9 ms·

I would much rather incentivize non-plastic alternative packaging. Consumers should have better options for metal cans, glass bottles, etc for mainstream goods,

I would much rather incentivize non-plastic alternative packaging. Consumers should have better options for metal cans, glass bottles, etc for mainstream goods, as those materials are far more effective targets for recycling. But they're no where near competitive with plastic because the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle.

mc32 5y ago
Why glass? Glass is quite recyclable but requires lots of energy to recycle. As soda bottles and milk bottles they might last 20 uses. Glass is also much heavier requiring more energy to transport.
- 3pt14159 5y ago
  In every part of Canada I've lived in there has been a well developed reuse system. In Ontario, for example, a beer bottle is used around 100 times on average. Reuse should be way better integrated into our systems. If I could bring a resuable bag back to any supermarket to get the $1 fee back, it would be so much easier to justify buying reusable bags that really last a long time. The trouble is I never remember to bring it with me in the morning before work and I grocery shop on my way back home.
  - loonster 5y ago
    My family stores the bags in the trunk of our car. They are always available for random shopping trips. Public transportation would make reusable bags much more inconvenient for our family.
  - fnimick 5y ago
    I keep a couple in every bag I use regularly (gym bag, work bag, briefcase, etc) so I'm never without if I decide to stop by the store on the way home. That way you don't have to proactively remember to bring it!
  - arsome 5y ago
    Beer bottles are typically only reused if you say, bring them to The Beer Store or something similar. If you toss them in your municipal bin like me, my understanding is they basically just smash them and use the glass bits in other products like asphalt as it's just not worth the energy cost to actually recycle it. Aluminum cans are probably a better bet for recycling if you're just using the municipal bins. They're profitable enough that people routinely come steal the cans from my bins.
    - cloverich 5y ago
      But if the bottles, or even a subset of them, were standardized, it would be possible to have some bottle specific re-use (not recycle) programs. OP was I think giving an example of one that works. Perhaps it would be possible to extend it. I can understand there are some product specific's that limit this in some cases, but if I drink beer and topo chico and a few other similar drinks, it seems unlikely they couldn't all use the same bottle.
      - mc32 5y ago
        A lot of beer bottles conform to an industry standard (the ones with paper labels where anyone can slap their own label) and get reused. However, the reuse frequency is from 15 to 20 times before they begin to fail inspection tests and have to be taken out of circulation (and recycled or dumped). Recycling that glass is expensive. The big advantage of glass from a consumer pov is that its inert and does not react with contents.
        thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > The big advantage of glass from a consumer pov is that its inert and does not react with contents. This is a pretty significant advantage, but the disadvantage is that sometimes you drop it.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >In Ontario, for example, a beer bottle is used around 100 times on average. fact check: no, only 15 https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2013/06/28/the_average_beer_bottle_is_refilled_15_times_in_its_environmentallyfriendly_life_cycle.html https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2013/06/28/the_averag...
    - 3pt14159 5y ago
      Oh, ok thanks for updating my view. I clearly remember hearing it was 99% but must be either misremembering or the original source was wrong. I'd still rather have re-use via glass or recycling via aluminum than plastic.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
- hatchnyc 5y ago
  You are not wrong, but in some countries they collect, wash, and and reuse glass (and even special kinds of plastic) bottles. According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States. Someone should do the math first obviously but it seems like a great idea to me. If bottling is done locally you aren’t transporting the bottles long distance, and quite significantly in my mind glass is inert so if it does get into the environment, it isn’t leaching microplastics into the environment for the next thousand years.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    >According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States. You're making me feel old. I used to sort bottles as a kid. Soft drinks are just another example of gigantism in corporate life, economy of scale uber alles. There was a time when practically every small town had one or more bottling plants, the owners were pillars of the community sponsoring softball teams and the like. Delivery trucks typically had shelving rather than bays. Following that there was a huge spate of consolidation. Small distributors/bottlers had their franchises taken away, canning became owned by the mothership and absolutely huge. The more centralized the more of a pain it becomes to sort/return/clean bottles. I suppose it's like the history of car dealerships as they become fewer and larger. For that matter, a significant (most?) percentage of the US used to be self-employed instead of wage slaves.
