2 Likes
Some plastics really can be recycled. I take our old PVET, melt it into - let’s call then ingots - and make things out of them. The hackerspace I’m a member of gathers up leftover feedstock and recycles it - and finished 3D-printed items - into new feedstock There’s a place about eight miles from here that does the Lord’s work by taking in Styrofoam and recycling it on-site. Plastic use has to drop. Has to. But the idea that we can just snap our fingers and get rid of plastics is beyond stupid. And as long as we have them we need ways to keep them from turning into garbage.
7 Likes
When our city put out a bid for pubically funded recycling, they ended up choosing a mixed-stream provider over the provider I’d contracted with privately that required sorting. I wondered how they could take glass with their garbage trucks, but I’m no waste expert so I assumed they must handle it somehow.
A few years later I learned that they do handle it, by burying it in their private landfill well outside of town. It was all a lie, and as the private company I’d used before lost their entire customer base to the municipally funded provider and folded, I have a choice of throwing away my glass in the garbage or throwing it away with extra steps (including washing the glass as the city will fine you for contaminated recycling). It’s all a lie.
11 Likes
Delivered in glass containers, that were then reused (I wonder what externalities that entailed?). Beer was another example (my fave) of constantly recycled containers. All have gone away.
Still, containers that don’t allow light exposure have some value? Glass didn’t do that. Still, I’ll take glass over any other option, but I don’t think most Americans agree.
The thing about reminiscing about earlier days of non-plastic consumer options is that those times also involved chemical dumping into rivers, oil waste into landfills and sewer systems, and eventually waterway ignition!
I think we are bound to unload a host of NEW EXOTIC externalities upon the environment with a commitment to GREEN tech, although we will certainly (smugly) dismiss them until, again, too late.
HUZZAH!!
1 Like
That’s why green and brown glass exist. To block whatever wavelengths of light isn’t good for the contents. The point is, these are solved problems. We used to do all this just fine. Milk can also be shipped in waxed paper boxes.
With all due respect, that’s an odd straw man. I’m the first person to reject fauxstalgia. Nobody is saying that going back to unregulated leather tanneries is a good idea. I’m just rejecting this notion that we need plastic containers to survive, when we have a perfectly good counterpoint from our own history that shows we don’t.
People also seem to be underappreciating that our current dependency on plastic containers was manufactured need. It was a deliberate and coordinated marketing campaign by the industry to convince us all that only plastic can do all these things. It’s all in the Planet Money story.
13 Likes
Well, yes and no. It was the lack of (government lobbied and prolly subsidized) cheap options that made glass the choice. Those factors (the lobbied forced alternatives) aren’t going away either. The entire lack of environmental concern in that era combined with no alternative made glass a cheap option, though I have no idea of what actual fully internalized costs of glass would be.
I’m not disagreeing so much as thinking prior use of glass as an option probably had a lot of, then and current, discounted effects upon the environment and economy that were and are unknown.
I like your hopeful outlook, but as an old guy who has been sold many wonderful new (and retro) solutions, I have a permanent case of stomach upset at any insistence that something that is posited as obviously wonderful is the way to go.
Everything has unexplored costs.
1 Like
I try to select products in glass or tin/aluminium packaging when I’m out shopping, to the point of sometimes not getting the brand I would prefer (but, really … soy sauce is soy sauce, regardless of the pretty picture on the label^). I figure that even if the container isn’t recycled^^, then piles of glass and metal lying about the place are still better than piles of plastic.^^^
Pretty much all large supermarkets here have free-flow bins for rice, flour, nuts, dried fruit, lentils and such. They used to provide ziplock plastic bags to put the product in, which were super useful in their own right and got reused until they fell apart, but increasingly they’re going to paper bags which is fine.
One interesting development I’ve been seeing more of recently^^^^ is BYO-container. It’s semi-common at the free flow bins (although there’s a pricing/taring problem that doesn’t quite seem solved yet), but just today at lunch I saw a person handing their own container over to be filled with a duck-and-orange salad at the Vietnamese takeaway place I went to.
