28 ms·

Pringles tube tries to wake from 'recycling nightmare'

198 points by Kaibeezy 6y ago

dreen 6y ago
Fred Baur, the inventor of the original Pringles can, was buried in one of them (on his request)
- gerikson 6y ago
  Gene Wolfe (the SF author) helped develop the machine to make them. > I was in the engineering development division, and asked to develop mass production equipment to make these chips. And we divided the task into the dough making/dough rolling portion, which was done by Len Hooper, and the cooking portion, which was done by me, and then the pickoff and salting portion, which was done by someone else, and then the can filling/can sealing portion which was done by a man who was almost driven insane by the program. Because he would develop a machine, and he would have it almost ready to go, and they would say "Oh, instead of 300 cans a minute, make it 500 cans a minute." And so he would have to throw out a bunch of stuff, and develop the new machine, and when he got that one about ready, they'd say "make it 700 cans a minute." And they almost put him in a mental hospital. He took his job very seriously and he just about flipped out. https://web.archive.org/web/20090916170648/http://home.roadrunner.com/~lperson1/wolfe.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090916170648/http://home.roadr...
  - Mediterraneo10 6y ago
    Gene Wolfe's job as a plant engineer before he became a full-time author gave him a front-row seat for other low-quality mid-20th-century American processed food. In his novel Peace, it is subtly revealed towards the end of the book that the protagonist’s family business produces Tang (through breaking potatoes down into their starch and then adding flavoring).
- binarymax 6y ago
  Like, buried in a giant replica of the can as a coffin? Or cremated and put in a normal size can?
  - Stratoscope 6y ago
    "Some of Baur's ashes were buried in a Pringles can at his request." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Baur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Baur
kbos87 6y ago
If you want to have your eyes opened about just how little of the material you probably think you are recycling actually gets recycled, watch the recent Frontline episode called “Plastic Wars”. The sad truth is that while recycling is worthwhile, it’s also a woefully insufficient solution that has been held up by the petroleum industry as a cure all to prevent a backlash against plastic. Even products that are labeled recyclable often aren’t once they are processed. One thing that sticks with me (and this is just one representative example) is that almost none of those plastic salad containers that have overtaken supermarkets are ever recycled. https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  And many cities subsidize waste by charging money for trash hauling but not for putting trash in the recycling bin. Seattle even introduced a punitive fine for NOT contaminating the recycling stream!
  - Zippogriff 6y ago
    Regular trash costs extra money after a couple bags, here, so we're encouraged to put anything in recycling that can go there. Our city has us put recycling out at the curb, unbagged and uncovered, in plastic bins. Meanwhile, wind exists. It's more of a littering program than a recycling program, really.
    - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
      Do they still have a plastic bin? Where does it go I wonder, now that China isn't taking it.
      - Zippogriff 6y ago
        Oh it's much worse. It's all mixed up together, no sorting. I doubt any of it actual gets recycled, except maybe the metal. It's such an obviously terrible program that surely it only exists to funnel money to someone's cousin, or something. Ineffective, and directly causes several trash-devils swirling down the street every year. Been that way for at least a decade, and there's little or no agitation to eliminate or fix the program. [EDIT] that is, I meant the bins are all made of plastic, so light and prone to blowing around or tipping, not that it's a bin dedicated to plastic. We don't sort, here, all the metal, cardboard, and plastic goes in the same open-topped plastic containers. No glass collection is done whatsoever, as it's not permitted in regular trash or recycling, so you have to sort that out on your own.
chongli 6y ago
I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it. This is one of the big problems I have with recycling. When I was a kid in school (throughout the 90’s), we learned the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is last on the list. The list is in order of increasing waste for a very good reason. We should first strive to reduce the amount of wasteful stuff we purchase, barring that we should try to reuse things around the house (plastic bags, containers, etc), and finally if we can’t do either we should recycle the stuff to try and recover the materials. Nowadays I don’t hear about the 3 R’s anymore. It’s become all about people dumping everything in a box and making it somebody else’s problem, just as trash was in the first place.
- masklinn 6y ago
  > I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it. Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw cans away, there’s noly do many cans you can find a use for. I can’t find any specific production numbers but the internet tells me Kellogg’s sells for billions in snacks and pringles are a significant fraction of that. A Pringle can is a buck or two, meaning 6 figures Pringle cans being sold every year, if not 7.
  - adingus 6y ago
    Maybe they can progressively make Pringles cans bigger so you can store your old cans inside your new cans.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      The traditional thing to do is to make packaging smaller (while keeping price the same) - so you'd get to store your new cans in your old cans.
burke_holland 6y ago
Given that most recycling ends up in landfills anyway, I’m not sure it matters much. We have a much bigger recycling problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...
- throwaway2245 6y ago
  It matters because these problems feed into each other. If a tonne of recycling is not financially viable because the Pringles cans are too difficult to extract, then none of it gets recycled.
exabrial 6y ago
Wouldn't it be better to use as much paper as possible in the packaging and certify the paper is sourced from sustainable forestry? They we use the package as a carbon sink.
- yourapostasy 6y ago
  Paper lacks many properties sought after in plastic packaging. We end up coating the paper if we try to make it exhibit those properties, and the coatings frequently involve some kind of polymer. If it wasn't for the microplastics problem that I don't see a solution for yet (need something on the order of Drexlerian nanotech to scour the environment and pull the microplastics out of it), then more durable, reusable designs of plastic packaging would be amazing. Glass and stainless steel containers are my go-to solutions at home, but many people are unwilling to put up with their bulk and weight. My ideal is hermetically sealed glass containers [1] that use ground glass joints to seal, but there is a limited selection of their form factors (I can't find tall sizes for holding spaghetti, for example). I haven't been able to find stainless steel containers with reusable recycled rubber or cork gaskets in a good selection of form factors. I've wondered what it would take to coordinate with a manufacturer or distributor to link up a crowdsource-driven supply chain to optimize for reduce and reuse. Crowdsource enough local people within biking/PRT/drone distance who will commit to buying some specific quantity periodically over a few years, and source wholesale quantities of goods to eliminate retail packaging. Send a truck on an optimized route picking up pallet loads of goods from different manufacturers/distributors. Use material handling robots to break down the full truck load of goods, pick and place into bins, and queue for last mile distribution of first month delivery. Remainder sits in a super-insulated (R-100 or so) warehouse. The question is about finding that breakeven point where the automation productivity can be captured by a small enough group of people that makes it worthwhile for them to implement instead of letting an Amazon/WalMart/Target capture the lion's share productivity gains' benefits. [1] https://www.thomassci.com/scientific-supplies/Ground-Glass-Bottles https://www.thomassci.com/scientific-supplies/Ground-Glass-B...
