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The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consu

The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturers_ - Define industry quotas for how much 'new' plastic is allowed to be made from crude and make companies bid for it in a "new plastic" market, this would enable buy in from petro-chemical businesses whose profit currently depends on volume. Yes, product prices will increase but the reality is that the price is already there but is just currently hidden behind the recycling PR machine. None of this requires ocean micro plastic cleaning tech, or plastic separating computer vision, it is purely political it is purely stopping this protectionism. It can change right now if people are outraged enough.

makecheck 6y ago
I’m not against these ideas but you do have to zoom out a bit to fully realize the impact of each alternative. It’s not as simple as replacing a “bad” one with a “good” one, because there are side effects. (I haven’t added up the total impacts of every option either; this is just something to consider.) For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of bottles around the world, it will take more energy to move glass bottles. Glass is also fragile so it’s possible there is more shipping material or more random losses affecting cost. So then the problem is not just how to replace plastic bottles with glass but how to offset the added environmental cost of transporting glass.
- jlmorton 6y ago
  > hauling millions of bottles around the world If it's a 1:1 transition from plastic bottle to glass bottle, it would be 35 billion bottles annually, in the US alone.
  - davinic 6y ago
    It wouldn't be. Forcing the producers to pay for their externalities will also make some products like bottled water cost-prohibitive to sell in glass bottles and reduce demand or increase packaging sizes to more is bought in reusable plastic carboys, etc. "Reduce" is more important than reuse or recycle and while there is an obvious need for cheap bottled water, probably at least 80% of plastic disposable water bottles do not need to be sold in that way.
    - R0b0t1 6y ago
      But how much other economic activity are you limiting and what other products are affected? For example, what about plastic for prototyping and engineering use? Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum? The issue is I can't see any of these restrictions accurately reflecting cost. If they could these things would not be a concern. Any of these suggestions that apply only within a national market are also ineffective, as by their very nature they are going to reduce economic activity in that nation... which will be picked up by someone else who doesn't care. The laws need to take this into account.
      - Rayhem 6y ago
        > Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum? The post above you didn't suggest using higher impact materials like brass and aluminum, they suggested making manufacturers pay for externalities which would be the case for plastics or metals.
        R0b0t1 6y ago
        Nothing happens in a vacuum. You could very easily end up incentivizing worse behavior by misjudging what the externalities actually are and their impact. Do you remember how telephone fraud with blue boxes was prosecuted? The stolen time was judged at full sale value of the minutes. But this doesn't make any sense, as if the call could not be placed for free it would not have happened, and if no one else was in line to place a call there was not lost revenue. It seems like people are trying to do this with e.g. unrecycled plastics. Recycling is expensive likely because it is not economically productive, not because people are freeloading. The bar for showing otherwise should be very high.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  > For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of bottles around the world, it will take more energy to move glass bottles. This is true, but it (mostly) not an externalized cost. By forcing environmental costs to be internalized by industry, the market should guide industry away from damaging the environment. Of course that would require honest, complete, and well enforced regulation.
  - deleted 6y ago
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  - agotterer 6y ago
    Where I live the local government told us to stop putting glass in our recycling bin and to throw it out instead. The reason I’ve heard is that the glass is breaking and making it harder to recycle it or the things it contaminates. This is unfortunate because I don’t think most people are taking their glass to the supermarket to be recycled and instead a highly recyclable good is ending up in a plastic garbage bag at the landfill.
    - PowerBar 6y ago
      Parts of lower mainland BC (Canada) are the same. For example, I can recycle glass in Vancouver, but Surrey stopped accepting it years ago because they changed recycling companies and the new one considers it a safety hazard for their works. Conversely, Surrey will recycle plastic bags, but in Vancouver you have to drop them off at the grocery store (only a few stores do this).
- dheera 6y ago
  > hauling millions of bottles around the world How much of those bottles are single-use bottles for water? We can cut that portion entirely. 100%. Either install filters (ideal) or use reusable 5-gal plastic bottles and water dispensers.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  All the cost/energy benefits listed are exactly the type of short term business arguments that enabled companies like Coca-Cola to transition from glass bootles to producing 110 _billion_ PET bootles, every, single, year. [0] There are a number of long-term costs not captured in these business decisions: - The energy cost of recycling a PET bottle is much greater than producing a brand new one from crude oil. This creates the wrong kind of incentives for recycling - Plastic degrades everytime it is recycled. Google plastic "downcycling". In an ideal circular economy old plastics would still have to be replaced with "new" crude oil plastic with additional energy and emissions costs. - The cost of plastic collection and _sorting_ (which manufacturers aren't paying for) - The environmental and disposal costs of unrecycled plastic, a PET bottle will take at least 450 years to fully decompose. [1] - The Health costs of the calamity of micro-plastics contaminating our food supply and ground water. Simply google "plastic endocrine disruptors". [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/02/coca-cola-increased-its-production-of-plastic-bottles-by-a-billion-last-year-say-greenpeace https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/02/coca-col... [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/plastic-bottles/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/plast...
  - acituan 6y ago
    I’m with you with your conclusions but not only you are not responding to OPs point about the complexity of cost calculations, you are adding further data that is irrelevant. “This is what Coca-Cola said” is not a valid rebuttal.
  - wcoenen 6y ago
    > Simply google "plastic endocrine disruptors" I did, and found that the 1996 paper that helped launch the movement against endocrine disruptors, was retracted in 2001 because the data was made up. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-02-003.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-02-0... (I'm not making any claim here about whether endocrine disruptors in our environment are a problem or not. Maybe they are. But I don't like to be told "just Google X" because that can be used to support any nonsense nowadays. Just give me a good reference and I'll try to figure out whether it's credible.)
- 8note 6y ago
  I'm not sure the choice is between shipping glass or plastic bottles long distances, but rather having the bottling plants closer or further from the consumption
- spodek 6y ago
