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Better start educating people about cleaning out their plastic containers before recycling, even a bit of yogurt left at the bottom of a yogurt container can co

Better start educating people about cleaning out their plastic containers before recycling, even a bit of yogurt left at the bottom of a yogurt container can contaminate and can be possibly thrown out as garbage. Heads up to those who didn't know like me. https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4606893 https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4606893

polskibus 8y ago
That requires wasting water though. Maybe the container for yoghurt should be changed to be reusable after washing or recyclable without wasting resources on cleaning?
- lisper 8y ago
  > That requires wasting water though Yeah, this. This is the thing that most people who consider themselves environmentally conscious do not seem to have taken fully on board: there are no simple solutions here. There is an elephant in the room: there are simply too many human beings on the planet for them all to have a prosperous life style without enormous changes to the fundamental structure of the world's economy. Recycling will not save us. Better gas mileage will not save us. Electric cars will not save us. More public transit will not save us. The only thing that might save us is massive investment in nuclear power (plus solar and wind, but those two alone will not save us) plus a concerted effort to make birth control more widely available and socially acceptable.
  - mgbmtl 8y ago
    That's rather pessimistic. The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies. There is no magic bullet.
    - lisper 8y ago
      > That's rather pessimistic. Indeed. But it's also realistic. > The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies. Applies to what? R-R-R will buy some time. It will not solve the problem in the long run. > There is no magic bullet. Yes, there is: birth control. The solution to the problem is to stop the underlying unsustainable process, which is the exponential growth in human population. That is the ONLY solution.
      - olyjohn 8y ago
        Seriously. It's scary how accurate the movie Idiocracy is becoming.
      - mgbmtl 8y ago
        Just curious: what's the ideal population Earth, if all humans consumed as much as the average person in the US/Canada? Random googling suggests that for the US alone, ideal population would be 150 M, with EU-levels of consumption. That's pretty drastic.
        lisper 8y ago
        "Ideal" is a matter of taste. If you like to hang out in big cities your ideal number might be bigger than someone who doesn't. Personally, I think we are well past the point of diminishing returns for any reasonable quality metric. But just getting people to acknowledge that this is something worth thinking about would be significant progress. > That's pretty drastic. Yep. We've dug ourselves into a pretty deep hole. Getting out will not be easy.
        A2017U1 8y ago
        How did you get that very low figure? Everyone living like the US is put at using 4x the planets resources, which would suggest 1.5 billion people. That's the extremes too, the EU consumes much less. http://personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa12/2012/10/if-everyone-lived-liked-americans-how-many-earths-would-we-need.html http://personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa12/2012/10/if-every...
- RandallBrown 8y ago
  Wasting water isn't a problem in some parts of the world. In many places, water you don't use from your tap will just end up flowing into the ocean anyway. Treating it will require some energy sure, but then it's an energy problem, which is all recycling is (in places like the US where most of our trash ends up safely in landfills and not the ocean.)
- danans 8y ago
  The amount of additional water needed to wash the yogurt container, compared to the massive amount of water mismanagement in agriculture and industry, is minimal. We learned this during the recent California drought. The real reason that people (myself included) don't always wash plastic containers out: it's a hassle. There are several ways we can try to solve this: - Separating recycling materials at the curb, so the yogurt container never meets the clean paper (although I thought Canada already does this). - Biodegradable plant-based plastics suitable for food packaging purposes - Better automated sorting technology at the recycling center.
  - jschwartzi 8y ago
    Curbside separation in my mind involves me keeping huge amounts of different bins in my tiny apartment so that I can sort everything, and then finding where the landlord has put the brown glass recycle bins this week, then walking over to the other end of the 15 acre complex to locate the green glass bins, then walking to the opposite corner to locate the aluminum can bin. I'm not saying it's impossible, but any system that requires individuals to pre-sort recyclables needs to account for the fact that most of us live in places that were designed before recycling was a thing.
  - forkLding 8y ago
    Yea Canadians have to sort out recycling materials into categories and separate out paper from plastic containers or else its not picked up by the waste collectors, I think issue is when it is put into recycling to be reused for materials.
  - polskibus 8y ago
    The point is to change processes and habits so the entire sum of resources used and pollution produced is minimal. Reuse is almost always better, so maybe yoghurts can come in glass jars instead of tiny, hard to wash plastic cups? Maybe smallest containers, that discourage reuse should be taxed extra? Much easier to wash 1l yoghurt cup than 4 x 250ml. Biodegradable - that's cool, but sometimes they can be toxic, not really biodegradable or require a lot of resources to produce, and a lot of waste is produced as by product. Sorting is great, but only recycling, which requires cleaning - which is attacking the problem from the wrong end.
danans 8y ago
"Even a few spoonfuls of peanut butter left in a jar can contaminate a tonne of paper and make it unmarketable — destined for the dump. Same for that glob of yogurt left in the bottom of the container." The article seems to claim that the yogurt can contaminate clean paper that is mixed in, making the paper un-recyclable, not the plastic yogurt container itself. Also, this appears to be a new thing, since China stopped accepting contaminated paper for recycling.
- mjevans 8y ago
  Unless it is a LARGE, clean, never touched food item like a box the paper should probably actually just go in to the compost stream anyway... I would actually welcome a far more limited* (and to recyclable types) number of plastics allowed in packaging and requirements that they also cannot be fused to other materials. The numbers should be REQUIRED to be /raised/ or /impressed/ to a large degree and be VERY LARGE on the two dimensional face as well. A 'nearly legally blind' person should be able to still tell where the logo is and understand it's content. The plastics / glasses binning should also assume they /are/ getting dirty consumer content and use an 'industrial' boiling water pot to dislodge and release the food waste. Such a processing step is more practical as part of the post-consumer input filter.

