67 ms·

There was a really interesting (and disheartening) story by NPR this year about recycling in the US: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling

There was a really interesting (and disheartening) story by NPR this year about recycling in the US: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-worth-it-anymore-people-on-the-front-lines-say-maybe-not https://www.npr.org/2021/04/21/987111675/video-is-recycling-... One of the comments made was that consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. In reality, the system we have only works if there are companies that want to actually use the recycled materials. If there are none, it just gets landfilled. I bring this up because one of the things mentioned was Pringles cans. Everyone thinks they are recyclable. But the can is two sheets of cardboard glued over a thin sheet of aluminum. The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. So the cans just get thrown out. In fact some people make arguments that recycling programs do more harm than good, because they allow consumers to alleviate their guilt about waste without actually helping the environment. The cynic may say that's intentional.

throwawayboise 5y ago
> consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.
- amatecha 5y ago
  I really see this as a problem further up the chain - why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Why is there so much crap to throw out? Why was it legal to wrap a product in another 25% of its weight in useless, non-recyclable packaging? I'm not sure why I as an individual am forced to bear the brunt of colossally wasteful pipelines and processes that I had no say in. I can do a bit and reuse bags, buy stuff with minimal packaging (or avoid buying new stuff etc.), but broadly, I have no choice most of the time.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    100% agreed, this is exactly the problem. Just take a pack of yoghurt, we had good paper packaging and now they've glued a useless plastic port to it. Boom, no longer recyclable. Same with cheese and other bread toppings, all used to be packaged in perfectly recyclable paper and now it's sold in see-through plastic.
    - YokoZar 5y ago
      Food-soiled paper was never recyclable.
      - scrose 5y ago
        Maybe OP had meant compostable?
        dnautics 5y ago
        Probably shouldn't compost dairy, unless it's industrially composted with chemical treatment
    - adrianN 5y ago
      See through plastic can be both recycleable and biodegradable and might even use less ressources to produce, and improve the shelf life so that less food is wasted. Details are very important in these matters, which is why it's a bad idea to put the burden of figuring this all out on consumers.
  - epistasis 5y ago
    I've started to give bad reviews to products with wasteful packaging that I couldn't see before purchase. If there's multiple cubic feet of styrofoam, I will leave a bad review mentioning only the packaging complaint so that future purchasers will know too.
  - User23 5y ago
    > why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Shrinkage. It's to the point where you need a screwdriver to get a kid's toy car out of the box.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Consumers are complicit in the scam.
mschuster91 5y ago
> The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. I'd have expected that simply melting down the stuff would burn off all the organic contaminants (paper/plastic/glue and food residue), leaving the aluminium and sludge that can be scooped off.
- myoon 5y ago
  Probably would still be an issue with contaminating the aluminum with carbon and possibly other impurities. You'd probably need some other process to purify the aluminum afterwards, which likely makes it too expensive.
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    But that process by itself is always going to be more energy efficient than winning the aluminum from bauxite ore. Of course you need a purification step after dealing with scrap, but aluminum scrap, even when contaminated is quite valuable, basically the price is a function of how pure it already is.
Factorium 5y ago
The solution is to standardise packaging so that it can be re-used by multiple brands and companies, with just a clean out and new set of logos glued on. This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least suitable for glass containers and bottles.
- flyinghamster 5y ago
  Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles, which would be trucked back to the bottling plant, sanitized, and reused. But that was too inconvenient, I guess. First came thin glass disposables, and then plastic took over. At least aluminum cans (and steel, for that matter) are readily recyclable. Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.
  - AussieWog93 5y ago
    >Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?
  - YokoZar 5y ago
    The energy and water costs of cleaning and sanitizing reusable containers can be very substantial. It seems nicer to "reuse" a bottle, but it may genuinely be the case that it's less impactful to just make a new one (preferably out of recycled materials).
    - Factorium 5y ago
      Reusing glass uses a similar amount of water and about 30-40% of the energy as recycling: https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S2212827119X00037/1-s2.0-S2212827119300563/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEGYaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQD9Qifj%2BlAFsZaHwEiaKoA3zv5UflZP%2F4BNK3jIALQoGAIgGkZc5BpkVHV4IS3jwz9sMuUP36B9XEjLobdKWSz6CZEqgwQI7%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FARAEGgwwNTkwMDM1NDY4NjUiDAI3FNMv4ehRiZvZFSrXA%2BFeSHFobACl2g3RpuUU8tV2joqS6YFOfeLkTAjk3fA27fw1xUxRQ5K1j3Hs8vreSFlnkzqHBTJNZREa2THJPH2FmiGQv5tisyuxZ1sa4afGr9DuWanL150YucFWosbQYZE7rCULmkbd5jR6h33vDidDiXqLw54lWWfpipQejif3xRMprEmnTTHqMKyyVBtqULoHozxGMNRoH30Bx%2BUC%2BeDc58erCTFUQ6%2Bm4ME7pv0IFoagkEPRWh98LXKom1VWHRJlc%2BlkPkmRsQf36A1vmb86wCTJbipblov1Hpw7TG55dPTBCxLd4iCk%2Be%2F5CG0F3KwREGYTHUR0biqbEUJ1RDL7eYI2QQi456ipz1%2FmmOiq4RLmW%2FxXuzVB5oP3V0nyCnB1OKY2sNPrroT9jRdWEGXvrY1VSM7MUSfyZWMEZTyAvIXEso13yCLSwgYouECIBmeRPvyMJwdULt3oJWoVmivd8XLZSfZ3Ao2OKat71vsE8NBdEGuxu%2BQx7G3gISIMWvhf4cFz2TWPX3%2FTN4OysV0F93EGjiZhTN4Q1lZdiaDP2m3x3F2nJk2nKRyJm6oB39sdBLwbMqiDdg4KO5xDVoDJvghxPKpKpq2T7XadNfUUcx%2BUJkX24jDS48WLBjqlAeGAf71T9iqXpOrWITZuQPt1IDKuxfUL8yVW3w4SIW0CYSiXpvUnYbT2r%2BUHxwsMmOKjOwOLUWFf55nxKVSG1TDUie9RjpwhZeuaQkdf1OAkJpTpWNAbSJ1b6is%2BUKylC%2BI%2BrUiZ1B6QhF7uhaHoyNw7NphWYxxUx232ipPNfxueYHW9poycQX6Z2ICzc9eEmx%2FVMzMS9HE0jz1KiDvPTDo7%2BZxhYA%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20211021T143323Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYZJCEPNRI%2F20211021%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=2feaef3d8d919f6a9dbff539152b82dd7af3c32c48b4140d04f6a5ff5469fef7&hash=c9ed574805c993058ceedb73034497d92887c2d2e7c0e0b5cd0409722b0243c0&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2212827119300563&tid=spdf-ea611fa5-e074-40fb-9a29-5a384613d6b4&sid=199708ee9cae93446e893c475e07315c4895gxrqb&type=client https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S221282711... So my point stands, we could see significant environmental improvements if we mandated standard glass bottle and container sizes. Something like: Food, Carbonated Liquid, Beer, Wine. Sizes: 150ml, 300ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L, 1.5L, 2L.