  > hauling millions of bottles around the world I haven't used a bottle of any sort for water for at least ten years. Not everyone has access to safe water, but billions do and billions more would if by not thinking we can fall back on bottles and therefore maintained cleaner water supplies. We don't need alternatives for many things. Paper or plastic? Neither. I've shopped with the same bag since the 90s. Most beverages are marketing gimmicks we'd be happier, safer, and less polluting without -- same with most packaged food, children's toys, fast fashion, and so on. Our sense of entitlement and disconnect with healthy living, nature, and how we used to live is killing us.
  - agotterer 6y ago
    The folks at Tap (https://findtap.com/ https://findtap.com/) are trying to make it easier to refill a water bottle while your out and about or traveling. It doesn’t solve the problem globally, but it’s great to see companies trying to reduce plastic waste and make it easy and free/cheap to access clean water.
    - jasonmp85 6y ago
      Well, is it free or is it cheap? The solution is called a water fountain and they should all be free.
      - agotterer 6y ago
        In the end someone has to pay for it. Water fountains need maintenance and cleaning. I’ve seen quite a few public fountains I’d never drink from. Tap is interesting because it correctly aligns consumer incentives and maintenance costs.
  - deleted 6y ago
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- decasteve 6y ago
  Why keep shipping bottles around? Leave them where they are. Ship the liquid in tanker trucks and fill the bottles at the destination.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    That is what happens. The scale is just so immense. Coca Cola, for instance, is produced and bottled in at least 68 separate plants in the US alone.
- TheRealSteel 6y ago
  Is there any good reason we can't start putting damn near every liquid into huge aluminium (or tin?) cans? It uses alot of power to smelt originally but it recycles forever with no degradation. Aluminium at least.
- jillesvangurp 6y ago
  Transport energy cost is a challenge. Luckily, that whole sector is moving towards using clean energy. So, it matters less as long as we clean that part of our economy up. Also, it perhaps incentivizes manufacturers to recycle and produce closer to consumers. That's the beauty of making this the manufacturers problem: they get to be creative finding solutions to these problems. Germany already has deposits on things like soda cans, plastic bottles, and beer bottles. It works and isn't crippling the economy. Also the likes of Coca Cola are operating in Germany and turning a profit despite this. They face similar rules elsewhere in Europe. This is already part of their business today. A lot of the plastic bottles are ending up being recycled. Half the success is simply collecting them separately from normal waste so you get all the PET plastics sorted together. That makes that easier. Some of the bottles are actually cleaned and reused. Simply making recycling a concern for the manufacturer is the key to getting businesses to compete on being more sustainable because it becomes their problem to solve. Single use plastics only make sense when you get to dump them for "free" without regard for cleaning up the mess. IMHO the main challenges with plastics long term are ensuring the stuff either breaks down when dumped or does not end up in land fills and our oceans. Secondly, we are using oil for producing plastics and could long term be switching to synthesized carbohydrates produced using clean energy. This requires a lot of R&D to happen to scale this and do it more efficiently of course. But it would change things a lot. We'll need stupendous amounts of cheap energy for this. That's actually a good thing when the cheapest form of energy we make is increasingly from renewables. So, the more demand we have on that the faster the demise of dirty energy.
- happymellon 6y ago
  It's interesting that, at least in the UK, the beer industry is fine with glass bottles and metal cans. Why is soda so special that it deserves special treatment?
  - tijl 6y ago
    The beer industry would love to use plastic bottles. But beer goes stale in plastic. Plastic is not good at keeping the oxygen out and the alcohol in. There are bottles with multiple layers in different types of plastic that work reasonably well, but they are more expensive than standard PET bottles, much harder to recycle than PET, and still not as good for storing beer as glass is.
chmod600 6y ago
A ban seems foolish. First you need to categorize things as "single-use" versus reusable, and people will argue about that distinction. Then, you need do deal with the inevitable unintended consequences from miscategorized items or bizarre alternatives companies choose to replace plastic. A tax would be much more straightforward.
- jay_kyburz 6y ago
  Tax just makes things more expensive, and is very slow to elicit change. Taxing plastic bags while grocery shopping just makes your groceries a tiny bit more expensive. If you ban plastic shopping bags altogether they disappear overnight. update: I agree that trying to define "single-use" is difficult, instead I think governments should just choose an item that has good alternatives and ban them.
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    My country banned single use supermarket bags, which they defined by the thickness of the material and whether they had cut-out handles. So a supermarket that used to charge 10c for one of those bags replaced them with 20c bags of slightly thicker plastic with attached handles. For me, the extra cost was negligible so I just bought the more expensive bags and threw them in the rubbish. They don't offer them anymore, for some reason.
    - jay_kyburz 6y ago
      Here in Australia the thin bags were free and people used to use _a lot_ of them. Now they sell bags that are thicker and re-usable, but a lot of people bring their own bags. I read a study that suggested the total plastic usage has gone down, but not by as much as you would think.
      - lopmotr 6y ago
        I though they weren't banned for their amount of plastic usage, which was surely negligible compared to the packaging of the products people put in them, but for their tendency to blow away and end up in the environment. Thicker bags might not be so easily blown away so maybe it's OK if we all use them? I don't know really because nobody actually analyses this stuff - the decisions are made in response to public outrage.
mulmen 6y ago
What about single use plastic for things like cleaning supplies? Why only medical? I don’t shop at a grocery store, how will I return my plastic, glass or metal containers? Is plastic so bad if it gets reused? If we don’t make plastic what happens to that portion of the petrochemical supply chain? Are there other constructive uses or does it just get dumped into a river somewhere?
TylerE 6y ago
You're just assuming that glass is better than plastic. I challenge that assumption. Glass is much heavier and bulkier (so a truck will carry less product, and burn more fuel and cause more road wear to do so), and more product will be lost to spoilage.
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Glass also takes a lot of energy to produce. In many (most?) cases more fossil fuels will be consumed making a glass container than the plastic equivalent. The same sorts of issues apply to coated paper or card containers.
  - barney54 6y ago
    Glass is also somewhat difficult to recycle. The actual recycling is easy, but different colors of glass needs to be sorted. And glass is heavy, so it’s costly to transport.
    - TylerE 6y ago
      I think if you really wanted to go all in on glass recycling you'd have to ban everything except maybe 3 colors (Something like clear, a light green, and something quite dark).
- coliveira 6y ago
  This is good, because transportation costs can be easily accounted in the final price of the product. Paying higher costs make people more honest about how much they want to spend for the privilege of buying small bottles of a product.
- aksss 6y ago
  Even this assumes that people will bother to even transport the heavier alternative. There are places in the world where goods just won't be available anymore. Doesn't affect me, but not every place on the planet gets to make choices like "just switch to glass".
