whole (first) world to change. Would you rely on “personal motiviation” if you needed a whole brigade to storm a beach? Clearly not. Likewise these individualistic efforts are completely wrong-headed.
Because they’re not supposed to change anything. Only to assign blame. (Clear-minded: what motivation is behind the consumer nagging)
The proper way to change all of society is organized effort. Which means leveraging existing institutions. Like entire freaking supply lines. You maybe stop importing toothpicks from across the world instead of the false narrative of “educating” the “consumers” (keyword) to not “buy stuff from China”.
Be cynical, clear-minded and pragmatic—all of these lead to the same conclusions on this topic.
Sorry, but this is absolutely not true. I routinely travel between Liverpool and Zürich, you can take a guess which one looks like a pristine modern city and which one looks like a junkyard/dump. Let me tell you, it's not just because there are more bins in one of those cities.
Plastic recycling factories are going bankrupt (five in the tiny Netherlands in the space of one year), because they can't compete with new plastic. Textile processors are stuck with warehouses full of unusable discarded fast fashion.
Littering is just a tiny part of this problem. Reducing plastic (by charging for bags) is good and works, but the bigger issue lies with the fact that we use so much plastic, and often have no real choice in the matter.
This is not true for drink bottles. (though they are not 100% recyclable due to material degradation, and there might be safety challenges for products made of recycled feedstock) I can't claim nothing is burned/etc, but it's most certainly not "mostly" for countries with a collection scheme.
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/18/18271470/us-cities-s...
I completely agree with you that a national beverage tax, refundable, would be a fantastic idea. The problem I see will be in how the program is administered. There will be tension between federal and state over who gets part of the money, who funds the program, maintains it, etc. How to get retailers to put the machines in their store which takes away inventory space? Pay them? Require it?
So many questions. Probably a federal tax that then redistributes the money equally to each state to fund local recycling programs would be easier.
[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...
[1] https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/advance-article-abstract/doi...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_of_very_high_concern (I expect the oil industry to do its utmost to delay this from having any legal effect, as per.)
Most on this site are fortunate enough to be able to drink disposables and have it whisked away magically. It's when that doesn't or can't occur that you start to realize how much we all waste.
Single use plastics should have been outlawed years ago. Or at least taxed to high heaven.
This is a cop out. It’s cheap and trivial to buy a reusable water bottle and refill it.
> Single use plastics should have been outlawed years ago. Or at least taxed to high heaven.
Tax, don't ban. And make the tax proportional to the estimated damage.
However a 6 hour flight from the closest major city would have given off 1500 kg of CO2 (per passenger). And presumably another 1500kg to get back again.
Independent of glass, according to Wikipedia over 75 % of all PET-bottles in the DACH region are also re-used before they are recycled (which can mean burning them). So, yes, it is absolutely realistic to have a system where the majority of bottles are reused.
As the paper also mention - stricter rules for packaging designed for clean and easy recycling is a tool in the toolbox. They mentioned a study found that a majority of contaminant detected stemmed from labels, adhesive, etc.
There's also chemical recycling which I get the impression [1] can solve some of these challenges, but don't seem to be used much yet.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221334372...
Our traffic congestion charging program here in Singapore also works really well (and was famously adopted by London later).
In part, it is the oil industry itself which kept the myth of plastic recycling going:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/23/climate/california-exxon-...
(I’m sure, like with any question, there will be many vocal commenters chiming in saying how they like plastic. All I can say, lucky you, and I am yet to meet any of you IRL!)
The oil industry may be looking down the barrel of renewables eating at a good chunk of their profit and subsidy money. I expect them to do all they can to keep plastic attractive in the eyes of the public.
I admit I don't have any references at hand, but I'm quite sure I've seen articles claiming plastic bottles "win" by a comfortable margin from an energy perspective.
Of course - energy is not everything.
Additionally, the energy needed to produce even the initial, energy-intensive glass or aluminium could perhaps come from renewables and perhaps some emissions can be captured given enough motivation. (And when it comes to transportation perhaps today’s approach of lugging finished bottles around the globe can evolve towards moving source material and packaging it locally.)