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Besides what the other person said, paper packaging is often bleached with dioxins because consumers like clean white packaging. Dioxins are really nasty stuff.
redis_mlc 6y ago
The Stax chips packaging is almost a 100% reusable plastic bottle, and I think they taste better than Pringle's, so I buy Stax occasionally. If the plastic lid was screw-on, it would be ideal for a relief tube when flying, but it's just press-fit.
- werdnapk 6y ago
  The article alludes to removing the plastic components altogether if possible in place of the plastic, so yes, the Stax container is easier to recycle, but still not ideal.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    I said reuse, which is superior to recycling. reduce > reuse > recycle You can learn more here: https://www.epa.gov/recycle https://www.epa.gov/recycle Automotive vehicles are the only thing with high rates of recycling - the rate is almost 100% for the metal. https://www.worldautosteel.org/life-cycle-thinking/recycling/ https://www.worldautosteel.org/life-cycle-thinking/recycling... Household waste in the US is usually quietly landfilled, unless a private contractor can make money recycling it. (The bluebox separation training is helpful though for a future date.)
- yread 6y ago
  I hope you fly solo...
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    Doesn't really matter. If you're a required crew member in a small plane, gotta keep it comfy, though most planes with 2 pilots would be big enough for a lav.
kefabean 6y ago
I wish there was more (food) packaging regulation to limit the types of materials, how they are combined and how they must be reused or recycled. I try to avoid, reuse, refill, recycle but it still makes me sad how much material in my own home is discarded in ‘recycling’ but probably in reality goes straight to landfill.
sandreas 6y ago
Goodbye cantenna ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna
ZeroGravitas 6y ago
Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. The way problems with it are treated as fundamentally unfixable always strikes me as against the site's ethos, yet people love pointing them out. Recycling just gets dumped in landfill! Ok, lets ban that. But, actually, its more environmentally friendly to landfill it! Are you sure? Science doesnt really agree. But anyway, can we make recycling more efficient? No, stop trying to improve things. Recycling is bad. If it made sense the free market would already do it!
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  Bury it until it makes sense to mine it
- awiesenhofer 6y ago
  > Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. Same here. Especially as someone from central europe where most recycling just works and noone even thinks twice about it. Heck, a lot of landfill dumping is even banned here already and anything dumped must be thermally threated first anyway.
  - kachnuv_ocasek 6y ago
    Actually, I'm not sure how well recycling works in "Central Europe". In Czechia, at least, although waste sorting seems to work fairly well, as far as I'm aware, the share of plastic waste that gets recycled is negligible. Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity.
    - Shacklz 6y ago
      > Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity. Well, at least it doesn't get shipped around the world to then be dumped into the ocean...
    - tutanchamun 6y ago
      Yes, 1 or 2 years ago I saw a short piece about recycling plastics and what really is getting recycled in the end. Many products which would be easy to recycle didn't get recycled because they had fancy labels on them which made it hard or impossible for the machines which resulted in the plastics getting burned instead.
Ensorceled 6y ago
We need to focus on the second R, reuse. I have mason jars that my grandmother and then my mother used for pickling. The only waste is the rubber ring which needs to be replaced occasionally and THAT could be recycled. Many of these bottles have been used for 80+ years now. I have a few Ball jars which my GREAT grandmother used 100+ years ago. Beer bottles in Canada are reused dozens of times and are recyclable (brown glass) when broken or worn out. The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy. Plastics are not currently infinitely recyclable as the polymer chains break down. A lot of plastic is simply not recyclable at all in most of North America [1] We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close. [1] https://apps.npr.org/plastics-recycling/ https://apps.npr.org/plastics-recycling/
- adrianN 6y ago
  Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order. A lot of things don't need so much packaging in the first place.
  - ed_elliott_asc 6y ago
    We need a www.packagingdisasters.com which name and shame the worst packaging disasters.
    - FroshKiller 6y ago
      We need legislation with teeth.
  - rikroots 6y ago
    Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle, Composting, Energy from waste, Incineration, Landfill - that was the basics of the Waste Hierarchy when I worked on the Waste Strategy for England back in the late 1990s. I don't know if the order has shifted much over the past couple of decades. The EU Packaging Directive seems to be getting more robust - I remember the first Directive was a bit weak and too open to national interpretation so it's good to see they seem to have introduced hard recycling targets and put a lot more emphasis on the need for producer responsibility schemes for packaging - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1595838206165&uri=LEGISSUM:l21207 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15958382...
ed_elliott_asc 6y ago
The thing is they don’t need that plastic lid. They say without it the food would be spoiled but if you have a big bag of crisps, you open them and eat them or they go off - this is no different. Kellogg’s seem to believe they have invented a type of crisp that can only be eaten over a period of time.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  They need some kind of closure on the tube to keep the chips and crumbs in and the dust out in the cupboard. (The foil/paper closure works until first opened but not after.) Chip bags can be clipped closed for this.
- m-p-3 6y ago
  They definitely don't need the plastic lid, no way I can stop myself from eating the whole thing in one session.
  - RandallBrown 6y ago
    The only thing that stops me from eating them that quickly is how hard they are to get out of the can once you're about halfway through.
- sschueller 6y ago
  Especially as they used to say once to start you can't stop. So you eat the whole tube anyway...
- hinkley 6y ago
  Pringles hold up well in lunchboxes, and the can could go a week per child even if they prefer one flavor. I think people underestimate the packing density of Pringle’s. There is a lot of (mashed) potato in that can.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  It's the Pringles brand, though: "once you pop you just can't stop" or something like that. They've built this story around the sound of the lid popping off.
ja27 6y ago
