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What bugs me most is the use of long-living plastics in fast moving consumer goods. I have to buy 12g of plastics to get 80g of Prosciutto. From packaging to E
by thrawn0r 6y ago
What bugs me most is the use of long-living plastics in fast moving consumer goods.
I have to buy 12g of plastics to get 80g of Prosciutto.
From packaging to EOL its lifespan is max. 60 days, most of the time more like 20 days I suspect.
Why does it need to be in a container that degrades in 300+ years?
- forgotmypw17 6y agovoted with your spend you ensured more plastic bits is now in your karma
- wolfi1 6y agounfortunately sometimes wax paper is proposed as an alternative but although the name suggests it to be ecologically it isn't. most, if not all, "wax papers" use paraffin instead of wax
- lopis 6y agoAlso if you would use real wax, suddenly fruits and vegetables wouldn't be vegan anymore.
- giantg2 6y agoWhat about soy wax?
- mattkrause 6y agoOr carnauba wax (which is already used in some foods).
- giantg2 6y agoParaffin is a wax, it's just synthetic (and all the issues that come with that). More concerning is that many "waxed" products contain PTFEs.
- lkuty 6y agoWe should be able to buy things in bulk and it should be generalized. The norm, not the exception. And if it is not possible to sell stuff that way, then the goods should be forbidden to be sold (with probably some exceptions).
- JosephRedfern 6y agoBulk buying isn't always the solution though (perishable goods, for instance), and isn't always affordable. Your financial situation shouldn't dictate your ability to avoid unnecessary waste. In my opinion, the move should be towards normalising reusable containers (where practical). Where I am, there are some more "specialist" shops who are doing great work in this area, but it's not mainstream and is often more expensive than just going to the supermarket.
- lkuty 6y agoYou're right, I guess I used the wrong word... "bulk". I wanted to say that we should buy food which has no container and as such no plastic container. Not that we should buy them in large quantities, if it's what has been implied by my use of the word. Anyway, someone thought I should be thanked with another -1. Can we go to -Infinity ?
- SamBam 6y agoYeah, it's confusing terminology, because "buying in bulk" usually means buying large quantities, but the "bulk bins" of e.g. nuts at the grocery store really means "buy as much as you want." But when the tomatoes are loose, we don't call that bulk. Anyway, we can just say "without packaging."
- powersnail 6y agoFresh meat and vegetables, however, should be buy-able in small portions. Otherwise, you either have to buy a giant freezer and eat frozen food all the time, or go to a diner on a daily basis.
- janlaureys 6y agoThis drives me crazy as well. Even sillier is that at my local supermarket where I can either buy regular tomatoes in bulk and take them home in a paper bag that the store provides or just in my reusable bag or I can buy the biologic organic tomatoes that are packaged by 6 in a little cardboard tray and wrapped in plastic.
- lopis 6y agoI hit this dilemma often. Do I buy bulk regular produce or organic produce invariably wrapped in plastic or in plastic bags?
- bluGill 6y agoOrganic is a buzzword that doesn't mean anything useful. They can't use some chemicals so they substitute others which are often more harmful. Or they destroy the soil because they can't replace the nutrients that they are taking out.
- realce 6y agoThis doesn't feel like an accurate representation of organic farming. My family has 2 organic farms and neither of them do what you're saying. Not difficult to rotate crops.
- NateEag 6y agoI think the complaint is meant to be "organic doesn't mean anything". I read GP as saying that while an organic product might be produced responsibly, as your family's farms do, it could also be factory-farmed using pesticides worse than Roundup. If that is true, then the word "organic" is not meaningful for consumers who want to support sustainable, low-impact farming.