^ I know, I know. The differences between really good soy and the rest can be astonishing, but at any given price point it’s much of a muchness.
^^ although I tend to keep roughly half the jars I buy, and get at least one more use out of them, sometimes multiple.
^^^ even taking into account the issue of having broken glass or rusty tins in the environment.
^^^^ I too am old enough to remember home milk delivery in glass bottles, collecting soda bottles to take to the corner store to redeem for lollies, and crates of quart beer bottles and flagons being endlessly reused. All the craft beer places around here (and there’s about a dozen in my small city) will happily refill pretty much any bottle, and I know that’s a global thing.
7 Likes
Ugh, yes. We compost kitchen scraps at home and we’re generally pretty good about removing the little plastic stickers but every spring we’ll inevitably find a few in our finished compost. There are compostable stickers available, but they’re not very widespread.
8 Likes
Here’s your eco-friendly produce sticker: hire a cashier who knows what a cucumber is?
3 Likes
Yeah, that’d be cool, and I know the local farm stand does have a couple people who not only know what every piece of produce is called but how much it costs, no stickers needed. But my supermarket carries a dozen varieties of apples in both organic and non-organic versions and I’m not going to insist that anyone try to learn the subtle difference between an organic Honeycrisp apple ($4.59 /lb) and a traditionally grown Snapdragon ($1.99 /lb).
9 Likes
I wonder if it was made out of the same stuff they make biodegradable packaging peanuts out of. My spouse and I received a package from a “green” company full of packing peanuts. I e-mailed the company asking, “Um, so, you say you’re eco-friendly but you sent us a box of packing peanuts?” The company replied that the peanuts were made out of plants and would dissolve in water.
And yes, yes they do. Spouse and I spent a fun few minutes dissolving all the peanuts in the bath tub.
Unrelated, our household also takes advantage of the Gimme Five program offered by Preserve. We keep a box in our kitchen that we throw all the five plastics into and when it’s full, we send them all to Preserve to be made into toothbrush handles and so forth (that can also be recycled through the program). Granted, we have to send the materials to Preserve on our own dime but at least we know it’s being recycled as opposed to being stuck on a barge in Asia or something. And we eat a lot of packaged yogurt. (https://www.preserve.eco/pages/gimme5-what-we-accept)
8 Likes
Here’s a related report from “The Science Show” on the (Australian) ABC Radio National from December 2020. A quick summary would be: Cool new scientific developments in recycling, tempered with some realistic reservations about getting manufacturers to take responsibility for recycling.
Note that if you scroll down on that page you can read the transcript rather than having to listen to the audio.
6 Likes
About all recycled glass is good for is as an aggregate substitute in concrete. Wonderful stuff but it is just not remelted back into glass as that is cheaper to make from scratch - and having one green or brown bottle in a batch screws the clarity. Grew up in 1950’s country Australia with many people still using iceboxes and the big ice blocks were delivered around town by horse and cart. So was the bread, so was the milk - til those days were over. The town had its own cordial works and a truck would go around town and you’d buy a crate of soft drinks and give back a crate of empties, which went back to the cordial works for washing and refilling - a virtuous circle.It was still kraft wrapping paper and brown paper bags back then but commoditization of everything meant uniformity of portions, and in order to maintain freshness, plastic packaging. Glass is fragile and heavy, hence plastic jars/bottles. Cheaper /faster to produce/more energy efficient to blow a plastic container than a glass one. Trouble is we are all “living of the fat of the land”. When it becomes tough here, we just go further into the interior and dig deeper holes to mine greater resources. There is no end use for anything. We don’t repair. We have planned obsolescence which supports production. Seriously, does the first model Apple phone still work? Probably. But every year they bring out a new mod with heightened features. I don’t even have a smartphone but was just thinking this morning, looking at the glass jars and plastic containers in my sink - which are never going to get a second use - how much of a consumer slave I have become - and the tiny thrill I get from buying more stuff that I don’t need.