Lays Stax come in an equivalent all-plastic tube and it's insane how much plastic that is compared to a bag of regular chips. The other one that bothers me is the larger Crystal Light packets which come in a very sturdy plastic container that's at least five times bigger than it needs to be. Even the generic knock-offs at ALDI come in a similar plastic container. Why not cardboard? Here, a good bit of our trash is burned and used to generate electricity before the ash is buried, so I feel a bit less guilty about single-use plastics but it's still not good. I'm sure plenty of our recycling stream ends up there too, either due to contamination or lack of buyers for it.
sandGorgon 6y ago
FWIW - Pringles tubes are very effective in increasing wifi signal range. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out-of-a-pringles-can-nb/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ioJ8i56pA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ioJ8i56pA
- m-p-3 6y ago
  The world will run out of antennas to boost.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    MIMO cantenna! Now with more M’s.
- BlackLotus89 6y ago
  No they are not. They were used because someone did it and documented it, but the diameter and length is sub-optimal (75mm is too small) should be between 84 and 92mm (diameter). Since this was probably more a joke I won't get too much into the details, but if you really want to build a "cantenna" there are great resources out there.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    So we need Pringle’s Extra (you can fit your hand in there!) and a little campaign about mesh networking... I’m guessing the diameter and length are also wrong for 5Ghz as well?
alexanderthe- 6y ago
Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce standardized packaging across product "classes" to streamline reuse and recycling - for example, all soda bottles of size x, must come in shape y, made out of polymer z. The obvious financial impact would be companies having to potentially retool their factories to facilitate that, but there can also be sensible tax rebates to prevent the corporations from crying. The bottom line is, the cost of doing business has to take into account the environmental impacts on our planet and the consequences for our progeny.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce ... You are being naive, even in the European Union which has a fairly contained level of corruption the Plastic and Petro-chemical lobby are incredibly strong. Many countries wanted to introduce a single-use plastic ban, almost immediately a campaign came out saying they were trying to kill people at hospitals where many consumables are single-use plastic (Obviously medical supplies were exempt from the ban). The single-use plastic ban was so watered down that now the only thing that will be baned are things like plastic forks and plastic q-tips. Another example is return deposits, many European countries have very succesful glass deposit schemes usually reusing the supermarket stores' infrastructure. The natural progression of this is to create large plastic bootle/container deposits. Again this will never happen because it obviously stops the current externalization of costs in the plastic business. There are two main forces at play against Humanity on the plastic front of our Anthropogenic calamity: - The consumer product manufacturers (think Unilever, Pepsico, Nestle, Kraft, etc.). Their interest in plastic containers is mostly due to the reduction in production cost and transport costs. They heavily lobby against bans and any cost increase for their production chain. - The Petro-Chemical industry (Including Big Oil companies), many of these refining business know they are getting squeezed out of the fuel business as electrical vehicle adoption is bound to increase. The Plastic production is the last remaining golden goose in their portfolio. A circular economy where most of the plastic is recycled from previously used plastic would mean that the volumes and profits of these very financially successful business would evaporate. Both these lobbies and others will continue to resist and undermine any attempt to curb our planetary and Humane destruction until they are stopped either by public pressure or insolvency.
jacknews 6y ago
The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil. But IMHO manufacturers should be on the hook for the lifecycle of their products. Either through taxes, or some kind of market-driven bidding mechanism, they should have financial penalties (or even rewards), based on product environmental impact. The whole recycling movement seems to me to be a way for companies to palm off this responsibility onto the public, and then win 'green publicity' when they deign to make their products slightly more amenable to the (usually public-funded/volunteer/coerced/etc) recycling system.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil. This is incredibly uninformed and misleading. Burying it will not solve any problems, a PET bootle takes something like 450 years to fully breakdown, on top of that the particles released as it breaks down will be washed away into the subsoil and end up in ground water, then rivers, water supply, and eventually then back into the oceans. Most plastics also have a hazardous health side effect they act as hormone disruptors, effectively mimicking estrogen. Having any additional plastic purposefully break down and leak in even greater concentrations, into our water supply, sounds like a remarkably poor idea.
  - jacknews 6y ago
    It will solve the PET problem for 450 years. But my point is less to do with how to treat waste, than the fact that the most important first step is to actually collect it. In much of the world, collection is not happening properly, which is why we see so much plastic waste washed into rivers and oceans. Of course if we create less waste to start with, that also helps, but that will only happen if manufacturers are pressured where it matters, the bottom line.
altcognito 6y ago
The best approach would be to make corporations and people pay based on the amount of trash they generate. Similar to VAT, have a GAT. All of a sudden, consumers would be keenly aware and happy to purchase products that reduce trash. Even better, weight it against the long term damage to the environment. Yes, this is going to be ugly politically, but that's probably one way to capture the negative externalities of a product. You could even have a very tiny tag with a number printed on the item that would allow you to look up a breakdown of what went into calculating it's 'GAT' score.
- hinkley 6y ago
  You’d have to bill them collectively for things like cleaning up the ocean and you’d get countersued to hell and back. It’d be easier to just tariff everything, but then you either soft ban that material or embolden them (do the time, do the crime style).
downshun 6y ago
There's so much 'repeat trash' that could be repurposed if accumulated instead of disposed immediately.
amelius 6y ago
Nespresso has the same problem with those little pods, but decided not to change anything about their design and instead focus on recycling.
- sschueller 6y ago
  What are their alternatives? Plastic is worse and paper does not seal properly. They would need to line paper with something that makes it bad again for recycling. Letting people collect the used pods and return them for free makes sense if you want to have a pod system. Of course you could make coffee the old way.
  - amelius 6y ago
    Yes, but making coffee the old way would ruin Nespresso's business model.
m0nty 6y ago
> Kellogg's says these lids will still produce the distinctive "pop" associated with the product. No it isn't. Is this "pop" really such a big deal that they've been holding back on the redesign for so long?
- detaro 6y ago
  Isn't it like the Pringles marketing thing?
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I can’t recall the last time I saw a Pringle’s ad, but wasn’t their slogan “Once you pop, you can’t stop?” Although that’s a double edged argument. If you say the marketing is true (we need the pop!) then you’ve just stated that don’t think the can needs to be resealable...