- robotbikes 6y agoThere is certification and regulation required and a fair amount of promises to become USDA organic or even use organic on the label of a food legally in the U.S. So if they were using pesticides they would be engaging in fraud. There is large scale organic farming that is probably not sustainable though and this is likely the source of a lot of organic produce that is not locally sourced, but it also probably doesn't have pesticides on it. O. The other hand fraud does happen and there was a big organic grain trader who was found to be substituting non-organic grain for grain and I think he was prosecuted for it but he got away with it for years. There are also local sustainable farmers who grow organically but can't afford or can't justify the cost of organic certification. So while it does mean something it isn't doesn't always mean what you might think it does.
- murukesh_s 6y agoIt's too much in developed nations. Went to Tokyo and almost every thing is wrapped in plastic over plastic without guilt. They say its burned/recycled but not sure how much is true and how much impact it is bringing to the surroundings. The volume of packaged foods in developing nations are comparatively lower but can't imagine the footprint it could cause when those nations also develop into heavily packaged FMCG consuming behemoths.
- zorba20002 6y agoTrue, in Iran everybody buy their fruits and vegetables from designated stores that only sell those. you can have even bring your own container to consume zero plastic. in Denmark it is not even an option. Day to day groceries are bought in supermarkets with insane amount of plastic wraps.
- bjarneh 6y agoI guess the only reason this happens is due to price, but we could force a "plastic tax" on those types of products unless they came in something that was biodegradable. Seems like a solvable problem, but only if we make it harder to pollute; otherwise price will dictate.
- laci37 6y agoHungary has plastic tax, still it's every where. In the case of prosciutto I guess it's because sliced up meat needs to be protected from drying out even if it is preserved. You can't prevent this with paper, so the shelf life would be short. So you either need a deli counter in the shop, or have customers buy the meat in bulk.
- devilbunny 6y agoPlastic just lets you see it. Wax paper works perfectly well for protecting things from desiccation.
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoDoes it spoil faster with wax paper since it is open to the outside air and oxygen and microbes that are about?
- undersuit 6y agoYou enclose the product in the wax paper and seal it closed with the slightest amount of heat.
- Broken_Hippo 6y agoYup. sure, sealed, but is it sanitary enough? They used to seal jellies and jam with wax over the top. Unfortunately, this method made it more likely that you would get food poisoning (and it is still an issue with home canning, but we are a little safer). Hence the question about if it keeps out microbes and such.
- bluntfang 6y agowait til you hear about the factory farming industry that produced that prosciutto!
- kitcar 6y agoIn many cases that's a function of food safety regulations, re: minimizing bacteria growth on the food while traveling though the logistics chain.
- lotyrin 6y agoThe logistics graph probably needs to have fewer edges, and the average path be quite a bit shorter, but then we can't all have whatever we want whenever we want wherever we want.
- swiley 6y agoA lot of food is packaged in cellophane though isn't it? That's edible by earthworms just like cardboard/paper is.
- boringg 6y agoDo we have enough earthworms in concentrated enough areas in order to eat all of this packaging were generating?
- whoomp12342 6y agobecause it makes a crinkle sound that makes you want to buy more
- smarx007 6y agoI would guess packaging transparency is very important from the marketing PoV in retail?
- JTbane 6y agoWhat if a requirement was made for producers of products to handle the disposal of their packaging? I have no idea how much of a financial burden it would be but that could go far to help reduce waste.
- hairytrog 6y agoJust nuclear waste?
- crazygringo 6y ago> Why does it need to be in a container that degrades in 300+ years? Because there's no other cost-effective material we've invented that keeps the prosciutto airtight (so it doesn't dry out in hours), won't puncture/rip easily, holds up to shipping+stacking, and is transparent (to examine for fat percentage, slice thickness, etc. -- always essential for meats and veggies). Can you provide a material that does all that but starts degrading after 60 days? If you can, you stand to make a lot of $$$. Obviously, the main alternative is having someone slice it at the deli counter for you, but that means you could only ever buy prosciutto at places with a staffed deli counter, including the 15-minute wait for the deli counter if you're going grocery shopping at the end of a regular workday...