polskibus 8y ago

That requires wasting water though. Maybe the container for yoghurt should be changed to be reusable after washing or recyclable without wasting resources on cleaning?

lisper 8y ago
> That requires wasting water though Yeah, this. This is the thing that most people who consider themselves environmentally conscious do not seem to have taken fully on board: there are no simple solutions here. There is an elephant in the room: there are simply too many human beings on the planet for them all to have a prosperous life style without enormous changes to the fundamental structure of the world's economy. Recycling will not save us. Better gas mileage will not save us. Electric cars will not save us. More public transit will not save us. The only thing that might save us is massive investment in nuclear power (plus solar and wind, but those two alone will not save us) plus a concerted effort to make birth control more widely available and socially acceptable.
- mgbmtl 8y ago
  That's rather pessimistic. The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies. There is no magic bullet.
  - lisper 8y ago
    > That's rather pessimistic. Indeed. But it's also realistic. > The old slogan of "reduce, re-use, recycle" (in that order) still applies. Applies to what? R-R-R will buy some time. It will not solve the problem in the long run. > There is no magic bullet. Yes, there is: birth control. The solution to the problem is to stop the underlying unsustainable process, which is the exponential growth in human population. That is the ONLY solution.
    - olyjohn 8y ago
      Seriously. It's scary how accurate the movie Idiocracy is becoming.
    - mgbmtl 8y ago
      Just curious: what's the ideal population Earth, if all humans consumed as much as the average person in the US/Canada? Random googling suggests that for the US alone, ideal population would be 150 M, with EU-levels of consumption. That's pretty drastic.
      - lisper 8y ago
        "Ideal" is a matter of taste. If you like to hang out in big cities your ideal number might be bigger than someone who doesn't. Personally, I think we are well past the point of diminishing returns for any reasonable quality metric. But just getting people to acknowledge that this is something worth thinking about would be significant progress. > That's pretty drastic. Yep. We've dug ourselves into a pretty deep hole. Getting out will not be easy.
      - A2017U1 8y ago
        How did you get that very low figure? Everyone living like the US is put at using 4x the planets resources, which would suggest 1.5 billion people. That's the extremes too, the EU consumes much less. http://personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa12/2012/10/if-everyone-lived-liked-americans-how-many-earths-would-we-need.html http://personal.psu.edu/afr3/blogs/siowfa12/2012/10/if-every...
RandallBrown 8y ago
Wasting water isn't a problem in some parts of the world. In many places, water you don't use from your tap will just end up flowing into the ocean anyway. Treating it will require some energy sure, but then it's an energy problem, which is all recycling is (in places like the US where most of our trash ends up safely in landfills and not the ocean.)
danans 8y ago
The amount of additional water needed to wash the yogurt container, compared to the massive amount of water mismanagement in agriculture and industry, is minimal. We learned this during the recent California drought. The real reason that people (myself included) don't always wash plastic containers out: it's a hassle. There are several ways we can try to solve this: - Separating recycling materials at the curb, so the yogurt container never meets the clean paper (although I thought Canada already does this). - Biodegradable plant-based plastics suitable for food packaging purposes - Better automated sorting technology at the recycling center.
- jschwartzi 8y ago
  Curbside separation in my mind involves me keeping huge amounts of different bins in my tiny apartment so that I can sort everything, and then finding where the landlord has put the brown glass recycle bins this week, then walking over to the other end of the 15 acre complex to locate the green glass bins, then walking to the opposite corner to locate the aluminum can bin. I'm not saying it's impossible, but any system that requires individuals to pre-sort recyclables needs to account for the fact that most of us live in places that were designed before recycling was a thing.
- forkLding 8y ago
  Yea Canadians have to sort out recycling materials into categories and separate out paper from plastic containers or else its not picked up by the waste collectors, I think issue is when it is put into recycling to be reused for materials.
- polskibus 8y ago
  The point is to change processes and habits so the entire sum of resources used and pollution produced is minimal. Reuse is almost always better, so maybe yoghurts can come in glass jars instead of tiny, hard to wash plastic cups? Maybe smallest containers, that discourage reuse should be taxed extra? Much easier to wash 1l yoghurt cup than 4 x 250ml. Biodegradable - that's cool, but sometimes they can be toxic, not really biodegradable or require a lot of resources to produce, and a lot of waste is produced as by product. Sorting is great, but only recycling, which requires cleaning - which is attacking the problem from the wrong end.

danans 8y ago

"Even a few spoonfuls of peanut butter left in a jar can contaminate a tonne of paper and make it unmarketable — destined for the dump. Same for that glob of yogurt left in the bottom of the container." The article seems to claim that the yogurt can contaminate clean paper that is mixed in, making the paper un-recyclable, not the plastic yogurt container itself. Also, this appears to be a new thing, since China stopped accepting contaminated paper for recycling.

mjevans 8y ago
Unless it is a LARGE, clean, never touched food item like a box the paper should probably actually just go in to the compost stream anyway... I would actually welcome a far more limited* (and to recyclable types) number of plastics allowed in packaging and requirements that they also cannot be fused to other materials. The numbers should be REQUIRED to be /raised/ or /impressed/ to a large degree and be VERY LARGE on the two dimensional face as well. A 'nearly legally blind' person should be able to still tell where the logo is and understand it's content. The plastics / glasses binning should also assume they /are/ getting dirty consumer content and use an 'industrial' boiling water pot to dislodge and release the food waste. Such a processing step is more practical as part of the post-consumer input filter.