mjevans 5y ago
The recycling process for a pringles can sounds somewhat simple conceptually. Coarse shred (duration???) Submerge within an artificial swamp rich in bacteria to digest the biological components; ideally capture the outputs from this loop for fuel or other bio processes. When completed a rich 'ore' of mixed metal shavings should be the result, and easier to recycle.
- spicybright 5y ago
  Think you're making a lot of leaps here, unless you're very knowledgeable of how recycling works in practice...
- jacquesm 5y ago
  First off, you don't have a custom process for every random bit of packaging out there, even those that occur as frequently as pringles cans. Second, even if you did, you'd have a massive sorting problem on your hand and those custom lines to deal with each and every products packaging would require an awful lot of space, energy and other resources to cope with. So as nice as this idea sounds it is not really workable in practice. The way it does work is indeed, shredding, then float tanks to separate the lighter materials from the heavier ones, then some more stepwise improvements (for instance: to separate out the steel from other metals) and finally compaction and what comes out the other end gets passed on to companies willing to pay for it, and if there is no market, which get paid to deal with the resulting sludge/scraps/goo. Recycling is not nearly as orderly a process as manufacturing is, and there will always be a residue that simply can not be dealt with economically. Properly designed packaging takes that into account at the time of manufacture to ensure that the residue is as small a fraction as possible. This is a hard problem, and in the longer term, next to climate change one of the hardest ones that we will need to tackle. The good news is that we could start today.
  - kragen 5y ago
    The resulting sludge is in many cases much richer in valuable (but dangerous) heavy metals than the ores we mine the heavy metals from, as well as a few lighter elements like lithium. Maybe the way to handle this is to split it up into one-tonne or ten-tonne chunks, seal each one in a few millimeters of polypropylene, and bury them in carefully recorded secret locations: in abandoned underground mines, quarries, wilderness areas, on the sea floor. Then, you can sell the coordinates of these secret locations to would-be miners—maybe not in 02021 but in 02061 or 02121. Seeking investors with long time horizons! More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere. I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging. 8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course. So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.
gregmac 5y ago
One way could be to tax based on recyclability. There's a lot of ways to implement this, but packaging that's 100% plain cardboard should be cheaper than something made of plastics, and anything where two different materials are glued together should just be stupidly expensive. That squishy (non-recyclable) foam glued to the inside of cardboard boxes is really frustrating.
whoisburbansky 5y ago
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-... Doesn’t seem like cynicism when that was explicitly the point of recycling marketing.
- ootsootsoots 5y ago
  It would be nice if public education spent most of its time on relativity and network effects, logical fallacy, as part of the elementary school stage. Packaged for less developed emotional processors anyway. Exposing the technique of misinformation acts as an inoculant and reduces network effects of bad arguments: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0175799 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... For example; imo we live in a friendlier Soviet state, with state sanctioned limits (quotas) on millions of peoples agency via the lack of public will to focus on local issues, and focus on neoliberal economic agendas. In collusion with state power, billionaires live large on our effort and denigrate our frustration, as if they’re scientifically entitled to their figurative life of power, even though advertising and marketing have relied on government research into neuroscience and behavioral economics. Off topic from the original post but trying to make a point in a thread about propaganda. Peace.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
In Japan, consumers are responsible for disassembling their waste when recycling. Something like that could work for the USA, though I'm not sure if Japan's more involved system actually gets better results than other countries. For example, https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/japans-high-recycling-rate-plastic/#:~:text=According%20to%20official%20numbers%2C%20in,%2C%20recycles%20about%209%20percent.)&text=More%20than%20half%20of%20the,in%20incinerators%20to%20generate%20energy https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry.... indicates that much of the recycling is oriented around energy production than actual material reuse. Obviously we should expect energy/material loss when recycling (meaning, each time something is recycled it should require inputs), but perhaps we can get those numbers down more and more as time goes on.
- ryan_lane 5y ago
  Don't less the elaborate consumer sorting fool you. Japan burns everything except for PET, glass and metals. They make you separate plastics because in some areas they burn the plastics separately in ways that attempt to reduce the pollution from burning it.
rland 5y ago
If something isn't obviously recyclable (like, pure aluminum, pure glass, or regular paper) I throw it into the trash. I'd rather it end up in a landfill here, where there is at least a pretense of environmental regulation, than have it shipped overseas after being rejected from a recycling process. I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering. When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've ever thrown away is somewhere."