NoSorryCannot 6y ago
I think assessing and charging at the time of distribution, as best as can be estimated, the total cost of responsible disposal would be sufficient to align incentives, for both manufacturers and consumers. More waste means higher prices. And fees so assessed should actually pay for disposal. Of everything. Discourage dumping and garbage burning by making waste collection "free" (in reality paid in advance at time of purchase).
gruez 6y ago
> The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. At the risk of sounding like an industry shill: why is it being characterized as an cost externalization by the petrochemical/packaging industries, rather than the consumers? I agree that any pollution generated during extraction and manufacture can be attributed as an externalize of the packaging/petrochemical industry, but why should they be on the hook after it leaves their hands? Consumers are using the said products, reaping the benefits (either in cheaper products or greater convenience), and pay for their disposal via tax dollars or fees. I guess you could argue that companies should be responsible for the entire lifecycle, but then it becomes a slippery slope. Is the automotive industry externalizing the cost of roads? Is the food industry externalizing the cost of sewer systems? Are electronics manufacturers externalizing the cost of electricity?
- jolux 6y ago
  They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics. I don’t think consumers are blameless, but you can’t get everyone in the world to change their purchasing behavior without regulation, which is necessary when lower prices are subsidized by huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large.
  - jariel 6y ago
    "They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics." ? Plastics are an absolutely incredible technology, to the point of revolutionary. They are used absolutely everywhere, in everything. Nobody needed to be convinced of the utility of plastics, it's one of the most utilitarian things ever created.
    - josho 6y ago
      So, they lied when they didn't even need to. Doesn't that make the lie that much worse?
      - 6y ago
tuatoru 6y ago
If the goals are to cut fossil fuel consumption and/or dispersal of waste into the natural environment, it ain't that simple. The best option by far is to not consume things. Don't buy stuff. That's working out really well for us, isn't it? Next best in many places is single use followed by incineration for district heating and electricity. Third, in many places, is single use with well managed collection and disposal to a well managed landfill. When you dig into the numbers, things like reusable glass containers, cotton bags, and so on are harmful virtue signaling. Karens get to shame other people who harming the world less than the Karens are by a long way.
- WA 6y ago
  You surely have a source for this right?
  - tuatoru 6y ago
    Dammit, I knew you would ask that. I'll have to dig back through my paper notebooks going back over about 20 years. (My ex-wife was a virtue signaler, and I had started to be sceptical. I used a university library, but I don't live near a university any more.) Probably there's a lot better research to be had now, refined! Updated! With 20% lower error bounds! But I doubt very much the conclusions have changed, especially given the world's dependence on Chinese manufacturing and China's dependence on coal.
  - jlmorton 6y ago
    Here's [0] a write-up from NPR, with links to several studies comparing the life cycle costs of plastic and alternative materials, and noting that from a climate change perspective, plastic comes out ahead in most analyses, but that plastic has much larger cleanup costs: [0] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/735848489/plastic-has-a-big-carbon-footprint-but-that-isnt-the-whole-story https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/735848489/plastic-has-a-big-c...
jariel 6y ago
What happens if glass packaged goods are much more expensive to ship and prone to breakage thereby creating considerably CO2 exposure? There are a zillion unforeseen externalizations in the mandates your listing - this is why centralization usually doesn't work very well. Plastic is one of many materials that go in landfills, and we don't turn it into Co2 either so I'm not sure how we can go after that 'evil industry' and not others? Probably a better solution would be to figure out how we can make use of that material afterwards - or - finding rational ways to dispose of it relatively cleanly.
- andrepd 6y ago
  Yes because decentralisation is working wonders here... Leave each self-interested agent to profit off externalities which they don't have to pay. We will have good quarterly reports for our shareholders all the way to extinction.
pathseeker 6y ago
>- Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). Direct bans for things so heavily used are going to have extreme unintended consequences. Are we willing to put that much immediate demand on things like tin and aluminum (cans, food cases, etc) that will drive up energy consumption and CO2 emissions? It's not clear that's a win for the environment.
ummonk 6y ago
Most glass and paper doesn't get recycled either. Recycling is broadly speaking nonexistent. Most ends up in the landfill or incinerated.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > Recycling is broadly speaking nonexistent. Can you link to a source for that claim?
  - aksss 6y ago
    https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china... https://www.wired.com/story/since-chinas-ban-recycling-in-the-us-has-gone-up-in-flames/ https://www.wired.com/story/since-chinas-ban-recycling-in-th... You know how they say the "cloud" is just some other guy's computer? Recycling can often be some other guy's landfill.
snarf21 6y ago
These are ideas that could affect change but it has to be a process. We didn't get here overnight and we won't solve it overnight. It seems like slow adding and raising a plastic tax based on packaging containing any plastic would work. Consumers have to decide if they will continue to pay more and more for convenience year over year. This tax money is used to develop technology to recycle and breakdown plastics. Basically, you slowly pay the consumer to pay up for their laziness.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > we won't solve it overnight. We are past and overdue on too many milestones in this planetary anthropogenic destruction. The future of humanity cannot afford anything less than solving this overnight. Some people will sit in Davos and ponder but the longer we waste time the longer we risk collapsing the world order that allows them to sit at Davos and ponder.
lazyjones 6y ago
No. "Single-use" plastic is often used for a long time, longer than "eco" alternatives like paper bags that simply don't do the job well enough to be reused. Glass and paper are horrible alternatives (for the environment) if not recycled properly (and they aren't, like plastic).
- oefnak 6y ago
  Glass and paper may cost more energy, but don't cause pollution. And when we have enough solar panels, energy will be free. Removing all microplastics from nature will be a lot harder.
  - kgabis 6y ago
    No, energy won't be free with "enough solar panels". There's this thing called night. And seasons. And transmission losses.
  - themeiguoren 6y ago
    Paper grocery bags give off gas when they rot, whereas the (smaller) amount of energy in a plastic grocery bag is carbon locked in a controlled landfill. I think there’s a strong argument for plastic bags being more environmentally friendly.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
Kluny 6y ago
Yes yes yes. Saved for copying and pasting, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter. I've been studying plastic waste for years as a member of the Surfrider Foundation, and right now I'm in a BBA program called Business and Sustainability, and my colleagues are having a really hard time getting past the idea that recycling+electric cars=sustainable.
jakobmartz3 6y ago