The math is not straightforward.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/world/plastic-bottles-vs-alu...
In most places, you can only buy it in plastic and sometimes paper carton, though that seems to be dwindling. There are no other options, so people just grab the plastic one.
There's a local place by me that sells their milk in beautiful glass jugs. They charge $5 a jug, but you get that back if you return it unbroken to buy more. That place sells a ton, it's just that most people don't even have the option.
It seems though companies have zero incentive to do such a program. There's no reward for recycling as above, and no punishment for being wasteful. However we change that - either via tax or law, I'd be on board with.
Keep in mind that single use items like plastic or paper cartons also only have a finite cost in terms of resources and environmental impact. So you'd have to weigh that against the potentially more annoying logistics of having to go back to the store to return your glass jug; especially if you do that journey by car. (Recycling glass is about as resource intensive as making new glass. And both take a lot more than making a tetrapak.)
I grew up in Germany, where re-using glass bottles is widespread, most iconically for beer. So on the consumer side there's unlikely to be extra journeys for that: most stores take bake used bottles.
Aluminum and steel cans are widely recycled around the world as far as I can tell. So much so that you can actually get (small amounts of) money for collecting aluminum cans. No extra law or tax required there: if you don't recycle your can, in many places someone else will.
Perhaps you're right, but, living in a south east Asian country where trash is a major problem that goes far beyond simple littering, I think that will take several decades to change and we should look for something quicker.
There was a storm here yesterday and literally several tons of trash washed up onto the beach, as it does most days during the stormy season. This can't be classed as littering, it's a problem far far bigger than asking people to put things into bins.
Much of the trash on the beach probably was thrown into a bin at some point. The problem is what happens after that. Western countries ship their "recycling" off to developing countries, and when it ends up in the sea they get to say it wasn't their fault, while developing countries just don't bother with the plausible deniability step.
If you think there is a new material out there that we are prevented from using, I'd be interested to hear what it is.
But plastic was never "better". Remember that we had PVC all the places until we found out it was made with a carcinogen.
But agreed: all factors have to be taken into account. Maybe there are better plastics that are reusable easier and faster.
Burn it and the problem ia solved, at the end of the day it's still oil.
Some plastics do meet the definition of literal poison, but those used in bottles do not seem to, and BPA is at worst supposedly to be classified as “substance of very high concern”. Can’t believe that I would write the above as good news, but there we go.
Maybe we should just eat gold
https://dol.ismcdn.jp/mwimgs/d/e/-/img_def751445b616015211f3...
https://img.kurashinista.jp/get/2023/01/06/c4cc391408c0f5663...
https://cafe-no-chishiki.club/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/アルミ...
Not sure if they have the inner plastic container aluminium cans have.
[1]: https://pantamera.nu/en/private-citizen/facts--statistics/de...
1) "when you are going there anyway", which many people don't anymore.
2) Yes, it's absolutely a big inconvenience; I remember those days, and it took 15-30 minutes each time, leaving aside the inconvenience of bagging and lugging them, and the extreme unreliability of the machines. Not going to happen.
A recycling bin that gets picked up alongside the trash bin is far, far more convenient. I live in a state that has a can/bottle deposit, and despite that I just toss them in the recycling bin. If there wasn't a recycling bin or the recycling bin didn't allow them, they'd go in the trash bin, because life is too short to spend any of it feeding plastic bottles into a machine.
My state also incentivizes recycling in other ways: trash bins are small with high fees, recycling bins are huge and free.
They were also regularly blamed as the source of wild fires.
[0] https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article/199/1/81/7609801?log...
It's a jungle out there and if not unregulated, then very much un-policed. PFAS was seen as completely benign for decades, turns it isn't and that is bio-accumulates.
Specific chemicals like BPA being banned in certain applications, only to be replaced by some other, very similar chemical, which then legislators play whack-a-mole with (or whack-a-sloth) very slowly, over decades.
Plus imports from China. (And some other countries, but hey, China has the volume. Shouldn't they care even just a little themselves too?)
Heck, toys from there still sometimes contain lead, which should really not be a thing in this day and age, but the fact that it sometimes still happen should indicate how little the producers and importers know or care.
