Taxation, regulation and bans. Absolutely.
Taxation, regulation and bans. Absolutely.
Taxation, regulation and bans. Absolutely.
Taxation, regulation and bans. Absolutely.
Taxation, regulation and bans. Absolutely.
Ongoing Edit: adding to the compilation for emphasis
One huge factor has been natural gas fracking, which has made new plastics a lot cheaper to make. We’re in the middle of a huge surge in production capacity right now, so don’t look for Big Oil to turn down the spigot any time soon.
At the beginning of COVID, our county phased out its ‘3 can plan’, with a can each for green waste, recyclables (mixed), and ‘everything else’. The phaseout was coming for a while, though; the plague was just the last straw. You can still take recyclables to the redemption centers, where you get a nickel each for beverage bottles and cans, and there are big Dumpsters for separated unredeemable items like cardboard boxes, but transport is a pain and you have to go far afield to find someplace that will take your hedge cuttings.
The article says they crush now, which is our experience in BC since the demise of the beloved stubby.
Then there’s my city, which still runs the ‘green’ barrel (yard clippings), and accepts very, very little recyclables into the blue barrel (corrugated cardboard, aluminium cans, and very selective plastics).
Paperboard boxes, like cereal boxes, and the ‘12 pack’ soda can boxes? trash, they won’t take them.
I at least made use of my green barrel (which I pay a fee for both monthly and whenever I have it emptied) to stuff the branches of the two trees I had to cut down last year into.
They discontinued the giant cardboard dumpsters, probably because people were putting normal trash and other crap into them; I need to see if I can be a sneaky pete and take the truckload of cardboard I have to the office and put it into one of their cardboard dumpsters, because the city won’t do a bulk collection of just cardboard. 
Many, many years ago my family relocated from the US to Spain for a year. My parents were thrilled to discover how cheap “good” (wildly better than what was available in flyover US at the time) wine was. Then to their shock, they found out that they got half of that back if they returned the bottles to the store.
The Beer Store isn’t a government monopoly. They’re technically owned by the big three breweries in Canada (which at the time I worked there were Labatts, Molson, and Sleeman). It’s basically a government sanctioned monopoly. The Toronto Star ran an excellent series of articles a while back (by Martin Regg Cohn) about the Beer Store and why it should go.
They do have an excellent recycling program, though. I’m glad I got out of there before they started accepting empties from the LCBO.
In NYC some huge proportion of the picking and sorting work of bottle-deposit recycling is done by the homeless. On the one hand, I worry about the impact it will have on these people, who truly have single-handedly made recycling happen at scale here. On the other hand, what a sad fucking thing to worry about when adequate housing and homelessness assistance is so much more humane than just leaving people to the dirtiest, lowest paid work.
Yup, also the marketing of recycling and the recycling symbol itself suggests that there’s this loop of eternally recyclable plastics - very misleading. There is significant degradation and resource requirement to recycle the material. If you buy a sweater made of recycled plastic, that’s not going to become a soda bottle ever again.
Yeah I almost think Elaine’s wondering what she’s getting herself into and they may not actually stay together. So his smile is to the enduring memory he’ll have of having won that day. When she yells to him from the pulpit it seems like both a “rescue me” and “f you!”
On Harry Shearer’s Le Show radio/podcast is a segment that opens with this line but changes the advice to “microplastics.” There is so much news about how microplastics are interfering with the natural order (my words) he has this segment almost every week.
A major factor that creates pressure towards plastic packaging (as well as durables construction) is the gains on transportation costs in an environment tilted heavily towards very non-local supply chains due to the strength-to-weight ratio. The cost of shipping goods around is a huge and difficult to predict variable that isn’t nearly as obvious to the consumer as it is to the producer (weight of retail items is aggressively reduced by manufacturers for this reason), and it’s subject to all the variation in fuel costs (historically also something that began increasing steadily in the 70’s). Perhaps this will shift over time somewhat as electrification begins to take over more - to the extent that it lowers the energy costs of transport. That very same trend could also increase the cost of manufacturing with plastics due to the rising relative costs of petroleum extraction in a lower petro-energy demand world - but that could be a more distant knock-on effect.
As I understand it, even if it were economically preferable, recycling plastics would still consume more energy than making new plastic.