- jdmichal 6y ago
  Their marketing is based around that sound... So it probably is seen as a big deal to them. Probably some pop-psych idea around having that sound be associated to them through the commercials and usage.
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    I've never heard a pop during a lifetime of probably eating my bodyweight in Pringles. Either it's always been purely a marketing thing and they're finally actually engineering it into their packaging, or people are attacking Pringles lids in a way I do not understand.
    - Groxx 6y ago
      Same - I've literally never heard that "pop". I grew up thinking it was just their slogan, referring to the act of opening the tube (as "pop the top/hood/etc" is used for many other things), not onomatopoeia.
- deleted 6y ago
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
I really think the focus should be on using biodegradable materials. Basically no plastic. Landfills would be fine if the trash actually broke down.
kthejoker2 6y ago
My immediate thought is it sounds like Kellogg's/Pringles could get a lot of free positive marketing by just switching to a "100% biodegradable" bag? Nobody likes Pringles because they're in a tube.
- crazygringo 6y ago
  The tube is far more space-efficient. Also, I imagine Pringles in a bag would be destroyed -- they're far more fragile than a potato chip, tortilla chip, or pretzel.
- gridlockd 6y ago
  Not true, the tube makes sure the chips stay mostly intact. The shape of the chips fits neatly around your tongue. Pringles are made of flour, they would turn to dust in an ordinary bag.
- James_Henry 6y ago
  A lot of those biodegradable containers you see are coated in short chain PFAS/PFOA which build up over time in the ground and end up in the water (and maybe plants) and then give you cancer.
- analog31 6y ago
  Pringles are a good example where the packaging is the product to a large degree. I was around when Pringles were introduced, and saw the ads on TV. The tube was central to the marketing appeal. There were already reconstituted potato chips in bags on the market, though I can't for the life of me remember the name. Pringles were molded to a uniform size and shape, and the tube protected them from breakage. There was a satisfying snap when you opened the lid. There are other examples where the packaging is the product, such as "Lunchables" from Oscar Mayer.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Kids might. Or at least did. Packing tubes were magic, and Pringle’s cans are musical.
- RandallBrown 6y ago
beamatronic 6y ago
You can store tennis balls. You can make a WiFi cantenna! Many ways to re-use these cans.
- skocznymroczny 6y ago
  There's a certain popular "adult" usecase involving a rubber glove turned inside out and two kitchen sponges...
brainzap 6y ago
How about we just don't buy them.
- jeffbee 6y ago
  Seriously. Eat a potato if you want.
- theonemind 6y ago
  I don't see why anyone buys them. We have real potato chips made from cut potato, then the compressed potato dust abomination we call the Pringle. They have an unsatisfying gritty texture when crunching and chewing them. Eating pringles makes me want actual potato chips.
fortran77 6y ago
There's always the "cantenna" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna
- ghostDancer 6y ago
  Or Enigma Machines: http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigma http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigm...
JoeAltmaier 6y ago
Foil/plastic/paper juice boxes are my vote for 'recycling nightmare'. And kids use them by the dozen.
- hinkley 6y ago
  The waste processor in Seattle claimed to be able to recycle Tetrapac boxes, although I’ve no idea how they manage that or if it’s just PR.
zoobab 6y ago
I propose a glass container as a replacement.
everdrive 6y ago
It's quite sad, since there's no reason for pringles to exist in the first place. They're not good for you, they have no nutritional value, and they come with tons of waste. All this mess just because a few people with poor impulse control wanted to be a bit more comfortable.
someonehere 6y ago
> Kellogg's says these lids will still produce the distinctive "pop" associated with the product. We’re concerned with a pop sound so we’re spending time and resources finding an alternative way to make the pop. Sounds ridiculous.
- angel_j 6y ago
  And all for 10 cents worth of potato dust cast into the shape of a chip and covered in sodium.
justnotworthit 6y ago
Isn't tetrapak more complex in makeup and more ubiquitous? How is it recycled? Because there's more of it, there's a better effort at handling it? * I'm currently testing used tetrapak as shingle siding for dog houses!
mensetmanusman 6y ago
The use of the word ‘nightmare’ when describing consumer packaging makes discussion of climate issues seem like a joke to the average person. Do journalists realize they are being mocked when they highlight this terminology? Are they doing it intentionally to make a mockery of these issues?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
The uncomfortable truth: 50% of food is thrown away due to our current habits. This % would be even higher if we didn’t use multilayer materials to protect food from spoiling. The only way to solve this is by changing our eating habits (e.g. some things would have to go away, because they are not economical to centrally produce and ship everywhere around the world). That, or you get distributed manufacturing that makes this food on demand locally.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  Food waste isn’t a problem per se. If the farming is done sustainably, and distribution improved so people aren’t starving, I don’t see why we have to eliminate foods instead of just increasing their price and/or reducing availability to e.g. tier 1 cities.
- DFHippie 6y ago
  A large percentage of this food waste is perishable or unwanted stuff in the store. Produce gets ugly and, though it's still usable, nobody picks it over the fresher stuff. Milk gets close to its sell-by date and people pick fresher stuff. Someone overstocks something and a manager pitches it. Something doesn't sell. Some of this can go to food pantries, but a lot just turns into methane in landfills. As for produce, much perishes en route as well, or is abandoned in the field as unsellable, or reaches the market where produce managers are shopping for their stores and it doesn't sell. Changing our consumer habits is only going to get us so far. Not that it isn't worth doing, but that 50% figure isn't due to families buying two bags of potato chips and pitching one.
INTPenis 6y ago
Not once in my life have I "popped" a pringles tube. I thought that was just an ad.
rdiddly 6y ago
Nonetheless it's possible to recycle them. Well the foil you tear off is definitely trash and the lid most likely also, but the wall of the can, you can cut a slit down the side with a knife and separate it from the metal bottom. Bottom goes with metals, rectangular lined cardboard sheet goes with aseptics (lined cartons etc) if your area has a program for that.
- bobthepanda 6y ago
  How likely do you find that people will actually do this though? If people are not likely to do it that makes the proposition rather pointless. Hello Fresh gave me something (I think it was a cooling pack) that was "recyclable" but really only the outside was, and the inside you had to toss in the trash anyways, and on top of that I'm pretty sure you couldn't touch what was inside it, and to me that pretty much makes it trash with all the "buts" involved.
  - rdiddly 6y ago
    It's possible, is the extent of what I'm saying.
ChuckMcM 6y ago
Well if they get rid of the foil interior what will I use for a 2.4Ghz waveguide?[1] [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/0596005598/ch05s04.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/05960055...

