I wish we'd get real about plastic

Post #439,906 by drook 9/19/21 6:06:50 PM 9/20/21 7:57:41 AM Reply	I wish we'd get real about plastic The plastic recycling message came from the same PR machine that invented the phrase "carbon footprint". The latter was designed to shift the conversation onto individual behavior and away from industrial pollution, which absolutely dwarfs personal contribution. Plastic is technically recyclable - the best kind - but it's so expensive and inefficient that no one wants to do it. But by convincing us to rinse our bottles and shame our neighbors into doing the same, they got us to stop demanding they don't use so much fucking plastic in every-fucking-thing. That's why my family of four fills a huge bin with trash and a merely-large bin with recycling every week, when growing up we filled one old galvanized can each week, except after Christmas and sometimes a birthday. [edit] About the time I was writing this ^^^ Dave Winer was posting this. http://scripting.com/2021/09/18.html#a163456 -- Drew Edited by drook Sept. 20, 2021, 01:43:07 AM EDT Edited by drook Sept. 20, 2021, 07:57:41 AM EDT Expand All History
Post #439,911 by pwhysall 9/20/21 2:10:58 AM 9/20/21 2:10:58 AM Reply	Thankfully over here it is starting to move, albeit slowly It's baby steps, for sure. But we have definitely got a reduction-in-packaging-and-especially-plastic thing going on. We have our milk delivered (are milkmen a thing in the US?). It comes in glass bottles which we return (they go through the dishwasher with the rest of the dishes). This means we avoid a couple of 1 litre plastic cartons every week, or a hundred or so every year. Things like cotton buds (q-tips to you) come in cardboard packaging, having foregone the plastic lid. A few food items that had a transparent plastic window now do not. A guilty junk-food pleasure of ours is the Old El Paso crispy chicken fajita* kit - it used to come with a plastic bag to shake and coat the chicken, now it does not, and one uses a bowl. *It's actually quite pleasant, especially if you leave the chicken in the oven for an extra five minutes to get a good ol' crunch on it. I can hear Mexico weeping from here, though.
Post #439,915 by CRConrad 9/20/21 5:07:40 AM 9/20/21 5:07:40 AM Reply	"Plastic cartons" sounds a bit of an oxymoron. YTH don't they use cardboard like sensible people?
Post #439,918 by pwhysall 9/20/21 6:01:59 AM 9/20/21 6:01:59 AM Reply	Bottles, then. UHT milk tends to come in cardboard cartons But they have a plastic spout.
Post #439,922 by CRConrad 9/20/21 12:32:22 PM 9/20/21 12:32:23 PM Reply	We must have extra-hardy fridge-resistant cardboard up here then... But yeah, some of them also have that moronic piece of plastic. WTF is wrong with people, is it millennials[§] who can't open the ordinary old-fashioned kind or what? https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=uusavuttomuus ___ [§]: Yeah, I know what I'm actually after is "Gen-Z". -- Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
Post #439,913 by static 9/20/21 4:44:14 AM 9/20/21 4:44:14 AM Reply	The problem is that it's just cheaper to use virgin material. That is what has to change and is what so many governments just won't do. The super simple approach is to levy a tax on a manufacturer for every ton of virgin plastic used. You make it in their best financial interest to find a way to recycle the stuff. Meanwhile the funds raised can be provided as cheap investment loans to people trying to increase the recyclability of material. Wade.
Post #439,920 by drook 9/20/21 8:05:48 AM 9/20/21 8:05:48 AM Reply	Put the cost of recycling into the tax We should do this for everything. Make manufacturers fund the eventual disposal of whatever they produce. They will of course say the proper free-market solution is to charge people for trash disposal, and they will make rational decisions about the value of that packaging and etc. Except right now they're all shitty and no one wants to be first to completely change how they do things for what has to look like marginal gains. -- Drew
Post #439,921 by Andrew Grygus 9/20/21 11:31:16 AM 9/20/21 11:31:16 AM Reply	Here in California . . . . . the streets in some areas were lined with mattresses. A fee was proposed to be paid by the mattress industry for each mattress sold, so a redemption could be paid for bringing them in. The mattress industry was livid with rage. It must have gone through though, because recently I've seen aging trucks piled with mattresses.
Post #439,924 by drook 9/20/21 2:59:57 PM 9/20/21 2:59:57 PM Reply	Someone with more time to look into this should crunch the numbers On the one hand, making every industry do it when there's only a few means that a lot of companies will be spending extra time and money solving a problem that doesn't exist. On the other hand, coming up with a whole regulatory scheme out of whole cloth for each industry that's causing problems doesn't sound efficient. It also means the industries that are paying will feel that they are being treated unfairly. Someone should figure out which way gets the biggest bang for the buck. -- Drew
Post #439,938 by static 9/21/21 11:09:27 PM 9/21/21 11:09:27 PM Reply	Yes. There are a range of ways to make those who should be using recycled material use recycled material. A financial solution seems to work best. Unfortunately, most politicians and economists think this looks like a "tariff" and thus they automatically don't like it. There is another problem I haven't mentioned, though: too much to recycle. That's when consumers are better at returning material than the relevant industry is at using it. We have some quite large stockpiles here in Au because that's happened. Again, I think the solution is to alter the market to create demand. Wade.