Yeah, I wish we had a president who actually cared about this and made it a priority, instead of tweeting bullshit.
agumonkey 6y ago
I wonder, with all the material refined from extracted base material (be it oil for plastic or ore for alloys) .. how much could we live by simply reusing discarded lots (old cars in the case of metals, similar for plastics)
hiisukun 6y ago
In South Australia (one of the eight states/territories in Australia), they have just banned many single use plastics [1]. The rules are a little delayed - coming in next year instead of now because of COVID - and are staged to include smaller items (straws) now and larger items (takeaway containers) later. That state has had a ban on plastic bags since 2009, around ten years before some of the more populated eastern parts of Australia. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/sa-first-state-to-ban-single-use-plastics-in-australia/12647434 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/sa-first-state-to-ban...
lightgreen 6y ago
> - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). This is just naive and irrational. What if I really need a single use plastic thingy because for example, it is a wire buckle, and making it multi-use would make it effectively expensive single-use wire buckle? Banning ALL is rarely a good solution. Just tax it and that's it. And it doesn't matter, if it's single use or multiple use, because eventually all of them end up in the garbage.
- replicatorblog 6y ago
  Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco. This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plastic wrap for retail packaging. Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations. The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.
  - konjin 6y ago
    >Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations. >The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology. That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer research the real trade off isn't uranium baby powder or regular baby powder, it's uranium baby powder or oncology".
    - replicatorblog 6y ago
      I invite you to spend some time in a pediatric oncology unit, look at the mind-boggling variety of single-use plastics consumed over the course of the day, and research their manufacturers and origins. The results will be more illuminating than some dramatic hypothetical.
londons_explore 6y ago
> Define industry quotas for how much 'new' plastic is allowed to be made from crude and make companies bid for it in a "new plastic" market If you implemented this one, all of your other goals would naturally fall out of the increased cost of plastic. Where you give the free market conditions where it ends up doing the things you were thinking of 'requiring' it to do, you'll end up with a much more effective solution, because no set of laws or requirements is ever as comprehensive as the effect of millions of people in millions of roles trying to save a few bucks...
gfxgirl 6y ago
I am curious how this would work in Japan. Walking through a grocery store or a convenience store most tea and soda is in plastic. I suppose that could be glass but carrying home several litters of liquid is already heavy enough with out adding glass. (most people walk to the grocery story so they have to carry stuff home). Most yogurt is in plastic. Putting that in ceramic or glass seems out or similar reasons. All bread products are wrapped in plastic. There used to open bins in the "bakery" area but because of covid-19 every pastry, bagel, croissant, etc is not individually wrapped in plastic. All chips and crackers are in plastic. I'm not 100% sure they can be wrapped in paper given how humid it is. Maybe wax paper? Milk is almost universally in cardboard though 80-90% have a plastic cap. I'm not sure that the cardboard isn't plastic coated though. It certainly feels like it is but maybe that's some kind of wax? All meat is in styrofoam trays (plastic) wrapped in plastic. I don't know if they could wrap it in anything else as people want to see it before buying (paper is opaque) and having a butcher counter would be much slower having to wait in line for the butcher. All cheese products are in plastic. Same as the butcher, I can imagine a cheese counter where they wrap the cheese in paper but no one wants to wait in line and plastic wrapped cheese lets me see the cheese. Japanese pumpkin is often sold in quarters because a single pumpkin is too much for one. Those are wrapped in plastic. Not sure what else you could wrap them in and leave them on the counter for a day. I suppose you could require to people to buy whole pumpkins. All tofu is sold in plastic. I'm also not sure what to do for garbage. Japan, or at least my area, requires garbage to be put in vinyl bags. It arguably helps putting out a bunch of food stuffs to not just be open and lure for rats and bugs so I'm not sure what we could switch to there. Well, there is definitely lots of room for improvement. At least in July they finally made stores require to charge for plastic bags and ask if you want one (not just auto charge you). I'm not sure how affective it is but it did manage to change my behavior. I carry a reusable bag now.
simonebrunozzi 6y ago
> The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Absolutely nailed it here. The rest of your comment is not going to happen easily though...
lopmotr 6y ago
At some point, won't it be cheaper to just bury it in a landfill away from any cities and drinking water? We can already afford to ship it to other countries, so why not ship it to the desert where there's unlimited capacity and it will never harm the environment?
epmaybe 6y ago
Might be interesting to see if we can get more reusable medical supplies in the future. Autoclave for sterility, replace smaller portions (like needles) to reduce waste. Plastic has its place for its characteristics, but if we can do the same and reuse at the same time, I'm all for it.
ManlyBread 6y ago
Are there any examples of taxing goods that solved an environmental issue? My feeling is that these taxes do nothing aside from increasing the cost of the goods.
xadhominemx 6y ago
Single use plastics are a tiny fraction of our carbon footprint. They are also very convenient and make users’ lives better. It would be a strange place to start with severe regulation.
- DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > Single use plastics are a tiny fraction of our carbon footprint ... And a Lion's share of the microplastic calamity contaminating our oceans, our ground water and our food supply. Not everything is about CO2 emissions. With a single business decision, Humans have managed to contaminate the whole water cycle with micro-plastics all the way up to alpine glaciers. [0] Single-use plastic is outstandingly great for seller's short-term direct costs, bad for almost everything else. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749119316422 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...
  - xadhominemx 6y ago
    How much of the microplastic contamination is from consumer goods packaging from western countries? The vast majority is from fishing nets and illegal dumping of household trash by developing countries.
    - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      We can never pressure other countries to do it unless we do it first. In addition, regulating plastic means that for multi-national corporations the path of least resistance is to operate under the most restrictive standard instead of maintaining multiple packaging solutions.
      - xadhominemx 6y ago
        You have no idea how consumer packaged goods supply chains work. And Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian policy makers are not going to care at all if we ban plastic soda bottles. And how high would this be on our list diplomatic priorities. Think about this for 4 seconds.
TimesOldRoman 6y ago
AGREE. Nothing worse that trash like those disposable stir-sticks that get maybe 20 seconds of use, yet will live in the ecosystem for thousands of years. Multiply that one tiny product by several orders of magnitude, daily, and we are burying ourselves in unusable cinders.