198 points by Kaibeezy 6y ago

dreen 6y ago

Fred Baur, the inventor of the original Pringles can, was buried in one of them (on his request)

gerikson 6y ago
Gene Wolfe (the SF author) helped develop the machine to make them. > I was in the engineering development division, and asked to develop mass production equipment to make these chips. And we divided the task into the dough making/dough rolling portion, which was done by Len Hooper, and the cooking portion, which was done by me, and then the pickoff and salting portion, which was done by someone else, and then the can filling/can sealing portion which was done by a man who was almost driven insane by the program. Because he would develop a machine, and he would have it almost ready to go, and they would say "Oh, instead of 300 cans a minute, make it 500 cans a minute." And so he would have to throw out a bunch of stuff, and develop the new machine, and when he got that one about ready, they'd say "make it 700 cans a minute." And they almost put him in a mental hospital. He took his job very seriously and he just about flipped out. https://web.archive.org/web/20090916170648/http://home.roadrunner.com/~lperson1/wolfe.html https://web.archive.org/web/20090916170648/http://home.roadr...
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Gene Wolfe's job as a plant engineer before he became a full-time author gave him a front-row seat for other low-quality mid-20th-century American processed food. In his novel Peace, it is subtly revealed towards the end of the book that the protagonist’s family business produces Tang (through breaking potatoes down into their starch and then adding flavoring).
binarymax 6y ago
Like, buried in a giant replica of the can as a coffin? Or cremated and put in a normal size can?
- Stratoscope 6y ago
  "Some of Baur's ashes were buried in a Pringles can at his request." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Baur https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Baur

kbos87 6y ago

If you want to have your eyes opened about just how little of the material you probably think you are recycling actually gets recycled, watch the recent Frontline episode called “Plastic Wars”. The sad truth is that while recycling is worthwhile, it’s also a woefully insufficient solution that has been held up by the petroleum industry as a cure all to prevent a backlash against plastic. Even products that are labeled recyclable often aren’t once they are processed. One thing that sticks with me (and this is just one representative example) is that almost none of those plastic salad containers that have overtaken supermarkets are ever recycled. https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o https://youtu.be/-dk3NOEgX7o

srtjstjsj 6y ago
And many cities subsidize waste by charging money for trash hauling but not for putting trash in the recycling bin. Seattle even introduced a punitive fine for NOT contaminating the recycling stream!
- Zippogriff 6y ago
  Regular trash costs extra money after a couple bags, here, so we're encouraged to put anything in recycling that can go there. Our city has us put recycling out at the curb, unbagged and uncovered, in plastic bins. Meanwhile, wind exists. It's more of a littering program than a recycling program, really.
  - JoeAltmaier 6y ago
    Do they still have a plastic bin? Where does it go I wonder, now that China isn't taking it.
    - Zippogriff 6y ago
      Oh it's much worse. It's all mixed up together, no sorting. I doubt any of it actual gets recycled, except maybe the metal. It's such an obviously terrible program that surely it only exists to funnel money to someone's cousin, or something. Ineffective, and directly causes several trash-devils swirling down the street every year. Been that way for at least a decade, and there's little or no agitation to eliminate or fix the program. [EDIT] that is, I meant the bins are all made of plastic, so light and prone to blowing around or tipping, not that it's a bin dedicated to plastic. We don't sort, here, all the metal, cardboard, and plastic goes in the same open-topped plastic containers. No glass collection is done whatsoever, as it's not permitted in regular trash or recycling, so you have to sort that out on your own.

chongli 6y ago

I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it. This is one of the big problems I have with recycling. When I was a kid in school (throughout the 90’s), we learned the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is last on the list. The list is in order of increasing waste for a very good reason. We should first strive to reduce the amount of wasteful stuff we purchase, barring that we should try to reuse things around the house (plastic bags, containers, etc), and finally if we can’t do either we should recycle the stuff to try and recover the materials. Nowadays I don’t hear about the 3 R’s anymore. It’s become all about people dumping everything in a box and making it somebody else’s problem, just as trash was in the first place.

masklinn 6y ago
> I love Pringles tubes. We reuse them all over the place around the house. Never really thought of recycling them. Seems like a terrible waste to destroy a perfectly good container just to get a ~penny’s worth of materials out of it. Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw cans away, there’s noly do many cans you can find a use for. I can’t find any specific production numbers but the internet tells me Kellogg’s sells for billions in snacks and pringles are a significant fraction of that. A Pringle can is a buck or two, meaning 6 figures Pringle cans being sold every year, if not 7.
- adingus 6y ago
  Maybe they can progressively make Pringles cans bigger so you can store your old cans inside your new cans.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    The traditional thing to do is to make packaging smaller (while keeping price the same) - so you'd get to store your new cans in your old cans.

burke_holland 6y ago

Given that most recycling ends up in landfills anyway, I’m not sure it matters much. We have a much bigger recycling problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfil...

throwaway2245 6y ago
It matters because these problems feed into each other. If a tonne of recycling is not financially viable because the Pringles cans are too difficult to extract, then none of it gets recycled.

exabrial 6y ago

Wouldn't it be better to use as much paper as possible in the packaging and certify the paper is sourced from sustainable forestry? They we use the package as a carbon sink.

yourapostasy 6y ago
Paper lacks many properties sought after in plastic packaging. We end up coating the paper if we try to make it exhibit those properties, and the coatings frequently involve some kind of polymer. If it wasn't for the microplastics problem that I don't see a solution for yet (need something on the order of Drexlerian nanotech to scour the environment and pull the microplastics out of it), then more durable, reusable designs of plastic packaging would be amazing. Glass and stainless steel containers are my go-to solutions at home, but many people are unwilling to put up with their bulk and weight. My ideal is hermetically sealed glass containers [1] that use ground glass joints to seal, but there is a limited selection of their form factors (I can't find tall sizes for holding spaghetti, for example). I haven't been able to find stainless steel containers with reusable recycled rubber or cork gaskets in a good selection of form factors. I've wondered what it would take to coordinate with a manufacturer or distributor to link up a crowdsource-driven supply chain to optimize for reduce and reuse. Crowdsource enough local people within biking/PRT/drone distance who will commit to buying some specific quantity periodically over a few years, and source wholesale quantities of goods to eliminate retail packaging. Send a truck on an optimized route picking up pallet loads of goods from different manufacturers/distributors. Use material handling robots to break down the full truck load of goods, pick and place into bins, and queue for last mile distribution of first month delivery. Remainder sits in a super-insulated (R-100 or so) warehouse. The question is about finding that breakeven point where the automation productivity can be captured by a small enough group of people that makes it worthwhile for them to implement instead of letting an Amazon/WalMart/Target capture the lion's share productivity gains' benefits. [1] https://www.thomassci.com/scientific-supplies/Ground-Glass-Bottles https://www.thomassci.com/scientific-supplies/Ground-Glass-B...
Mediterraneo10 6y ago
Besides what the other person said, paper packaging is often bleached with dioxins because consumers like clean white packaging. Dioxins are really nasty stuff.

