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Packaging for instant coffee made out of seaweed
- CryptoPunk 5y agoI wish I could invest in this company by buying some tokens on a decentralized exchange like Uniswap. Being forced to jump through a regimented set of due diligence checks, or to surrender my privacy via warrantless KYC disclosure requirements, just to invest, does far more harm than good on the balance.
- bsagdiyev 5y agoArticle about more environmentally friendly products. No one: Crypto zealot: we’ll I’d invest but the global banking system, blah blah blah
- CryptoPunk 5y agoI don't see what's wrong with my comment other than it offends the PC Kony 2012 crowd whose latest fad is attacking Web 3.0. I am frustrated that companies like this hadn't since long ago been better funded, when there are a huge number of people who would would invest in them if the process involved less friction. It affects me and every one else.
- dghughes 5y agoThe topic is coffee packaging and you're not talking about that, at all. You don't see the distinction?
- CryptoPunk 5y agoI'm going on a tangent, which is extremely useful products like non-plastic coffee packaging that are not well developed and marketed because of X problem, and expounding on X and its solution. It's a comment in a discussion forum. It doesn't need to meet some extreme level of rigor when it comes to topicality IMO.
- flippinburgers 5y agoGet a tea ball infuser or strainer. Buy loose leaf tea. Done. This is such a trivially simple type of packaging to avoid.
- edoceo 5y agoUgh, Keurig - the most expensive, wasteful way to make a mediocre cup of coffee. And the hardware breaks too
- bserge 5y agoIt's the fucking Juicero of coffee. If you put it that way, no wonder that company got so much funding. Seems juice drinkers are smarter than coffee guzzlers lol
- ewoodrich 5y agoI won't deny the packaging is wasteful but as someone who isn't a coffee connoisseur and lives by myself it's an easy way to make a decent cup or two at home with basically zero effort. And at 25 cents or so a cup the cost is fine personally, I just wish it didn't generate all that plastic waste.
- ianai 5y agoI find the French press easy enough to do quickly - and the waste goes fine down the disposal. It's also free of any plastics so long as I use a glass/steel press. Only takes 4 minutes and a supply of hot water. I've been known to heat the water up in another coffee mug (preferably a tempered glass measuring cup) in the microwave in a pinch.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> and the waste goes fine down the disposal Shouldn't it go into compost rather than into the water supply?
- WheelsAtLarge 5y agoAll of these plastic replacements don't tackle the biggest issue with plastic replacement and that's how to replace plastic and still be able to use the manufacturing machines. Those machines would be super expensive to replace. I suspect that by now all those machines and the production lines have been paid for and the owners would be unlikely to just stop using them because the pods need to be made of something else.
- ianai 5y agoThat sounds like a noble goal. My (feeble) understanding of chemistry leads to me to suspect producing a plant-based or otherwise sustainable stand-in for plastic would be akin to reproducing the processes (and energy expenditures) of the fossil fuel reserves originally involved to produce plastic. Plastic is a very complicated compound with pretty rare properties.
- WheelsAtLarge 5y agoI think the true replacement fix for plastic is to truly factor in the cost of plastic production, disposal and damage on our environment and health. With out that plastic will always be cheaper to produce than any other replacement. Right now plastic seems cheap but without factoring the externalities future generations will pay the true cost of cleaning up the damage it makes.
- davidhyde 5y agoTo cut costs companies typically make teabags out of polypropylene plastic instead of paper or alternatives. The problem is not a lack of alternatives but that people aren’t aware (or don’t care) that they are made of plastic. I mean, it looks like paper. It’s a good thing that they are using this seaweed but it’s not a “solved problem” until the negative PR cost to these companies is higher that the cost of using non plastic alternatives. I just don’t understand why more companies are not using this in their marketing campaigns. … It’s almost as if there there really is no competition at all. It’s almost as if most brands are owned by the same company. Unilever ;)
- chrisseaton 5y ago> To cut costs companies typically make teabags out of polypropylene plastic instead of paper or alternatives. That's funny - I think plastic teabags are the premium option. Cheaper (and the majority of) tea bags are paper. They are sealed with a plastic glue - but they're trying to move away from that. A fully plastic tea bag is definitely an unusual product and almost certainly some kind of premium design. For example https://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/brew-news/our-use-of-plastic https://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/brew-news/our-use-of-plastic
- davidhyde 5y agoThat was 2018, this is now: https://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/our-packaging https://www.yorkshiretea.co.uk/our-packaging You’re correct though, you can consider the 25% plastic in the bag as a “glue” but plastic is plastic and polypropylene takes hundreds of years to break down.
- kgc 5y agoPlastic mesh tea bags release tons of microplastics into your drink: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49845940 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49845940
- chrisseaton 5y agoIsn’t that exactly what I said? ‘Premium tea bags’.