throwawayboise 5y ago

> consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card. Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.

amatecha 5y ago
I really see this as a problem further up the chain - why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Why is there so much crap to throw out? Why was it legal to wrap a product in another 25% of its weight in useless, non-recyclable packaging? I'm not sure why I as an individual am forced to bear the brunt of colossally wasteful pipelines and processes that I had no say in. I can do a bit and reuse bags, buy stuff with minimal packaging (or avoid buying new stuff etc.), but broadly, I have no choice most of the time.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  100% agreed, this is exactly the problem. Just take a pack of yoghurt, we had good paper packaging and now they've glued a useless plastic port to it. Boom, no longer recyclable. Same with cheese and other bread toppings, all used to be packaged in perfectly recyclable paper and now it's sold in see-through plastic.
  - YokoZar 5y ago
    Food-soiled paper was never recyclable.
    - scrose 5y ago
      Maybe OP had meant compostable?
      - dnautics 5y ago
        Probably shouldn't compost dairy, unless it's industrially composted with chemical treatment
  - adrianN 5y ago
    See through plastic can be both recycleable and biodegradable and might even use less ressources to produce, and improve the shelf life so that less food is wasted. Details are very important in these matters, which is why it's a bad idea to put the burden of figuring this all out on consumers.
- epistasis 5y ago
  I've started to give bad reviews to products with wasteful packaging that I couldn't see before purchase. If there's multiple cubic feet of styrofoam, I will leave a bad review mentioning only the packaging complaint so that future purchasers will know too.
- User23 5y ago
  > why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Shrinkage. It's to the point where you need a screwdriver to get a kid's toy car out of the box.
alisonkisk 5y ago
Consumers are complicit in the scam.

mschuster91 5y ago

> The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people. I'd have expected that simply melting down the stuff would burn off all the organic contaminants (paper/plastic/glue and food residue), leaving the aluminium and sludge that can be scooped off.

myoon 5y ago
Probably would still be an issue with contaminating the aluminum with carbon and possibly other impurities. You'd probably need some other process to purify the aluminum afterwards, which likely makes it too expensive.
- jacquesm 5y ago
  But that process by itself is always going to be more energy efficient than winning the aluminum from bauxite ore. Of course you need a purification step after dealing with scrap, but aluminum scrap, even when contaminated is quite valuable, basically the price is a function of how pure it already is.