redis_mlc 6y ago

The Stax chips packaging is almost a 100% reusable plastic bottle, and I think they taste better than Pringle's, so I buy Stax occasionally. If the plastic lid was screw-on, it would be ideal for a relief tube when flying, but it's just press-fit.

werdnapk 6y ago
The article alludes to removing the plastic components altogether if possible in place of the plastic, so yes, the Stax container is easier to recycle, but still not ideal.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  I said reuse, which is superior to recycling. reduce > reuse > recycle You can learn more here: https://www.epa.gov/recycle https://www.epa.gov/recycle Automotive vehicles are the only thing with high rates of recycling - the rate is almost 100% for the metal. https://www.worldautosteel.org/life-cycle-thinking/recycling/ https://www.worldautosteel.org/life-cycle-thinking/recycling... Household waste in the US is usually quietly landfilled, unless a private contractor can make money recycling it. (The bluebox separation training is helpful though for a future date.)
yread 6y ago
I hope you fly solo...
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  Doesn't really matter. If you're a required crew member in a small plane, gotta keep it comfy, though most planes with 2 pilots would be big enough for a lav.

kefabean 6y ago

I wish there was more (food) packaging regulation to limit the types of materials, how they are combined and how they must be reused or recycled. I try to avoid, reuse, refill, recycle but it still makes me sad how much material in my own home is discarded in ‘recycling’ but probably in reality goes straight to landfill.

sandreas 6y ago

Goodbye cantenna ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna

ZeroGravitas 6y ago

Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. The way problems with it are treated as fundamentally unfixable always strikes me as against the site's ethos, yet people love pointing them out. Recycling just gets dumped in landfill! Ok, lets ban that. But, actually, its more environmentally friendly to landfill it! Are you sure? Science doesnt really agree. But anyway, can we make recycling more efficient? No, stop trying to improve things. Recycling is bad. If it made sense the free market would already do it!

coronadisaster 6y ago
Bury it until it makes sense to mine it
awiesenhofer 6y ago
> Recycling mentioned on Hacker News always depresses me. Same here. Especially as someone from central europe where most recycling just works and noone even thinks twice about it. Heck, a lot of landfill dumping is even banned here already and anything dumped must be thermally threated first anyway.
- kachnuv_ocasek 6y ago
  Actually, I'm not sure how well recycling works in "Central Europe". In Czechia, at least, although waste sorting seems to work fairly well, as far as I'm aware, the share of plastic waste that gets recycled is negligible. Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity.
  - Shacklz 6y ago
    > Most of it gets burnt or pyrolysed for heating and electricity. Well, at least it doesn't get shipped around the world to then be dumped into the ocean...
  - tutanchamun 6y ago
    Yes, 1 or 2 years ago I saw a short piece about recycling plastics and what really is getting recycled in the end. Many products which would be easy to recycle didn't get recycled because they had fancy labels on them which made it hard or impossible for the machines which resulted in the plastics getting burned instead.

Ensorceled 6y ago

We need to focus on the second R, reuse. I have mason jars that my grandmother and then my mother used for pickling. The only waste is the rubber ring which needs to be replaced occasionally and THAT could be recycled. Many of these bottles have been used for 80+ years now. I have a few Ball jars which my GREAT grandmother used 100+ years ago. Beer bottles in Canada are reused dozens of times and are recyclable (brown glass) when broken or worn out. The only containers which are infinitely recyclable are aluminum and coloured glass (nearly), but that takes energy. Plastics are not currently infinitely recyclable as the polymer chains break down. A lot of plastic is simply not recyclable at all in most of North America [1] We need to just force manufacturers to bear the costs of recycling their products 100%: everybody would switch to reusable and this current clam shell packaging disaster would come to a close. [1] https://apps.npr.org/plastics-recycling/ https://apps.npr.org/plastics-recycling/

adrianN 6y ago
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order. A lot of things don't need so much packaging in the first place.
- ed_elliott_asc 6y ago
  We need a www.packagingdisasters.com which name and shame the worst packaging disasters.
  - FroshKiller 6y ago
    We need legislation with teeth.
- rikroots 6y ago
  Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish, Recycle, Composting, Energy from waste, Incineration, Landfill - that was the basics of the Waste Hierarchy when I worked on the Waste Strategy for England back in the late 1990s. I don't know if the order has shifted much over the past couple of decades. The EU Packaging Directive seems to be getting more robust - I remember the first Directive was a bit weak and too open to national interpretation so it's good to see they seem to have introduced hard recycling targets and put a lot more emphasis on the need for producer responsibility schemes for packaging - https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=1595838206165&uri=LEGISSUM:l21207 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?qid=15958382...

ed_elliott_asc 6y ago

The thing is they don’t need that plastic lid. They say without it the food would be spoiled but if you have a big bag of crisps, you open them and eat them or they go off - this is no different. Kellogg’s seem to believe they have invented a type of crisp that can only be eaten over a period of time.

sokoloff 6y ago
They need some kind of closure on the tube to keep the chips and crumbs in and the dust out in the cupboard. (The foil/paper closure works until first opened but not after.) Chip bags can be clipped closed for this.
m-p-3 6y ago
They definitely don't need the plastic lid, no way I can stop myself from eating the whole thing in one session.
- RandallBrown 6y ago
  The only thing that stops me from eating them that quickly is how hard they are to get out of the can once you're about halfway through.
sschueller 6y ago
Especially as they used to say once to start you can't stop. So you eat the whole tube anyway...
hinkley 6y ago
Pringles hold up well in lunchboxes, and the can could go a week per child even if they prefer one flavor. I think people underestimate the packing density of Pringle’s. There is a lot of (mashed) potato in that can.
DFHippie 6y ago
It's the Pringles brand, though: "once you pop you just can't stop" or something like that. They've built this story around the sound of the lid popping off.

ja27 6y ago

Lays Stax come in an equivalent all-plastic tube and it's insane how much plastic that is compared to a bag of regular chips. The other one that bothers me is the larger Crystal Light packets which come in a very sturdy plastic container that's at least five times bigger than it needs to be. Even the generic knock-offs at ALDI come in a similar plastic container. Why not cardboard? Here, a good bit of our trash is burned and used to generate electricity before the ash is buried, so I feel a bit less guilty about single-use plastics but it's still not good. I'm sure plenty of our recycling stream ends up there too, either due to contamination or lack of buyers for it.