makecheck 6y ago

I’m not against these ideas but you do have to zoom out a bit to fully realize the impact of each alternative. It’s not as simple as replacing a “bad” one with a “good” one, because there are side effects. (I haven’t added up the total impacts of every option either; this is just something to consider.) For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of bottles around the world, it will take more energy to move glass bottles. Glass is also fragile so it’s possible there is more shipping material or more random losses affecting cost. So then the problem is not just how to replace plastic bottles with glass but how to offset the added environmental cost of transporting glass.

jlmorton 6y ago
> hauling millions of bottles around the world If it's a 1:1 transition from plastic bottle to glass bottle, it would be 35 billion bottles annually, in the US alone.
- davinic 6y ago
  It wouldn't be. Forcing the producers to pay for their externalities will also make some products like bottled water cost-prohibitive to sell in glass bottles and reduce demand or increase packaging sizes to more is bought in reusable plastic carboys, etc. "Reduce" is more important than reuse or recycle and while there is an obvious need for cheap bottled water, probably at least 80% of plastic disposable water bottles do not need to be sold in that way.
  - R0b0t1 6y ago
    But how much other economic activity are you limiting and what other products are affected? For example, what about plastic for prototyping and engineering use? Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum? The issue is I can't see any of these restrictions accurately reflecting cost. If they could these things would not be a concern. Any of these suggestions that apply only within a national market are also ineffective, as by their very nature they are going to reduce economic activity in that nation... which will be picked up by someone else who doesn't care. The laws need to take this into account.
    - Rayhem 6y ago
      > Are you going to force products to use higher cost and higher impact materials like brass and aluminum? The post above you didn't suggest using higher impact materials like brass and aluminum, they suggested making manufacturers pay for externalities which would be the case for plastics or metals.
      - R0b0t1 6y ago
        Nothing happens in a vacuum. You could very easily end up incentivizing worse behavior by misjudging what the externalities actually are and their impact. Do you remember how telephone fraud with blue boxes was prosecuted? The stolen time was judged at full sale value of the minutes. But this doesn't make any sense, as if the call could not be placed for free it would not have happened, and if no one else was in line to place a call there was not lost revenue. It seems like people are trying to do this with e.g. unrecycled plastics. Recycling is expensive likely because it is not economically productive, not because people are freeloading. The bar for showing otherwise should be very high.
Skunkleton 6y ago
> For example, glass is much heavier than the plastic used for bottles. If you have trucks/etc. hauling millions of bottles around the world, it will take more energy to move glass bottles. This is true, but it (mostly) not an externalized cost. By forcing environmental costs to be internalized by industry, the market should guide industry away from damaging the environment. Of course that would require honest, complete, and well enforced regulation.
- deleted 6y ago
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- agotterer 6y ago
  Where I live the local government told us to stop putting glass in our recycling bin and to throw it out instead. The reason I’ve heard is that the glass is breaking and making it harder to recycle it or the things it contaminates. This is unfortunate because I don’t think most people are taking their glass to the supermarket to be recycled and instead a highly recyclable good is ending up in a plastic garbage bag at the landfill.
  - PowerBar 6y ago
    Parts of lower mainland BC (Canada) are the same. For example, I can recycle glass in Vancouver, but Surrey stopped accepting it years ago because they changed recycling companies and the new one considers it a safety hazard for their works. Conversely, Surrey will recycle plastic bags, but in Vancouver you have to drop them off at the grocery store (only a few stores do this).
dheera 6y ago
> hauling millions of bottles around the world How much of those bottles are single-use bottles for water? We can cut that portion entirely. 100%. Either install filters (ideal) or use reusable 5-gal plastic bottles and water dispensers.
DoingIsLearning 6y ago
All the cost/energy benefits listed are exactly the type of short term business arguments that enabled companies like Coca-Cola to transition from glass bootles to producing 110 _billion_ PET bootles, every, single, year. [0] There are a number of long-term costs not captured in these business decisions: - The energy cost of recycling a PET bottle is much greater than producing a brand new one from crude oil. This creates the wrong kind of incentives for recycling - Plastic degrades everytime it is recycled. Google plastic "downcycling". In an ideal circular economy old plastics would still have to be replaced with "new" crude oil plastic with additional energy and emissions costs. - The cost of plastic collection and _sorting_ (which manufacturers aren't paying for) - The environmental and disposal costs of unrecycled plastic, a PET bottle will take at least 450 years to fully decompose. [1] - The Health costs of the calamity of micro-plastics contaminating our food supply and ground water. Simply google "plastic endocrine disruptors". [0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/02/coca-cola-increased-its-production-of-plastic-bottles-by-a-billion-last-year-say-greenpeace https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/02/coca-col... [1] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/plastic-bottles/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2019/08/plast...
- acituan 6y ago
  I’m with you with your conclusions but not only you are not responding to OPs point about the complexity of cost calculations, you are adding further data that is irrelevant. “This is what Coca-Cola said” is not a valid rebuttal.
- wcoenen 6y ago
  > Simply google "plastic endocrine disruptors" I did, and found that the 1996 paper that helped launch the movement against endocrine disruptors, was retracted in 2001 because the data was made up. https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-02-003.html https://grants.nih.gov/grants/guide/notice-files/NOT-OD-02-0... (I'm not making any claim here about whether endocrine disruptors in our environment are a problem or not. Maybe they are. But I don't like to be told "just Google X" because that can be used to support any nonsense nowadays. Just give me a good reference and I'll try to figure out whether it's credible.)
8note 6y ago
I'm not sure the choice is between shipping glass or plastic bottles long distances, but rather having the bottling plants closer or further from the consumption
spodek 6y ago
> hauling millions of bottles around the world I haven't used a bottle of any sort for water for at least ten years. Not everyone has access to safe water, but billions do and billions more would if by not thinking we can fall back on bottles and therefore maintained cleaner water supplies. We don't need alternatives for many things. Paper or plastic? Neither. I've shopped with the same bag since the 90s. Most beverages are marketing gimmicks we'd be happier, safer, and less polluting without -- same with most packaged food, children's toys, fast fashion, and so on. Our sense of entitlement and disconnect with healthy living, nature, and how we used to live is killing us.
- agotterer 6y ago
  The folks at Tap (https://findtap.com/ https://findtap.com/) are trying to make it easier to refill a water bottle while your out and about or traveling. It doesn’t solve the problem globally, but it’s great to see companies trying to reduce plastic waste and make it easy and free/cheap to access clean water.
  - jasonmp85 6y ago
    Well, is it free or is it cheap? The solution is called a water fountain and they should all be free.
    - agotterer 6y ago
      In the end someone has to pay for it. Water fountains need maintenance and cleaning. I’ve seen quite a few public fountains I’d never drink from. Tap is interesting because it correctly aligns consumer incentives and maintenance costs.
- deleted 6y ago
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decasteve 6y ago
Why keep shipping bottles around? Leave them where they are. Ship the liquid in tanker trucks and fill the bottles at the destination.
- TylerE 6y ago
  That is what happens. The scale is just so immense. Coca Cola, for instance, is produced and bottled in at least 68 separate plants in the US alone.
TheRealSteel 6y ago
Is there any good reason we can't start putting damn near every liquid into huge aluminium (or tin?) cans? It uses alot of power to smelt originally but it recycles forever with no degradation. Aluminium at least.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
Transport energy cost is a challenge. Luckily, that whole sector is moving towards using clean energy. So, it matters less as long as we clean that part of our economy up. Also, it perhaps incentivizes manufacturers to recycle and produce closer to consumers. That's the beauty of making this the manufacturers problem: they get to be creative finding solutions to these problems. Germany already has deposits on things like soda cans, plastic bottles, and beer bottles. It works and isn't crippling the economy. Also the likes of Coca Cola are operating in Germany and turning a profit despite this. They face similar rules elsewhere in Europe. This is already part of their business today. A lot of the plastic bottles are ending up being recycled. Half the success is simply collecting them separately from normal waste so you get all the PET plastics sorted together. That makes that easier. Some of the bottles are actually cleaned and reused. Simply making recycling a concern for the manufacturer is the key to getting businesses to compete on being more sustainable because it becomes their problem to solve. Single use plastics only make sense when you get to dump them for "free" without regard for cleaning up the mess. IMHO the main challenges with plastics long term are ensuring the stuff either breaks down when dumped or does not end up in land fills and our oceans. Secondly, we are using oil for producing plastics and could long term be switching to synthesized carbohydrates produced using clean energy. This requires a lot of R&D to happen to scale this and do it more efficiently of course. But it would change things a lot. We'll need stupendous amounts of cheap energy for this. That's actually a good thing when the cheapest form of energy we make is increasingly from renewables. So, the more demand we have on that the faster the demise of dirty energy.
happymellon 6y ago
It's interesting that, at least in the UK, the beer industry is fine with glass bottles and metal cans. Why is soda so special that it deserves special treatment?
- tijl 6y ago
  The beer industry would love to use plastic bottles. But beer goes stale in plastic. Plastic is not good at keeping the oxygen out and the alcohol in. There are bottles with multiple layers in different types of plastic that work reasonably well, but they are more expensive than standard PET bottles, much harder to recycle than PET, and still not as good for storing beer as glass is.