    - gruez 5y ago
      > For that matter, a significant (most?) percentage of the US used to be self-employed instead of wage slaves. Are you sure that's not just due to people moving away from agriculture? A family farm is a thing, but not really a family factory.
      - panzagl 5y ago
        More likely retail- in my town the bookstore, stationary store, newsstand, hardware stores, etc. were all family owned until the big box stores opened up two towns over.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  Places with cheap energy (e.g,. the Columbia River with hydroelectric power) could inexpensively recycle glass, aluminum. Of course it does take energy to get the recyclables to these places. Curious — are trains no longer efficient?
  - bequanna 5y ago
    > Places with cheap energy… I’ve always wondered about colocating manufacturing near cheap power sources. Is this actually possible? Isn’t the power generated already being used? If it is possible, why doesn’t every manufacturing plant just do this to reduce a huge input cost?
    - Ekaros 5y ago
      Energy transfer losses are pretty marginal around 2%. Compared to labour availability, shipping resources and products; and land, it is not so big deal. Unless it's very energy intensive industry.
    - JKCalhoun 5y ago
      Pretty sure aluminum extraction plants do this. As well as Bitcoin miners. ;-) Recently ... where was I, Eugene, Oregon? There was a shuttered Coca Cola bottling plant. I remember a huge one in Kansas City as well. Maybe someone with expertise can weigh in — but it seems like we used to, as an example, bottle things a lot more locally. It meant factory jobs in the area, transportation (of Coke) was shorter since there was probably a bottling plant in your state (or a neighboring one). I don't know. I feel a lot was lost.
      - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
        Most major metro areas in the US continue to have soft drink bottling plants (though they're using plastic bottles and aluminum cans these days), since transporting huge volumes of water is more expensive than smaller amounts of flavoring and coloring. Eugene OR (pop ~175K) may be slightly too small for that to be practical, but here in Portland I bike to work past two active bottling plants.
elliekelly 5y ago
I think this is the goal of Maine’s new recycling law (briefly mentioned in the article) where manufacturers are responsible for the cost of recycling. Although I’m not sure Maine’s law really allocates the full social cost of plastics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/maine-becomes-first-state-to-shift-costs-of-recycling-from-taxpayers-to-companies/2021/07/13/aa6fbe44-e416-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/maine-bec...
m0llusk 5y ago
Correctly labeling materials could be a firm foundation from which to base incentive programs.
burkaman 5y ago
One way to incentivize recyclable packaging would be to make it illegal for companies to put a symbol on their non-recyclable plastic packaging that 98% of consumers associate with recycling.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  Further - I don't understand why we don't just have mandated bottle/jar form factors. We broke the fucking loop by claiming that people could just throw plastic containers away and "somewhere, somehow (over the rainbow!!!) people will recycle them into new goods". That story is bullshit - even for most plastics that can actually be recycled. I want legislation that lays out a set of standardized form factors that are as re-usable as possible (NOT RECYCLABLE - Literally washable and reusable), and if companies use those - great! No extra taxes for you. Want to use your own custom packaging? Fine, but you pay for the whole fucking product lifecycle up front, before the customer ever touches it: Collection, Cleaning, Recycling/Disposal, Reprocessing, Redistribution. The EU estimates those costs for plastic at about 800 EUR ($950) a ton.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >I want legislation that lays out a set of standardized form factors that are as re-usable as possible (NOT RECYCLABLE - Literally washable and reusable), and if companies use those - great! No extra taxes for you. Is that seriously the impediment to plastic container reusability, that they're not standardized? People don't reuse plastic containers because there aren't that many uses for them around the house.
    - TeMPOraL 5y ago