8 Likes
We need more reuse. There isn’t any reason why most food containers couldn’t be sent back and reused as is, like milk bottles used to be.
4 Likes
Even at a given price point there is a big difference between soy sauce produced through fermentation and through hydrolysis. Also between different country’s styles.
4 Likes
Look, I understand how plastics flattened the gulf between rich and poor (somewhat), and that we definitely cannot get out of this pandemic without them. But as long as we operate under the idea that recycling is only something we can do when it’s profitable, we will bury ourselves in our own hubris. We must gather the political will to make it cost prohibitive to employ virgin plastics in packaging—we must make it frightfully more expensive for companies to keep manufacturing these products. And we must make it cheaper to recycle—even if it means sinking money into subsidies, incentives and regulations. What is it going to take to shrug off suicidal capitalism?
8 Likes
Also, up until the 1970s, soft drinks generally came in returnable bottles with a deposit. The bottles were cleaned and reused rather than discarded or melted down.
3 Likes
I don’t think that’s true. The lifecycle costs of glass can be calculated easily enough. One thing that is 100% certain is that reuse is always the best option and glass can be infinitely reused. Plastic is unsafe in most cases to reuse even once.
This is an argument for doing nothing. “Everything is fine the way it is” is how we got into this plastic mess.
ETA: You don’t know how old I am, so be careful about playing the Old Wise Man Who Has Seen It All card.
7 Likes
I wonder if this is something that’s different across the globe because of differing material requirements and/or availability. The article I posted above says that there are some fairly significant benefits to recycling used glass into new glass.
The glass industry regularly mixes cullet—a granular material made by crushing bottles and jars usually collected from recycling programs—with sand, limestone, and other raw materials to produce the molten glass needed to manufacture new bottles and jars.
When studying glass recycling, the first thing that becomes clear is that cullet is extremely useful. It provides many benefits to glass manufacturing.
First, cullet allows glass manufacturers to reduce their need for raw materials. The key ingredients used in glassmaking are sand (mainly silica, SiO2), sodium carbonate (also known as soda ash, Na2CO3), and limestone (CaCO3). One kilogram of cullet replaces 1.2 kg of raw materials, according to James V. Nordmeyer, vice president of global sustainability at Owens-Illinois, a major manufacturer of glass bottles and containers.
Cullet also helps manufacturers save on energy costs. For every 10% of cullet included in the glassmaking feed mixture, the energy needed to keep the furnace at temperatures high enough to generate molten glass falls by nearly 3%, Rue says. Running furnaces at lower temperatures extends furnace lives and reduces operating costs and, as a result, the price of the final glass products.
According to Pennsylvania State University’s John C. Mauro, adding cullet to the feed mixture also improves the quality of glass products. Mauro is a materials scientist and glass specialist who spent nearly 20 years at the glassmaker Corning. He explains that melting cullet doesn’t release carbon dioxide or other gases that can form unwanted trapped bubbles in the glass. Also, using cullet limits the deposition of crystals of unmelted starting materials, as well as the formation of streaks and optical imperfections due to incomplete mixing of those materials.
Finally, cullet has a significant environmental benefit. Adding the material to the mix reduces greenhouse gas emissions during manufacturing, Nordmeyer points out. When the carbonates from limestone melt with the other materials, they release CO2. Using 10% cullet in the manufacturing feed lowers emissions of CO2 by roughly 5%. Basically, for every 6 metric tons of cullet used in manufacturing, glassmakers can cut 1 metric ton of CO2 emissions.
10 Likes
Good luck there. Won’t happen so long as lawmakers are owned by corporations.
You won’t like my expectation. Can humanity avoid self-imposed extinction? Probably only when Earth’s environment is so fucked that going off-planet is the only survival option.
1 Like