- technotarek 5y agoFYI, there is a current option. We use Woken brand pods for a nespresso machine. Fully compostable. I’m not a coffee connoisseur, but I think they’re way better than Keurig (sp?).
- chrisseaton 5y ago> We use Woken brand pods for a nespresso machine. Not really comparable, as that requires an entire dedicated kitchen appliance to use.
- BoorishBears 5y agoWhat percentage of people actually end up sending their compostable plastics to an industrial composter?
- LilBytes 5y agoAlternatively, buy an actual coffee machine. I can recommend the Breville Double Boiler or the Barista Pro and do away with pods entirely. I've g the Barista Pro currently.
- Broken_Hippo 5y agoThis is going to be completely out of range for a lot of folks ($1600, by the way, nearly the price paid for the current rarely used car). It also isn't really comparable to a basic cup of coffee. (I'm certain your machine can produce an excellent cup of coffee, it just isn't the same category). I get a perfectly serviceable cup of coffee using a pour-over. I have a travel press, and a full sized press if I feel like such coffee. I can replace all of it - including the coffee grinder and kettle - for less than your machine. Plus, they fit over an over-the-sink shelf without weighing it down.
- dghughes 5y agoOr a French press it's very low tech, very simple. Grind the beans or use already ground, boil water, mix water and coffee, 5 min brew, done. I use 30g coffee beans to 450g water, 5 minute brew.
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- throwaway_2009 5y agoThis article makes me feel like an old ranty man in the pub. We have glass jars with coffee in. Using a spoon was apparently too difficult for some people, so we created plastic mesh bags to put the coffee in. For whatever reason, some of these people decided that putting plastic in the bin was some sort of insurmountable task and so threw it out of the window. So we now need to remake these (utterly pointless) plastic bags into something else, so that they can be thrown out of the window or whatever. It's all just utterly bizarre.
- beenBoutIT 5y agoMelt them down with solvents/heat and then cast them into something useful. Every home could have its own artisanal plastic forge. It could be the Great Leap Forward (Third Five Year Plan).
- dehrmann 5y agoYou're better off with at-home incinerators or depolymerizers. The volume, variety, and marketability of discarded home plastic make the economics recycling lousy, and the feedstock would be just as bad for making plastics at home. The other side is if you look at what's being made with 3D printers, it's still limited to novelties and prototypes.
- 878654Tom 5y agoOn the topic of 3D printers, 3D has a lot of industrial, repair/replacement, design and medical usage so I would not say it is limited to novelties and prototypes. Some chirugs will do a test run on a printed hearth before they do it on a patient (they actually scan how the hearth looks like in the patient and model after it), protheses are being printed to custom fit per patient,... Yes, home printers are still very into novelties and arts. But for custom parts 3D printing is very common. As soon as mass production starts then yes, other techniques are much faster.
- beenBoutIT 5y agoApparently PET's safe to burn and has the equivalent energy content of soft coal - Penn State's found a way to make a coal-substitute out of it. https://tpsalliance.org/pdf/conference/2010/5B-Garthe-PlastofuelAutomating--2010.pdf https://tpsalliance.org/pdf/conference/2010/5B-Garthe-Plasto...
- beenBoutIT 5y agoSeaweed is often contaminated with heavy metals and radioactive isotopes that no one wants coming near their food. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10898404/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10898404/
- octet1 5y agoIt's made with processed Seaweed, so I'd think the end product would be at least mostly free of these contaminants.
- kardos 5y agoI would expect the opposite: this product needs to be cheap to have a shot at supplanting plastic; extra process to remove all such contamination would work against it
- octet1 5y agoI think the process would be low-cost (reverse osmosis maybe?). Filtration generally seems pretty low-cost all around - the LifeStraw is $12.99 and can make toilet water drinkable.
- cout 5y ago"Orders of magnitude higher" levels of mercury concentration sounds bad, but is it high enough to be concerning? How much of that mercury would be left in a tea bag?
- beenBoutIT 5y agoMost likely more mercury than is found in the plastic alternative. The mercury may be bound somehow to the seaweed in a way that prevents it from being absorbed when the seaweed is consumed although steeping it in boiling water may leech it out. Ethyl mercury contaminated water is something to be avoided entirely.
- tehnub 5y agoYeah, I had a scare about plastic in the tea bags a while ago, as I tend to drink 1 or 2 cups of tea a day from tea bags. I found this brand, Clipper [0], that makes a plastic-free tea bag. Shipping from the UK takes a while, but the tea is pretty darn good, and I'm glad to no longer be ingesting micro plastics. [0]: https://www.clipper-teas.us/about/our-sustainability/ https://www.clipper-teas.us/about/our-sustainability/