Factorium 5y ago

The solution is to standardise packaging so that it can be re-used by multiple brands and companies, with just a clean out and new set of logos glued on. This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least suitable for glass containers and bottles.

flyinghamster 5y ago
Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles, which would be trucked back to the bottling plant, sanitized, and reused. But that was too inconvenient, I guess. First came thin glass disposables, and then plastic took over. At least aluminum cans (and steel, for that matter) are readily recyclable. Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.
- AussieWog93 5y ago
  >Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?
- YokoZar 5y ago
  The energy and water costs of cleaning and sanitizing reusable containers can be very substantial. It seems nicer to "reuse" a bottle, but it may genuinely be the case that it's less impactful to just make a new one (preferably out of recycled materials).
  - Factorium 5y ago
    Reusing glass uses a similar amount of water and about 30-40% of the energy as recycling: https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S2212827119X00037/1-s2.0-S2212827119300563/main.pdf?X-Amz-Security-Token=IQoJb3JpZ2luX2VjEGYaCXVzLWVhc3QtMSJHMEUCIQD9Qifj%2BlAFsZaHwEiaKoA3zv5UflZP%2F4BNK3jIALQoGAIgGkZc5BpkVHV4IS3jwz9sMuUP36B9XEjLobdKWSz6CZEqgwQI7%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2F%2FARAEGgwwNTkwMDM1NDY4NjUiDAI3FNMv4ehRiZvZFSrXA%2BFeSHFobACl2g3RpuUU8tV2joqS6YFOfeLkTAjk3fA27fw1xUxRQ5K1j3Hs8vreSFlnkzqHBTJNZREa2THJPH2FmiGQv5tisyuxZ1sa4afGr9DuWanL150YucFWosbQYZE7rCULmkbd5jR6h33vDidDiXqLw54lWWfpipQejif3xRMprEmnTTHqMKyyVBtqULoHozxGMNRoH30Bx%2BUC%2BeDc58erCTFUQ6%2Bm4ME7pv0IFoagkEPRWh98LXKom1VWHRJlc%2BlkPkmRsQf36A1vmb86wCTJbipblov1Hpw7TG55dPTBCxLd4iCk%2Be%2F5CG0F3KwREGYTHUR0biqbEUJ1RDL7eYI2QQi456ipz1%2FmmOiq4RLmW%2FxXuzVB5oP3V0nyCnB1OKY2sNPrroT9jRdWEGXvrY1VSM7MUSfyZWMEZTyAvIXEso13yCLSwgYouECIBmeRPvyMJwdULt3oJWoVmivd8XLZSfZ3Ao2OKat71vsE8NBdEGuxu%2BQx7G3gISIMWvhf4cFz2TWPX3%2FTN4OysV0F93EGjiZhTN4Q1lZdiaDP2m3x3F2nJk2nKRyJm6oB39sdBLwbMqiDdg4KO5xDVoDJvghxPKpKpq2T7XadNfUUcx%2BUJkX24jDS48WLBjqlAeGAf71T9iqXpOrWITZuQPt1IDKuxfUL8yVW3w4SIW0CYSiXpvUnYbT2r%2BUHxwsMmOKjOwOLUWFf55nxKVSG1TDUie9RjpwhZeuaQkdf1OAkJpTpWNAbSJ1b6is%2BUKylC%2BI%2BrUiZ1B6QhF7uhaHoyNw7NphWYxxUx232ipPNfxueYHW9poycQX6Z2ICzc9eEmx%2FVMzMS9HE0jz1KiDvPTDo7%2BZxhYA%3D%3D&X-Amz-Algorithm=AWS4-HMAC-SHA256&X-Amz-Date=20211021T143323Z&X-Amz-SignedHeaders=host&X-Amz-Expires=300&X-Amz-Credential=ASIAQ3PHCVTYZJCEPNRI%2F20211021%2Fus-east-1%2Fs3%2Faws4_request&X-Amz-Signature=2feaef3d8d919f6a9dbff539152b82dd7af3c32c48b4140d04f6a5ff5469fef7&hash=c9ed574805c993058ceedb73034497d92887c2d2e7c0e0b5cd0409722b0243c0&host=68042c943591013ac2b2430a89b270f6af2c76d8dfd086a07176afe7c76c2c61&pii=S2212827119300563&tid=spdf-ea611fa5-e074-40fb-9a29-5a384613d6b4&sid=199708ee9cae93446e893c475e07315c4895gxrqb&type=client https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S221282711... So my point stands, we could see significant environmental improvements if we mandated standard glass bottle and container sizes. Something like: Food, Carbonated Liquid, Beer, Wine. Sizes: 150ml, 300ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L, 1.5L, 2L.