      Good point. My wife and I went through a period of trying to maximally reuse otherwise disposable packaging we had around the house, and we quickly discovered two facts: 1. There's surprisingly many things you can use disposable containers for around the house. 2. Even if you go out of your way to find more uses for the waste, in a month or two you'll just run out of applications. The problem of consumer waste is that it's a continuous flow of trash. At-home reuse is not a sink, it's a buffer - it fills up quickly, so it doesn't alter the overall dynamic of the system. Any waste reuse scheme needs to recirculate it on the market - new products need to be put in old packaging.
bko 5y ago
> But they're no where near competitive with plastic because the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle. What's not included in the "total lifecycle" that's not accounted for in cost? Presumably these alternative packages won't save any landfill space.
jedimastert 5y ago
While we're at it, can we get rid of cloth packaging that isn't explicitly made to be reused? Like how Tom's come in a box and a cloth bag inside of that box! It's so resource intensive; it's like the definition of virtue signalling.
- tantalor 5y ago
  What do you think virtue signaling is?
  - jedimastert 5y ago
    Virtue signaling is when an entity does something expressly to show they support a cause or extol a virtue, without actually helping. Disposable cloth packaging is a great example of this. Plastic production needs to be reduced for a large number of reasons, but cloth production takes an exceptional amount of energy and resources to produce while not generally being reusable or recyclable, and the extra durability and/or protection of cloth is almost never needed. (There was a NYT article about this, but I'll link directly to the study <https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...>)
alistairSH 5y ago
I agree that we must incentivize packaging that's better for the environment. The problem is who gets to define "better". Cloth bags were once thought to be better than plastic for grocery use, but that might not be the case - the cloth has a larger environmental cost to produce (cotton is water-intensive) and has to be used a lot more than one might expect before it surpasses the basic plastic bag. And if the plastic bag is reused a few times, then used as a garbage liner, it's cost is reduced quite a bit. It's really not easy for a consumer to figure out what's better.
- twoodfin 5y ago
  Letting the price mechanism work (externalities accounted for) is a great way to do this.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - ceh123 5y ago
    > externalities accounted for Well yeah, that's kinda where the problem is. How do we price in all the different kinds of externalities for cotton bags and plastic bags in a way that is consistent and everyone agrees with? Debating these externalities and how they should be accounted for is exactly the hard problem the parent comment was talking about.
    - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
      A carbon tax would go a long way, even if it wouldn’t capture everything.
  - alistairSH 5y ago
    I agree - but that isn't a consumer decision (not a decision made at the time of consumption). A government agency has to determine the cost of the externalities (where the science and economics isn't easy) and then set taxes accordingly (not always politically viable).
formerly_proven 5y ago
> But they're no where near competitive with plastic because the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle. I don't know what you mean by this. If you bottle stuff into PET bottles (the usual stuff, being shredded after one use), then you have to buy one new PET bottle for each bottle you produce. If you bottle stuff into reusable glass bottles (98+ % returned intact, cleaned and reused), then you mostly don't buy new bottles, just replacements for bottles falling out of the cycle (reuse limit reached, not returned, broken). Why and by what mechanism would the price of a single new glass bottle account for the lifecycle of the bottle? It just doesn't make sense to me.
- RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
  I think what the parent comment meant was that for the environmental impact of producing and transporting a glass bottle (glassware are heavy), one can produce and transport many PET bottles. The ratio can be high enough to the point where producing a glass bottle is more environmental impactful if they are not reused enough. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0
p_j_w 5y ago
>I would much rather Why not both? Is one mutually exclusive of the other?
tmountain 5y ago
"the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle" Until that issue is addressed, plastic will reign supreme.
while1fork 5y ago
Alternatives are worthless because that's how to reach 0% adoption. Plastic packaging for food and single-use plastics should be banned outright. All sold containers should be standardized and reused just like they were decades ago.