chmod600 6y ago

A ban seems foolish. First you need to categorize things as "single-use" versus reusable, and people will argue about that distinction. Then, you need do deal with the inevitable unintended consequences from miscategorized items or bizarre alternatives companies choose to replace plastic. A tax would be much more straightforward.

jay_kyburz 6y ago
Tax just makes things more expensive, and is very slow to elicit change. Taxing plastic bags while grocery shopping just makes your groceries a tiny bit more expensive. If you ban plastic shopping bags altogether they disappear overnight. update: I agree that trying to define "single-use" is difficult, instead I think governments should just choose an item that has good alternatives and ban them.
- lopmotr 6y ago
  My country banned single use supermarket bags, which they defined by the thickness of the material and whether they had cut-out handles. So a supermarket that used to charge 10c for one of those bags replaced them with 20c bags of slightly thicker plastic with attached handles. For me, the extra cost was negligible so I just bought the more expensive bags and threw them in the rubbish. They don't offer them anymore, for some reason.
  - jay_kyburz 6y ago
    Here in Australia the thin bags were free and people used to use _a lot_ of them. Now they sell bags that are thicker and re-usable, but a lot of people bring their own bags. I read a study that suggested the total plastic usage has gone down, but not by as much as you would think.
    - lopmotr 6y ago
      I though they weren't banned for their amount of plastic usage, which was surely negligible compared to the packaging of the products people put in them, but for their tendency to blow away and end up in the environment. Thicker bags might not be so easily blown away so maybe it's OK if we all use them? I don't know really because nobody actually analyses this stuff - the decisions are made in response to public outrage.

mulmen 6y ago

What about single use plastic for things like cleaning supplies? Why only medical? I don’t shop at a grocery store, how will I return my plastic, glass or metal containers? Is plastic so bad if it gets reused? If we don’t make plastic what happens to that portion of the petrochemical supply chain? Are there other constructive uses or does it just get dumped into a river somewhere?

TylerE 6y ago

You're just assuming that glass is better than plastic. I challenge that assumption. Glass is much heavier and bulkier (so a truck will carry less product, and burn more fuel and cause more road wear to do so), and more product will be lost to spoilage.

tuatoru 6y ago
Glass also takes a lot of energy to produce. In many (most?) cases more fossil fuels will be consumed making a glass container than the plastic equivalent. The same sorts of issues apply to coated paper or card containers.
- barney54 6y ago
  Glass is also somewhat difficult to recycle. The actual recycling is easy, but different colors of glass needs to be sorted. And glass is heavy, so it’s costly to transport.
  - TylerE 6y ago
    I think if you really wanted to go all in on glass recycling you'd have to ban everything except maybe 3 colors (Something like clear, a light green, and something quite dark).
coliveira 6y ago
This is good, because transportation costs can be easily accounted in the final price of the product. Paying higher costs make people more honest about how much they want to spend for the privilege of buying small bottles of a product.
aksss 6y ago
Even this assumes that people will bother to even transport the heavier alternative. There are places in the world where goods just won't be available anymore. Doesn't affect me, but not every place on the planet gets to make choices like "just switch to glass".