sandGorgon 6y ago

FWIW - Pringles tubes are very effective in increasing wifi signal range. https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out-of-a-pringles-can-nb/ https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-make-a-wifi-antenna-out... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ioJ8i56pA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-ioJ8i56pA

m-p-3 6y ago
The world will run out of antennas to boost.
- hinkley 6y ago
  MIMO cantenna! Now with more M’s.
BlackLotus89 6y ago
No they are not. They were used because someone did it and documented it, but the diameter and length is sub-optimal (75mm is too small) should be between 84 and 92mm (diameter). Since this was probably more a joke I won't get too much into the details, but if you really want to build a "cantenna" there are great resources out there.
- hinkley 6y ago
  So we need Pringle’s Extra (you can fit your hand in there!) and a little campaign about mesh networking... I’m guessing the diameter and length are also wrong for 5Ghz as well?

alexanderthe- 6y ago

Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce standardized packaging across product "classes" to streamline reuse and recycling - for example, all soda bottles of size x, must come in shape y, made out of polymer z. The obvious financial impact would be companies having to potentially retool their factories to facilitate that, but there can also be sensible tax rebates to prevent the corporations from crying. The bottom line is, the cost of doing business has to take into account the environmental impacts on our planet and the consequences for our progeny.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
> Maybe I'm naive, but I don't see a good reason why government can't introduce legislation to enforce ... You are being naive, even in the European Union which has a fairly contained level of corruption the Plastic and Petro-chemical lobby are incredibly strong. Many countries wanted to introduce a single-use plastic ban, almost immediately a campaign came out saying they were trying to kill people at hospitals where many consumables are single-use plastic (Obviously medical supplies were exempt from the ban). The single-use plastic ban was so watered down that now the only thing that will be baned are things like plastic forks and plastic q-tips. Another example is return deposits, many European countries have very succesful glass deposit schemes usually reusing the supermarket stores' infrastructure. The natural progression of this is to create large plastic bootle/container deposits. Again this will never happen because it obviously stops the current externalization of costs in the plastic business. There are two main forces at play against Humanity on the plastic front of our Anthropogenic calamity: - The consumer product manufacturers (think Unilever, Pepsico, Nestle, Kraft, etc.). Their interest in plastic containers is mostly due to the reduction in production cost and transport costs. They heavily lobby against bans and any cost increase for their production chain. - The Petro-Chemical industry (Including Big Oil companies), many of these refining business know they are getting squeezed out of the fuel business as electrical vehicle adoption is bound to increase. The Plastic production is the last remaining golden goose in their portfolio. A circular economy where most of the plastic is recycled from previously used plastic would mean that the volumes and profits of these very financially successful business would evaporate. Both these lobbies and others will continue to resist and undermine any attempt to curb our planetary and Humane destruction until they are stopped either by public pressure or insolvency.

jacknews 6y ago

The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil. But IMHO manufacturers should be on the hook for the lifecycle of their products. Either through taxes, or some kind of market-driven bidding mechanism, they should have financial penalties (or even rewards), based on product environmental impact. The whole recycling movement seems to me to be a way for companies to palm off this responsibility onto the public, and then win 'green publicity' when they deign to make their products slightly more amenable to the (usually public-funded/volunteer/coerced/etc) recycling system.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
> The plastic-in-the-environment problem is mainly about collection. Collect it, bury it, and it will eventually turn back into oil. This is incredibly uninformed and misleading. Burying it will not solve any problems, a PET bootle takes something like 450 years to fully breakdown, on top of that the particles released as it breaks down will be washed away into the subsoil and end up in ground water, then rivers, water supply, and eventually then back into the oceans. Most plastics also have a hazardous health side effect they act as hormone disruptors, effectively mimicking estrogen. Having any additional plastic purposefully break down and leak in even greater concentrations, into our water supply, sounds like a remarkably poor idea.
- jacknews 6y ago
  It will solve the PET problem for 450 years. But my point is less to do with how to treat waste, than the fact that the most important first step is to actually collect it. In much of the world, collection is not happening properly, which is why we see so much plastic waste washed into rivers and oceans. Of course if we create less waste to start with, that also helps, but that will only happen if manufacturers are pressured where it matters, the bottom line.

altcognito 6y ago

The best approach would be to make corporations and people pay based on the amount of trash they generate. Similar to VAT, have a GAT. All of a sudden, consumers would be keenly aware and happy to purchase products that reduce trash. Even better, weight it against the long term damage to the environment. Yes, this is going to be ugly politically, but that's probably one way to capture the negative externalities of a product. You could even have a very tiny tag with a number printed on the item that would allow you to look up a breakdown of what went into calculating it's 'GAT' score.

hinkley 6y ago
You’d have to bill them collectively for things like cleaning up the ocean and you’d get countersued to hell and back. It’d be easier to just tariff everything, but then you either soft ban that material or embolden them (do the time, do the crime style).

downshun 6y ago

There's so much 'repeat trash' that could be repurposed if accumulated instead of disposed immediately.

amelius 6y ago

Nespresso has the same problem with those little pods, but decided not to change anything about their design and instead focus on recycling.

sschueller 6y ago
What are their alternatives? Plastic is worse and paper does not seal properly. They would need to line paper with something that makes it bad again for recycling. Letting people collect the used pods and return them for free makes sense if you want to have a pod system. Of course you could make coffee the old way.
- amelius 6y ago
  Yes, but making coffee the old way would ruin Nespresso's business model.

m0nty 6y ago

> Kellogg's says these lids will still produce the distinctive "pop" associated with the product. No it isn't. Is this "pop" really such a big deal that they've been holding back on the redesign for so long?

detaro 6y ago
Isn't it like the Pringles marketing thing?
- hinkley 6y ago
  I can’t recall the last time I saw a Pringle’s ad, but wasn’t their slogan “Once you pop, you can’t stop?” Although that’s a double edged argument. If you say the marketing is true (we need the pop!) then you’ve just stated that don’t think the can needs to be resealable...
jdmichal 6y ago
Their marketing is based around that sound... So it probably is seen as a big deal to them. Probably some pop-psych idea around having that sound be associated to them through the commercials and usage.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  I've never heard a pop during a lifetime of probably eating my bodyweight in Pringles. Either it's always been purely a marketing thing and they're finally actually engineering it into their packaging, or people are attacking Pringles lids in a way I do not understand.
  - Groxx 6y ago
    Same - I've literally never heard that "pop". I grew up thinking it was just their slogan, referring to the act of opening the tube (as "pop the top/hood/etc" is used for many other things), not onomatopoeia.
deleted 6y ago