mc32 5y ago

Why glass? Glass is quite recyclable but requires lots of energy to recycle. As soda bottles and milk bottles they might last 20 uses. Glass is also much heavier requiring more energy to transport.

3pt14159 5y ago
In every part of Canada I've lived in there has been a well developed reuse system. In Ontario, for example, a beer bottle is used around 100 times on average. Reuse should be way better integrated into our systems. If I could bring a resuable bag back to any supermarket to get the $1 fee back, it would be so much easier to justify buying reusable bags that really last a long time. The trouble is I never remember to bring it with me in the morning before work and I grocery shop on my way back home.
- loonster 5y ago
  My family stores the bags in the trunk of our car. They are always available for random shopping trips. Public transportation would make reusable bags much more inconvenient for our family.
- fnimick 5y ago
  I keep a couple in every bag I use regularly (gym bag, work bag, briefcase, etc) so I'm never without if I decide to stop by the store on the way home. That way you don't have to proactively remember to bring it!
- arsome 5y ago
  Beer bottles are typically only reused if you say, bring them to The Beer Store or something similar. If you toss them in your municipal bin like me, my understanding is they basically just smash them and use the glass bits in other products like asphalt as it's just not worth the energy cost to actually recycle it. Aluminum cans are probably a better bet for recycling if you're just using the municipal bins. They're profitable enough that people routinely come steal the cans from my bins.
  - cloverich 5y ago
    But if the bottles, or even a subset of them, were standardized, it would be possible to have some bottle specific re-use (not recycle) programs. OP was I think giving an example of one that works. Perhaps it would be possible to extend it. I can understand there are some product specific's that limit this in some cases, but if I drink beer and topo chico and a few other similar drinks, it seems unlikely they couldn't all use the same bottle.
    - mc32 5y ago
      A lot of beer bottles conform to an industry standard (the ones with paper labels where anyone can slap their own label) and get reused. However, the reuse frequency is from 15 to 20 times before they begin to fail inspection tests and have to be taken out of circulation (and recycled or dumped). Recycling that glass is expensive. The big advantage of glass from a consumer pov is that its inert and does not react with contents.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        > The big advantage of glass from a consumer pov is that its inert and does not react with contents. This is a pretty significant advantage, but the disadvantage is that sometimes you drop it.
- gruez 5y ago
  >In Ontario, for example, a beer bottle is used around 100 times on average. fact check: no, only 15 https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2013/06/28/the_average_beer_bottle_is_refilled_15_times_in_its_environmentallyfriendly_life_cycle.html https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2013/06/28/the_averag...
  - 3pt14159 5y ago
    Oh, ok thanks for updating my view. I clearly remember hearing it was 99% but must be either misremembering or the original source was wrong. I'd still rather have re-use via glass or recycling via aluminum than plastic.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
hatchnyc 5y ago
You are not wrong, but in some countries they collect, wash, and and reuse glass (and even special kinds of plastic) bottles. According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States. Someone should do the math first obviously but it seems like a great idea to me. If bottling is done locally you aren’t transporting the bottles long distance, and quite significantly in my mind glass is inert so if it does get into the environment, it isn’t leaching microplastics into the environment for the next thousand years.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  >According to my parents that used to be standard practice in the United States. You're making me feel old. I used to sort bottles as a kid. Soft drinks are just another example of gigantism in corporate life, economy of scale uber alles. There was a time when practically every small town had one or more bottling plants, the owners were pillars of the community sponsoring softball teams and the like. Delivery trucks typically had shelving rather than bays. Following that there was a huge spate of consolidation. Small distributors/bottlers had their franchises taken away, canning became owned by the mothership and absolutely huge. The more centralized the more of a pain it becomes to sort/return/clean bottles. I suppose it's like the history of car dealerships as they become fewer and larger. For that matter, a significant (most?) percentage of the US used to be self-employed instead of wage slaves.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > For that matter, a significant (most?) percentage of the US used to be self-employed instead of wage slaves. Are you sure that's not just due to people moving away from agriculture? A family farm is a thing, but not really a family factory.
    - panzagl 5y ago
      More likely retail- in my town the bookstore, stationary store, newsstand, hardware stores, etc. were all family owned until the big box stores opened up two towns over.
JKCalhoun 5y ago
Places with cheap energy (e.g,. the Columbia River with hydroelectric power) could inexpensively recycle glass, aluminum. Of course it does take energy to get the recyclables to these places. Curious — are trains no longer efficient?
- bequanna 5y ago
  > Places with cheap energy… I’ve always wondered about colocating manufacturing near cheap power sources. Is this actually possible? Isn’t the power generated already being used? If it is possible, why doesn’t every manufacturing plant just do this to reduce a huge input cost?
  - Ekaros 5y ago
    Energy transfer losses are pretty marginal around 2%. Compared to labour availability, shipping resources and products; and land, it is not so big deal. Unless it's very energy intensive industry.
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    Pretty sure aluminum extraction plants do this. As well as Bitcoin miners. ;-) Recently ... where was I, Eugene, Oregon? There was a shuttered Coca Cola bottling plant. I remember a huge one in Kansas City as well. Maybe someone with expertise can weigh in — but it seems like we used to, as an example, bottle things a lot more locally. It meant factory jobs in the area, transportation (of Coke) was shorter since there was probably a bottling plant in your state (or a neighboring one). I don't know. I feel a lot was lost.
    - blacksmith_tb 5y ago
      Most major metro areas in the US continue to have soft drink bottling plants (though they're using plastic bottles and aluminum cans these days), since transporting huge volumes of water is more expensive than smaller amounts of flavoring and coloring. Eugene OR (pop ~175K) may be slightly too small for that to be practical, but here in Portland I bike to work past two active bottling plants.

elliekelly 5y ago

I think this is the goal of Maine’s new recycling law (briefly mentioned in the article) where manufacturers are responsible for the cost of recycling. Although I’m not sure Maine’s law really allocates the full social cost of plastics: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/maine-becomes-first-state-to-shift-costs-of-recycling-from-taxpayers-to-companies/2021/07/13/aa6fbe44-e416-11eb-8aa5-5662858b696e_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/maine-bec...

m0llusk 5y ago

Correctly labeling materials could be a firm foundation from which to base incentive programs.

burkaman 5y ago

One way to incentivize recyclable packaging would be to make it illegal for companies to put a symbol on their non-recyclable plastic packaging that 98% of consumers associate with recycling.