NoSorryCannot 6y ago

I think assessing and charging at the time of distribution, as best as can be estimated, the total cost of responsible disposal would be sufficient to align incentives, for both manufacturers and consumers. More waste means higher prices. And fees so assessed should actually pay for disposal. Of everything. Discourage dumping and garbage burning by making waste collection "free" (in reality paid in advance at time of purchase).

gruez 6y ago

> The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. At the risk of sounding like an industry shill: why is it being characterized as an cost externalization by the petrochemical/packaging industries, rather than the consumers? I agree that any pollution generated during extraction and manufacture can be attributed as an externalize of the packaging/petrochemical industry, but why should they be on the hook after it leaves their hands? Consumers are using the said products, reaping the benefits (either in cheaper products or greater convenience), and pay for their disposal via tax dollars or fees. I guess you could argue that companies should be responsible for the entire lifecycle, but then it becomes a slippery slope. Is the automotive industry externalizing the cost of roads? Is the food industry externalizing the cost of sewer systems? Are electronics manufacturers externalizing the cost of electricity?

jolux 6y ago
They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics. I don’t think consumers are blameless, but you can’t get everyone in the world to change their purchasing behavior without regulation, which is necessary when lower prices are subsidized by huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large.
- jariel 6y ago
  "They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics." ? Plastics are an absolutely incredible technology, to the point of revolutionary. They are used absolutely everywhere, in everything. Nobody needed to be convinced of the utility of plastics, it's one of the most utilitarian things ever created.
  - josho 6y ago
    So, they lied when they didn't even need to. Doesn't that make the lie that much worse?
    - 6y ago

tuatoru 6y ago

If the goals are to cut fossil fuel consumption and/or dispersal of waste into the natural environment, it ain't that simple. The best option by far is to not consume things. Don't buy stuff. That's working out really well for us, isn't it? Next best in many places is single use followed by incineration for district heating and electricity. Third, in many places, is single use with well managed collection and disposal to a well managed landfill. When you dig into the numbers, things like reusable glass containers, cotton bags, and so on are harmful virtue signaling. Karens get to shame other people who harming the world less than the Karens are by a long way.

WA 6y ago
You surely have a source for this right?
- tuatoru 6y ago
  Dammit, I knew you would ask that. I'll have to dig back through my paper notebooks going back over about 20 years. (My ex-wife was a virtue signaler, and I had started to be sceptical. I used a university library, but I don't live near a university any more.) Probably there's a lot better research to be had now, refined! Updated! With 20% lower error bounds! But I doubt very much the conclusions have changed, especially given the world's dependence on Chinese manufacturing and China's dependence on coal.
- jlmorton 6y ago
  Here's [0] a write-up from NPR, with links to several studies comparing the life cycle costs of plastic and alternative materials, and noting that from a climate change perspective, plastic comes out ahead in most analyses, but that plastic has much larger cleanup costs: [0] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/735848489/plastic-has-a-big-carbon-footprint-but-that-isnt-the-whole-story https://www.npr.org/2019/07/09/735848489/plastic-has-a-big-c...

jariel 6y ago

What happens if glass packaged goods are much more expensive to ship and prone to breakage thereby creating considerably CO2 exposure? There are a zillion unforeseen externalizations in the mandates your listing - this is why centralization usually doesn't work very well. Plastic is one of many materials that go in landfills, and we don't turn it into Co2 either so I'm not sure how we can go after that 'evil industry' and not others? Probably a better solution would be to figure out how we can make use of that material afterwards - or - finding rational ways to dispose of it relatively cleanly.

andrepd 6y ago
Yes because decentralisation is working wonders here... Leave each self-interested agent to profit off externalities which they don't have to pay. We will have good quarterly reports for our shareholders all the way to extinction.

pathseeker 6y ago

>- Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). Direct bans for things so heavily used are going to have extreme unintended consequences. Are we willing to put that much immediate demand on things like tin and aluminum (cans, food cases, etc) that will drive up energy consumption and CO2 emissions? It's not clear that's a win for the environment.

ummonk 6y ago

Most glass and paper doesn't get recycled either. Recycling is broadly speaking nonexistent. Most ends up in the landfill or incinerated.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
> Recycling is broadly speaking nonexistent. Can you link to a source for that claim?
- aksss 6y ago
  https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china-has-stopped-accepting-our-trash/584131/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/china... https://www.wired.com/story/since-chinas-ban-recycling-in-the-us-has-gone-up-in-flames/ https://www.wired.com/story/since-chinas-ban-recycling-in-th... You know how they say the "cloud" is just some other guy's computer? Recycling can often be some other guy's landfill.

snarf21 6y ago

These are ideas that could affect change but it has to be a process. We didn't get here overnight and we won't solve it overnight. It seems like slow adding and raising a plastic tax based on packaging containing any plastic would work. Consumers have to decide if they will continue to pay more and more for convenience year over year. This tax money is used to develop technology to recycle and breakdown plastics. Basically, you slowly pay the consumer to pay up for their laziness.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
> we won't solve it overnight. We are past and overdue on too many milestones in this planetary anthropogenic destruction. The future of humanity cannot afford anything less than solving this overnight. Some people will sit in Davos and ponder but the longer we waste time the longer we risk collapsing the world order that allows them to sit at Davos and ponder.

lazyjones 6y ago

No. "Single-use" plastic is often used for a long time, longer than "eco" alternatives like paper bags that simply don't do the job well enough to be reused. Glass and paper are horrible alternatives (for the environment) if not recycled properly (and they aren't, like plastic).

oefnak 6y ago
Glass and paper may cost more energy, but don't cause pollution. And when we have enough solar panels, energy will be free. Removing all microplastics from nature will be a lot harder.
- kgabis 6y ago
  No, energy won't be free with "enough solar panels". There's this thing called night. And seasons. And transmission losses.
- themeiguoren 6y ago
  Paper grocery bags give off gas when they rot, whereas the (smaller) amount of energy in a plastic grocery bag is carbon locked in a controlled landfill. I think there’s a strong argument for plastic bags being more environmentally friendly.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

Kluny 6y ago

Yes yes yes. Saved for copying and pasting, and I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter. I've been studying plastic waste for years as a member of the Surfrider Foundation, and right now I'm in a BBA program called Business and Sustainability, and my colleagues are having a really hard time getting past the idea that recycling+electric cars=sustainable.