- hairytrog 6y agoThe ham itself will protect it, wrapped in Aluminum foil or even a hemp bag for shipping. The packaging is simply an artifact of people not wanting to buy a whole ham and wanting it presliced, which is perhaps an artifact of the fact that most people in the US will heat the majority of their meals by themselves and do not like to prepare meals. Sad.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- crazygringo 6y agoMaybe you don't know what prosciutto is...? It's not just ham. Buying an entire prosciutto costs hundreds of dollars, obviously people don't want to buy a whole one. It's also usually not heated, by the way. This has zero to do with not liking to prepare meals... most people who buy sliced prosciutto are doing it as part of the meal they're preparing. We're not talking about hot pockets or frozen lasagna here.
- aaronblohowiak 6y agoMaybe they know what prosciutto is but don’t know that in USA we use that term to only refer to prosciutto crudo?
- leetcrew 6y agosince you used prosciutto for an example, we ought to discuss how absurd it is to need a special container to keep slices of cured meat fresh in the first place. the block of prosciutto is already a container! perhaps the big block needs some sort of protection in transit to meet modern food safety requirements, but buying 80g at a time of prepackaged prosciutto creates a needless inefficiency. we ought to be able to go to the meat counter and buy a few days worth of prosciutto wrapped in paper.
- agentultra 6y agoFor me it's the sheer volume of the stuff and how casual people are about buying it. My kids have more toys than they know what to do with and they're all plastic. Every week I buy produce wrapped in plastic. All of our dental care products: plastic. My tools: have plastic in them! That lego set my kid builds for Xmas? It'll be here for thousands of years and Lego is manufacturing billions of bricks each year. Fungi are great and all but we have a destructive behavior we need to fix. We can't rely on a quick fix or a miracle cure.
- leetcrew 6y agoI loved lego as a kid and I now have an embarrassingly large pile of bricks collecting dust at my parents' house. I don't quite know what to do with them. in theory, they're worth a decent chunk of change. looking at used sets on ebay, I'd estimate it's somewhere in the four figure range easily. trouble is they're all disassembled and jumbled together. I can't even find someone who would take a bag of random bricks for free, let alone the whole pile.
- detaro 6y ago> I can't even find someone who would take a bag of random bricks for free, let alone the whole pile. People sell Lego by the kilo on ebay etc all the time.
- SteveGerencser 6y agoTake them all to a local children's hospital and drop them off if they embarrass you. Sell them on eBay by the kilo/pound if they embarrass you but you want the money in exchange for them.
- jonfw 6y agoI got rid of my childhood legos when I was like 15 in a garage sale. The lego bucket was completely disorganized and it was easily the hottest commodity we had there- there was a woman who showed up 5 minutes early to buy it and the next 6 hours of garage sale we had people showing up a few times an hour asking about it from the ad. Throw that up on Facebook marketplace or something and people will pay hundreds for it
- samstave 6y agoTOTALLY AGREE!!! I personally think that long-life plastics should be illegal for quickly used items. Glass and wax-cardboard should be our primary packaging methods for food. It should also be required that all plastics be recycled. I HATE plastic. Also, look at cars - whats the average lifespan of a car these days - and in all the millions of cars - with thousands of parts made from plastic that never get recycled.
- lkuty 6y agoCompletely agree! Probably going to 28 :-)
- speleding 6y agoCounterintuitively, because food that's not wrapped in plastic spoils faster it's actually better for the environment to use plastic, owing to reduced waste elsewhere.
- Dirlewanger 6y agoBut it's not. Spoiled produce is biodegradable. Plastic is not.
- speleding 6y agoFood takes energy to produce, transport and store, that releases (much) more CO2 for now than plastic packaging. Plastic is rather efficient, you only need a tiny drop of oil to create a lot of packaging. If food production at some point becomes CO2 neutral you still have a lot of other detrimental effects to the environment from food production to account for. Plastic is a net positive for the environment when it comes to food packaging.