horsawlarway 5y ago
Further - I don't understand why we don't just have mandated bottle/jar form factors. We broke the fucking loop by claiming that people could just throw plastic containers away and "somewhere, somehow (over the rainbow!!!) people will recycle them into new goods". That story is bullshit - even for most plastics that can actually be recycled. I want legislation that lays out a set of standardized form factors that are as re-usable as possible (NOT RECYCLABLE - Literally washable and reusable), and if companies use those - great! No extra taxes for you. Want to use your own custom packaging? Fine, but you pay for the whole fucking product lifecycle up front, before the customer ever touches it: Collection, Cleaning, Recycling/Disposal, Reprocessing, Redistribution. The EU estimates those costs for plastic at about 800 EUR ($950) a ton.
- gruez 5y ago
  >I want legislation that lays out a set of standardized form factors that are as re-usable as possible (NOT RECYCLABLE - Literally washable and reusable), and if companies use those - great! No extra taxes for you. Is that seriously the impediment to plastic container reusability, that they're not standardized? People don't reuse plastic containers because there aren't that many uses for them around the house.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Good point. My wife and I went through a period of trying to maximally reuse otherwise disposable packaging we had around the house, and we quickly discovered two facts: 1. There's surprisingly many things you can use disposable containers for around the house. 2. Even if you go out of your way to find more uses for the waste, in a month or two you'll just run out of applications. The problem of consumer waste is that it's a continuous flow of trash. At-home reuse is not a sink, it's a buffer - it fills up quickly, so it doesn't alter the overall dynamic of the system. Any waste reuse scheme needs to recirculate it on the market - new products need to be put in old packaging.

bko 5y ago

> But they're no where near competitive with plastic because the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle. What's not included in the "total lifecycle" that's not accounted for in cost? Presumably these alternative packages won't save any landfill space.

jedimastert 5y ago

While we're at it, can we get rid of cloth packaging that isn't explicitly made to be reused? Like how Tom's come in a box and a cloth bag inside of that box! It's so resource intensive; it's like the definition of virtue signalling.

tantalor 5y ago
What do you think virtue signaling is?
- jedimastert 5y ago
  Virtue signaling is when an entity does something expressly to show they support a cause or extol a virtue, without actually helping. Disposable cloth packaging is a great example of this. Plastic production needs to be reduced for a large number of reasons, but cloth production takes an exceptional amount of energy and resources to produce while not generally being reusable or recyclable, and the extra durability and/or protection of cloth is almost never needed. (There was a NYT article about this, but I'll link directly to the study <https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-73-4.pdf https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...>)

alistairSH 5y ago

I agree that we must incentivize packaging that's better for the environment. The problem is who gets to define "better". Cloth bags were once thought to be better than plastic for grocery use, but that might not be the case - the cloth has a larger environmental cost to produce (cotton is water-intensive) and has to be used a lot more than one might expect before it surpasses the basic plastic bag. And if the plastic bag is reused a few times, then used as a garbage liner, it's cost is reduced quite a bit. It's really not easy for a consumer to figure out what's better.

twoodfin 5y ago
Letting the price mechanism work (externalities accounted for) is a great way to do this.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ceh123 5y ago
  > externalities accounted for Well yeah, that's kinda where the problem is. How do we price in all the different kinds of externalities for cotton bags and plastic bags in a way that is consistent and everyone agrees with? Debating these externalities and how they should be accounted for is exactly the hard problem the parent comment was talking about.
  - amanaplanacanal 5y ago
    A carbon tax would go a long way, even if it wouldn’t capture everything.
- alistairSH 5y ago
  I agree - but that isn't a consumer decision (not a decision made at the time of consumption). A government agency has to determine the cost of the externalities (where the science and economics isn't easy) and then set taxes accordingly (not always politically viable).

formerly_proven 5y ago

> But they're no where near competitive with plastic because the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle. I don't know what you mean by this. If you bottle stuff into PET bottles (the usual stuff, being shredded after one use), then you have to buy one new PET bottle for each bottle you produce. If you bottle stuff into reusable glass bottles (98+ % returned intact, cleaned and reused), then you mostly don't buy new bottles, just replacements for bottles falling out of the cycle (reuse limit reached, not returned, broken). Why and by what mechanism would the price of a single new glass bottle account for the lifecycle of the bottle? It just doesn't make sense to me.

RyEgswuCsn 5y ago
I think what the parent comment meant was that for the environmental impact of producing and transporting a glass bottle (glassware are heavy), one can produce and transport many PET bottles. The ratio can be high enough to the point where producing a glass bottle is more environmental impactful if they are not reused enough. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvzvM9tf5s0

p_j_w 5y ago

>I would much rather Why not both? Is one mutually exclusive of the other?

tmountain 5y ago

"the production cost doesn't account for the total lifecycle" Until that issue is addressed, plastic will reign supreme.

while1fork 5y ago

Alternatives are worthless because that's how to reach 0% adoption. Plastic packaging for food and single-use plastics should be banned outright. All sold containers should be standardized and reused just like they were decades ago.