Post #439,939 by CRConrad 9/22/21 5:10:47 AM 9/22/21 5:10:47 AM Reply	We have (smallish) media "scandals" here from time to time, when municipalities... ...are found out using stuff for "recycling as energy" -- i.e. burning in the water and heating works -- stuff that consumers have painstakingly sorted into various "recycling for materials" categories. Annoying, of course, but kind of understandable in most cases: They just haven't had time to build out the receiving capacity. Annoying as fuck, of course, when it's been dragging out for years and years on end, but I get the (vague) impression the majority is just some a slight(ish) and to-be-expected lag. -- Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi
Post #439,940 by drook 9/22/21 9:39:11 AM 9/22/21 9:39:11 AM Reply	We've got to pull the "Reduce" lever harder Remember "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle"? We're supposed to do it in that order. That's what I was talking about with the sheer volume of waste my family generates vs. what we produced when I was growing up. We have to use less packaging, and less disposable everything else. Just the food packaging we go through blows my mind, and I know we cook more from scratch than the average American family. -- Drew
Post #439,941 by Another Scott 9/22/21 10:48:01 AM 9/22/21 10:48:01 AM Reply	Bag taxes. Virginia state government has lots of restrictions on what municipalities can do regarding taxes and fees. DC has had a plastic bag tax for ages. Virginia finally passed a law recently that allowed municipalities to impose a $0.05/bag fee. So my area is finally starting to roll that out. Reusable bags were strongly discouraged by many retailers last year. I expect they'll let people start using them again now. Little things like this need to be much more common. Paper containers (instead of everything being in effectively non-recycleable plastic) need to come back as well... Cheers, Scott.
Post #439,942 by drook 9/22/21 11:08:19 AM 9/22/21 11:08:19 AM Reply	I can hear the screams from the supply chain already "But food won't survive a cross-country trip and three weeks on the shelves without the packaging!" Well then don't ship it cross-country. Produce it (more) locally. "But then you won't be able to get strawberries in Cleveland in January!" OK, and ... ? "But we'll have to change what, when and where we sell everything!" Yes, you're getting the picture. -- Drew
Post #439,943 by Andrew Grygus 9/22/21 11:38:12 AM 9/22/21 11:38:12 AM Reply	Ecology & taxes Here in California disposable plastic bags are not allowed at check-out and reusables are $0.10 by law. Single use bags within grocery markets are still allowed - to prevent starting a revolution. I just have everything put back in the cart and bag what needs bagging at the car - which has quite a load of reusable bags. This thing about "paper" always amuses me. I've been involved (peripherally) with the ecology movement for so long that I remember what set off the whole ecology movement in the first place. It was extreme pollution from, you guessed it, Paper Companies.
Post #439,944 by drook 9/22/21 11:45:31 AM 9/22/21 11:45:31 AM Reply	I like how they do it at Costco They take all the cardboard cases the product ships to them in and stack them up by the registers. Grab a couple while you're waiting in line, and when they scan your stuff they'll load right into the boxes you just grabbed. Aldi has them too sometimes, depending on what they got a shipment of that day. -- Drew
Post #439,945 by Another Scott 9/22/21 1:11:30 PM 9/22/21 1:11:30 PM Reply	TJs will do that with wine if you want. Makes sense, but in practice it puts the recycling in the hands of the customer rather than the company. I just have them put them in my cloth grocery bags (without the stupid paper sleeves please!) instead. Yeah, paper production is dirty. I remember Ben Tilly talking about it, back in the day... Still, it's stuff from the biosphere, rather than 100M year old fossil fuel being brought to the surface... There are no easy answers, but some are better than others. Cheers, Scott.
Post #439,963 by Andrew Grygus 9/22/21 9:26:11 PM 9/22/21 9:26:11 PM Reply	When I shopped at TJs . . . . . I knew where the boxes were piled, so I just grabbed one before hitting the checkout line. Haven't been in a Trader Joe's since the COVID hit. Standing a half hour in a line waiting to get in didn't appeal to me. Sunland produce started stocking a mountain of the beer I bought there, and everything else I bought there was easy to replace elsewhere. I was already buying all my wine from Sunland Produce, better wine for lower cost. Boxes, I saw them up with a serrated bread knife and use the cardboard, with used paper napkins under it and a small bit of wood over, to start a small short fire every morning. I'm a Pagan, you see, and we like our little ritual fires, and it keeps us on the good side of the Fire Gods.
Post #439,962 by static 9/22/21 9:05:46 PM 9/22/21 9:05:46 PM Reply	Happens here. Local liquor chain Dan Murphy's does that, as does big-box hardware store Bunnings. Wade
Post #439,976 by scoenye 9/23/21 7:26:45 PM 9/23/21 7:26:45 PM Reply	But then you need to subtract all the FoodSaver repackaging plastic...
Post #439,968 by CRConrad 9/23/21 3:52:50 AM 9/23/21 3:52:50 AM Reply	What's in a name? (A piece of trash, by any other name, will still stink to high heaven...) Here in California disposable plastic bags are not allowed at check-out and reusables are $0.10 by law. How many people throw away their "reusables" after first use, effectively making them disposable? And conversely, what's to stop anyone from re-using their "disposables"? It's just names, not necessarily reality. -- Christian R. Conrad The Man Who Apparently Still Knows Fucking Everything Mail: Same username as at the top left of this post, at iki.fi

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