jakobmartz3 6y ago

Yeah, I wish we had a president who actually cared about this and made it a priority, instead of tweeting bullshit.

agumonkey 6y ago

I wonder, with all the material refined from extracted base material (be it oil for plastic or ore for alloys) .. how much could we live by simply reusing discarded lots (old cars in the case of metals, similar for plastics)

hiisukun 6y ago

In South Australia (one of the eight states/territories in Australia), they have just banned many single use plastics [1]. The rules are a little delayed - coming in next year instead of now because of COVID - and are staged to include smaller items (straws) now and larger items (takeaway containers) later. That state has had a ban on plastic bags since 2009, around ten years before some of the more populated eastern parts of Australia. [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/sa-first-state-to-ban-single-use-plastics-in-australia/12647434 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/sa-first-state-to-ban...

lightgreen 6y ago

> - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). This is just naive and irrational. What if I really need a single use plastic thingy because for example, it is a wire buckle, and making it multi-use would make it effectively expensive single-use wire buckle? Banning ALL is rarely a good solution. Just tax it and that's it. And it doesn't matter, if it's single use or multiple use, because eventually all of them end up in the garbage.

replicatorblog 6y ago
Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco. This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plastic wrap for retail packaging. Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations. The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.
- konjin 6y ago
  >Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations. >The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology. That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer research the real trade off isn't uranium baby powder or regular baby powder, it's uranium baby powder or oncology".
  - replicatorblog 6y ago
    I invite you to spend some time in a pediatric oncology unit, look at the mind-boggling variety of single-use plastics consumed over the course of the day, and research their manufacturers and origins. The results will be more illuminating than some dramatic hypothetical.

londons_explore 6y ago

> Define industry quotas for how much 'new' plastic is allowed to be made from crude and make companies bid for it in a "new plastic" market If you implemented this one, all of your other goals would naturally fall out of the increased cost of plastic. Where you give the free market conditions where it ends up doing the things you were thinking of 'requiring' it to do, you'll end up with a much more effective solution, because no set of laws or requirements is ever as comprehensive as the effect of millions of people in millions of roles trying to save a few bucks...

gfxgirl 6y ago

I am curious how this would work in Japan. Walking through a grocery store or a convenience store most tea and soda is in plastic. I suppose that could be glass but carrying home several litters of liquid is already heavy enough with out adding glass. (most people walk to the grocery story so they have to carry stuff home). Most yogurt is in plastic. Putting that in ceramic or glass seems out or similar reasons. All bread products are wrapped in plastic. There used to open bins in the "bakery" area but because of covid-19 every pastry, bagel, croissant, etc is not individually wrapped in plastic. All chips and crackers are in plastic. I'm not 100% sure they can be wrapped in paper given how humid it is. Maybe wax paper? Milk is almost universally in cardboard though 80-90% have a plastic cap. I'm not sure that the cardboard isn't plastic coated though. It certainly feels like it is but maybe that's some kind of wax? All meat is in styrofoam trays (plastic) wrapped in plastic. I don't know if they could wrap it in anything else as people want to see it before buying (paper is opaque) and having a butcher counter would be much slower having to wait in line for the butcher. All cheese products are in plastic. Same as the butcher, I can imagine a cheese counter where they wrap the cheese in paper but no one wants to wait in line and plastic wrapped cheese lets me see the cheese. Japanese pumpkin is often sold in quarters because a single pumpkin is too much for one. Those are wrapped in plastic. Not sure what else you could wrap them in and leave them on the counter for a day. I suppose you could require to people to buy whole pumpkins. All tofu is sold in plastic. I'm also not sure what to do for garbage. Japan, or at least my area, requires garbage to be put in vinyl bags. It arguably helps putting out a bunch of food stuffs to not just be open and lure for rats and bugs so I'm not sure what we could switch to there. Well, there is definitely lots of room for improvement. At least in July they finally made stores require to charge for plastic bags and ask if you want one (not just auto charge you). I'm not sure how affective it is but it did manage to change my behavior. I carry a reusable bag now.

simonebrunozzi 6y ago

> The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Absolutely nailed it here. The rest of your comment is not going to happen easily though...

lopmotr 6y ago

At some point, won't it be cheaper to just bury it in a landfill away from any cities and drinking water? We can already afford to ship it to other countries, so why not ship it to the desert where there's unlimited capacity and it will never harm the environment?

epmaybe 6y ago

Might be interesting to see if we can get more reusable medical supplies in the future. Autoclave for sterility, replace smaller portions (like needles) to reduce waste. Plastic has its place for its characteristics, but if we can do the same and reuse at the same time, I'm all for it.

ManlyBread 6y ago

Are there any examples of taxing goods that solved an environmental issue? My feeling is that these taxes do nothing aside from increasing the cost of the goods.

xadhominemx 6y ago

Single use plastics are a tiny fraction of our carbon footprint. They are also very convenient and make users’ lives better. It would be a strange place to start with severe regulation.

DoingIsLearning 6y ago
> Single use plastics are a tiny fraction of our carbon footprint ... And a Lion's share of the microplastic calamity contaminating our oceans, our ground water and our food supply. Not everything is about CO2 emissions. With a single business decision, Humans have managed to contaminate the whole water cycle with micro-plastics all the way up to alpine glaciers. [0] Single-use plastic is outstandingly great for seller's short-term direct costs, bad for almost everything else. [0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0269749119316422 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02697...
- xadhominemx 6y ago
  How much of the microplastic contamination is from consumer goods packaging from western countries? The vast majority is from fishing nets and illegal dumping of household trash by developing countries.
  - DoingIsLearning 6y ago
    We can never pressure other countries to do it unless we do it first. In addition, regulating plastic means that for multi-national corporations the path of least resistance is to operate under the most restrictive standard instead of maintaining multiple packaging solutions.
    - xadhominemx 6y ago
      You have no idea how consumer packaged goods supply chains work. And Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian policy makers are not going to care at all if we ban plastic soda bottles. And how high would this be on our list diplomatic priorities. Think about this for 4 seconds.

TimesOldRoman 6y ago

AGREE. Nothing worse that trash like those disposable stir-sticks that get maybe 20 seconds of use, yet will live in the ecosystem for thousands of years. Multiply that one tiny product by several orders of magnitude, daily, and we are burying ourselves in unusable cinders.