mjevans 5y ago

The recycling process for a pringles can sounds somewhat simple conceptually. Coarse shred (duration???) Submerge within an artificial swamp rich in bacteria to digest the biological components; ideally capture the outputs from this loop for fuel or other bio processes. When completed a rich 'ore' of mixed metal shavings should be the result, and easier to recycle.

spicybright 5y ago
Think you're making a lot of leaps here, unless you're very knowledgeable of how recycling works in practice...
jacquesm 5y ago
First off, you don't have a custom process for every random bit of packaging out there, even those that occur as frequently as pringles cans. Second, even if you did, you'd have a massive sorting problem on your hand and those custom lines to deal with each and every products packaging would require an awful lot of space, energy and other resources to cope with. So as nice as this idea sounds it is not really workable in practice. The way it does work is indeed, shredding, then float tanks to separate the lighter materials from the heavier ones, then some more stepwise improvements (for instance: to separate out the steel from other metals) and finally compaction and what comes out the other end gets passed on to companies willing to pay for it, and if there is no market, which get paid to deal with the resulting sludge/scraps/goo. Recycling is not nearly as orderly a process as manufacturing is, and there will always be a residue that simply can not be dealt with economically. Properly designed packaging takes that into account at the time of manufacture to ensure that the residue is as small a fraction as possible. This is a hard problem, and in the longer term, next to climate change one of the hardest ones that we will need to tackle. The good news is that we could start today.
- kragen 5y ago
  The resulting sludge is in many cases much richer in valuable (but dangerous) heavy metals than the ores we mine the heavy metals from, as well as a few lighter elements like lithium. Maybe the way to handle this is to split it up into one-tonne or ten-tonne chunks, seal each one in a few millimeters of polypropylene, and bury them in carefully recorded secret locations: in abandoned underground mines, quarries, wilderness areas, on the sea floor. Then, you can sell the coordinates of these secret locations to would-be miners—maybe not in 02021 but in 02061 or 02121. Seeking investors with long time horizons! More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere. I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging. 8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course. So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.

gregmac 5y ago

One way could be to tax based on recyclability. There's a lot of ways to implement this, but packaging that's 100% plain cardboard should be cheaper than something made of plastics, and anything where two different materials are glued together should just be stupidly expensive. That squishy (non-recyclable) foam glued to the inside of cardboard boxes is really frustrating.

whoisburbansky 5y ago

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-... Doesn’t seem like cynicism when that was explicitly the point of recycling marketing.

ootsootsoots 5y ago
It would be nice if public education spent most of its time on relativity and network effects, logical fallacy, as part of the elementary school stage. Packaged for less developed emotional processors anyway. Exposing the technique of misinformation acts as an inoculant and reduces network effects of bad arguments: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0175799 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... For example; imo we live in a friendlier Soviet state, with state sanctioned limits (quotas) on millions of peoples agency via the lack of public will to focus on local issues, and focus on neoliberal economic agendas. In collusion with state power, billionaires live large on our effort and denigrate our frustration, as if they’re scientifically entitled to their figurative life of power, even though advertising and marketing have relied on government research into neuroscience and behavioral economics. Off topic from the original post but trying to make a point in a thread about propaganda. Peace.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

In Japan, consumers are responsible for disassembling their waste when recycling. Something like that could work for the USA, though I'm not sure if Japan's more involved system actually gets better results than other countries. For example, https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry/japans-high-recycling-rate-plastic/#:~:text=According%20to%20official%20numbers%2C%20in,%2C%20recycles%20about%209%20percent.)&text=More%20than%20half%20of%20the,in%20incinerators%20to%20generate%20energy https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry.... indicates that much of the recycling is oriented around energy production than actual material reuse. Obviously we should expect energy/material loss when recycling (meaning, each time something is recycled it should require inputs), but perhaps we can get those numbers down more and more as time goes on.

ryan_lane 5y ago
Don't less the elaborate consumer sorting fool you. Japan burns everything except for PET, glass and metals. They make you separate plastics because in some areas they burn the plastics separately in ways that attempt to reduce the pollution from burning it.

rland 5y ago

If something isn't obviously recyclable (like, pure aluminum, pure glass, or regular paper) I throw it into the trash. I'd rather it end up in a landfill here, where there is at least a pretense of environmental regulation, than have it shipped overseas after being rejected from a recycling process. I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering. When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've ever thrown away is somewhere."