Eventually, that might be acceptable, once that energy is mostly coming from renewable zero-carbon sources, but right now you’d be trading off between carbon emissions and plastic waste, and from what I’ve read, it’s probably better to just send plastic to landfills for now (taking care to ensure it gets buried properly and doesn’t end up in the ocean).
Also, If we somehow manage to stop using so much oil, perhaps through
that would also increase the cost of manufacturing new plastic, since it’s mostly made from oil byproducts.
It is already happening! In larger German cities, so-called “unpacked-shops” (Unverpackt-Läden) have opened in the recent years. They offer all sorts of food non-packaged or in bulk, some also other consumer goods like detergent, shampoo etc. You bring your own containers (jars, bottles, cans etc.) and weigh them first so you know the weight of the container, writing the unladen weight onto the container. Then you fill it with the good, and at checkout the cashier weighs the filled container, substracts the unladen weight and thus calculates the price.
Of course, these shops are still a rarity, prices are generally on the fairtrade / organic level (since most shops try to offer fairtrade and organic goods) and they are mainly an offer for conscious consumers, but they are spreading. (Dried herbs or spices are actually often cheaper than in normal shops.) And in reaction, some of the large chains have begun to sell some goods in bulk, too, and are cutting down on packaging, e.g. cucumbers that each were once wrapped in plastic now usually get only a sticker with price and details.
I argue 90% of that efficiency is an illusion. All the stuff we ship in plastic used to ship in paper boxes. The stuff we buy in plastic bottles used to come in glass bottles with a recycling deposit. Aluminum cans as well. Juice used to come in cans and you had a special little pointy opener for it. All bags used to be paper.
We use plastic for packaging everything because it’s cheap. It’s cheap because the price does not reflect the lifetime cost of the object. If the environmental damage was factored in with a tax, Watch how fast packaging companies would get clever with paper and glass, just like they did before plastic. The world now is not so different that we need plastic everything to get by. Our parents had just as busy and hectic lifestyles as us and didn’t have much that was plastic. I’m old enough to remember milk delivery, and it was better because you didn’t have to go to the store to buy it and we never ran out.
Don’t fall into the trap of looking at the world as it is and seeing that as inevitable. Our addiction to plastic was created by decades of marketing, price fixing, oil industry subsidies and all sorts of things that having nothing to do with actual practical benefits of the material.
Yes, and the best is to use less stuff from the beginning. The order in “reduce, re-use, recycle” is relevant.
That’s reuse, which is different and great. I’m speaking specifically of breaking down materials to make new things from raw materials. This works great for metals, sorta okay for glass, sorta okay for paper, and dreadfully poorly for plastic.
Recycling is the third part of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” for a reason. It’s supposed to be the last resort after we’ve tried everything else. Bottle deposit systems work great and continue worldwide. We should embrace more things like that.
My son got his iPhone replaced a couple of weeks ago. He showed me the smooth molded insert used to hold the phone within the box. “Hard to believe it’s paper”, he said. I examined the insert. I would have bet money it was plastic. “Go ahead, run it under the tap.” I did as instructed and it had fully dissolved in about 30 seconds. I was regaling a colleague with this story and he said, “Bring it in, I’d like to see it.” I looked at him quizzically, “Well I would … except it completely dissolved in my hand and went down the sink.”
Woman: Um, yes, that’s the only way in which it makes sense for me to tell my kid to work as hard as you to become as rich as you.
Old Man Rumpke: What, now? I didn’t hear anything you said to the kid. I was busy operating a trash truck.
Woman: But then why did you tell us that you were Old Man Rumpke?
Old Man Rumpke: Because I am!! And I say so every three blocks, whether there is someone around to hear me or not!
If you want to get really depressed watch the 2016 documentary Plastic China for a glimpse into what happens to the plastic that is recycled.
Yeah, natural foods places and co-ops do that here too. Or did before COVID anyway.
Twenty years ago, when I told my grandmother that in the US each piece of fruit or vegetable has a sticker on it, she quite obviously thought I was talking nonsense. I thought of that recently when I got a load of compost in which I keep finding those stickers.
It is simpler to directly impose a financial disincentive to plastic use, or at least raise funds to deal with the stuff afterward. Production, importation and consumption of plastic should attract huge duties, tariffs, excise tax, value added tax, & environmental fees.*
In the meantime, warehousing it in landfills is probably the best solution. Something something about carbon capture too.