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

I really think the focus should be on using biodegradable materials. Basically no plastic. Landfills would be fine if the trash actually broke down.

kthejoker2 6y ago

My immediate thought is it sounds like Kellogg's/Pringles could get a lot of free positive marketing by just switching to a "100% biodegradable" bag? Nobody likes Pringles because they're in a tube.

crazygringo 6y ago
The tube is far more space-efficient. Also, I imagine Pringles in a bag would be destroyed -- they're far more fragile than a potato chip, tortilla chip, or pretzel.
gridlockd 6y ago
Not true, the tube makes sure the chips stay mostly intact. The shape of the chips fits neatly around your tongue. Pringles are made of flour, they would turn to dust in an ordinary bag.
James_Henry 6y ago
A lot of those biodegradable containers you see are coated in short chain PFAS/PFOA which build up over time in the ground and end up in the water (and maybe plants) and then give you cancer.
analog31 6y ago
Pringles are a good example where the packaging is the product to a large degree. I was around when Pringles were introduced, and saw the ads on TV. The tube was central to the marketing appeal. There were already reconstituted potato chips in bags on the market, though I can't for the life of me remember the name. Pringles were molded to a uniform size and shape, and the tube protected them from breakage. There was a satisfying snap when you opened the lid. There are other examples where the packaging is the product, such as "Lunchables" from Oscar Mayer.
hinkley 6y ago
Kids might. Or at least did. Packing tubes were magic, and Pringle’s cans are musical.
RandallBrown 6y ago

beamatronic 6y ago

You can store tennis balls. You can make a WiFi cantenna! Many ways to re-use these cans.

skocznymroczny 6y ago
There's a certain popular "adult" usecase involving a rubber glove turned inside out and two kitchen sponges...

brainzap 6y ago

How about we just don't buy them.

jeffbee 6y ago
Seriously. Eat a potato if you want.
theonemind 6y ago
I don't see why anyone buys them. We have real potato chips made from cut potato, then the compressed potato dust abomination we call the Pringle. They have an unsatisfying gritty texture when crunching and chewing them. Eating pringles makes me want actual potato chips.

fortran77 6y ago

There's always the "cantenna" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantenna

ghostDancer 6y ago
Or Enigma Machines: http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigma http://wiki.franklinheath.co.uk/index.php/Enigma/Paper_Enigm...

JoeAltmaier 6y ago

Foil/plastic/paper juice boxes are my vote for 'recycling nightmare'. And kids use them by the dozen.

hinkley 6y ago
The waste processor in Seattle claimed to be able to recycle Tetrapac boxes, although I’ve no idea how they manage that or if it’s just PR.

zoobab 6y ago

I propose a glass container as a replacement.

everdrive 6y ago

It's quite sad, since there's no reason for pringles to exist in the first place. They're not good for you, they have no nutritional value, and they come with tons of waste. All this mess just because a few people with poor impulse control wanted to be a bit more comfortable.

someonehere 6y ago

> Kellogg's says these lids will still produce the distinctive "pop" associated with the product. We’re concerned with a pop sound so we’re spending time and resources finding an alternative way to make the pop. Sounds ridiculous.

angel_j 6y ago
And all for 10 cents worth of potato dust cast into the shape of a chip and covered in sodium.

justnotworthit 6y ago

Isn't tetrapak more complex in makeup and more ubiquitous? How is it recycled? Because there's more of it, there's a better effort at handling it? * I'm currently testing used tetrapak as shingle siding for dog houses!

mensetmanusman 6y ago

The use of the word ‘nightmare’ when describing consumer packaging makes discussion of climate issues seem like a joke to the average person. Do journalists realize they are being mocked when they highlight this terminology? Are they doing it intentionally to make a mockery of these issues?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

The uncomfortable truth: 50% of food is thrown away due to our current habits. This % would be even higher if we didn’t use multilayer materials to protect food from spoiling. The only way to solve this is by changing our eating habits (e.g. some things would have to go away, because they are not economical to centrally produce and ship everywhere around the world). That, or you get distributed manufacturing that makes this food on demand locally.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
Food waste isn’t a problem per se. If the farming is done sustainably, and distribution improved so people aren’t starving, I don’t see why we have to eliminate foods instead of just increasing their price and/or reducing availability to e.g. tier 1 cities.
DFHippie 6y ago
A large percentage of this food waste is perishable or unwanted stuff in the store. Produce gets ugly and, though it's still usable, nobody picks it over the fresher stuff. Milk gets close to its sell-by date and people pick fresher stuff. Someone overstocks something and a manager pitches it. Something doesn't sell. Some of this can go to food pantries, but a lot just turns into methane in landfills. As for produce, much perishes en route as well, or is abandoned in the field as unsellable, or reaches the market where produce managers are shopping for their stores and it doesn't sell. Changing our consumer habits is only going to get us so far. Not that it isn't worth doing, but that 50% figure isn't due to families buying two bags of potato chips and pitching one.

INTPenis 6y ago

Not once in my life have I "popped" a pringles tube. I thought that was just an ad.

rdiddly 6y ago

Nonetheless it's possible to recycle them. Well the foil you tear off is definitely trash and the lid most likely also, but the wall of the can, you can cut a slit down the side with a knife and separate it from the metal bottom. Bottom goes with metals, rectangular lined cardboard sheet goes with aseptics (lined cartons etc) if your area has a program for that.

bobthepanda 6y ago
How likely do you find that people will actually do this though? If people are not likely to do it that makes the proposition rather pointless. Hello Fresh gave me something (I think it was a cooling pack) that was "recyclable" but really only the outside was, and the inside you had to toss in the trash anyways, and on top of that I'm pretty sure you couldn't touch what was inside it, and to me that pretty much makes it trash with all the "buts" involved.
- rdiddly 6y ago
  It's possible, is the extent of what I'm saying.

ChuckMcM 6y ago

Well if they get rid of the foil interior what will I use for a 2.4Ghz waveguide?[1] [1] https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/0596005598/ch05s04.html https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/wireless-hacks/05960055...