- panzagl 6y agoBut if you need to ship twice as much unpackaged as packaged you're harming the environment in other ways.
- antoniuschan99 6y agoPBS Frontline has a good documentary called Plastic Wars. It’s part conspiracy where the Petro Companies need alternative sources of $$$ since the Energy $$$ is drying up with the advent of Renewables and EVs https://youtu.be/lXzee3tIZco https://youtu.be/lXzee3tIZco
- jonnycomputer 6y agoIt wouldn't practically matter if there were only 500m of us on the planet. I'm not advocating any particular policy btw, but a lot of pollution problems just go away when you minimize the multiplicative factor.
- robertlagrant 6y agoOr if there were only 10000 of us. So what?
- jonnycomputer 6y agoCertain things are possible with 10,000. Others with 10,000,000. Still others with 10 billion. Certain things are impossible with only 10,000. Others with 10,000,000. Still other things are impossible with 10 billion. We want rich, diverse, dynamic and satisfying lives. We do not want a crowded, polluted, impoverished world. 10,000 of us is certainly too few to sustain our civilizational accomplishments. My guess is that the numbers we have now are too many. What is the right-ish number?
- robertlagrant 6y agoIt doesn't really matter, is my point. We might need at least 30 billion to fully colonise the Solar System one day, or we might need to become a tiny colony that subsists off heat from the Earth's core hiding from super robots. Ethically, we would need a pressure great enough to reduce the population for a horrible reason. We would never choose it.
- jonnycomputer 6y agoIt may be that a policy solution can be arrived at that is non-coercive, and gets around the temporary downsides of an aging population. I'm less pessimistic I guess.
- robertlagrant 6y ago
- tombert 6y agoI wish it were more acceptable to simply bring your own packaging to the grocery store and let them do a tare-weight. My wife and I tried this a few years ago for a few weeks, either bringing in our own Tupperware or Mason jars to do it, and each time the person working in the deli area had to get a manager involved, and one time they accused us of stealing their tupperware, since they sold that same container in the shop. We did this partly for environmental reasons, but mostly for "meat packaging gets really stinky in your garbage can after a few days in a small apartment" reasons. After awhile, we decided it wasn't worth the headache to us. In NYC (and California too I think?), they're starting to encourage bringing your own bag instead of buying them at the register, so I might retry this experiment again.
- titanomachy 6y agoProbably depends where you shop. At the more expensive, bougie, "socially-conscious" grocery stores in the US, this is pretty normal or even encouraged. Whole Foods is the most prominent example of the kind of store I'm thinking of.
- tombert 6y agoIn my case, it was in Washington Heights, not typically considered the yuppie-stronghold, and I've since moved to another similarly non-yuppie place. Next time I go to C-Town or Food Bazaar or something maybe I'll make another effort and try again...there isn't a Whole Foods near me.
- undersuit 6y agoI really like glass growlers for beer. I can walk across the street and buy a canned 6-pack of a local beer or I can ride my bike to the brewery and have a drink while I wait for my growler to fill. It's about the same price for me.
- gnopgnip 6y agoIf there were carbon taxes, plastic taxes, or more generally if the externalities were priced in this would be less of an issue. Plastic would still be used where it is economical, or where it is really needed, but cardboard, paper, and other materials that can be recycled or reused would be cheaper and more common. Glass jars or wax paper could both work, but currently the glass is more expensive than plastic, and wax paper would probably give a shorter shelf life. And these taxes don't need to be for 100% of the cost to change behavior.
- DenisM 6y agoThat piece of plastic will spend its hundreds of years of retirement buried in a hole in the ground in the landfill. It produces no harm to whatsoever, and we are not going to run out of land for millions of years. Whenever I bring this up someone inevitably brings up polluted oceans, so I might as well address it now - if you don't throw your plastic bags into the ocean and neither does your local waste management those bags will never make it to the ocean. They will be in the landfill.