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According to an eco site this will have some impact, they call it "leash the lid": > 6 Most Common Sources of Plastic Pollution > 1 of 6: Food Wrappers & Cont

by 323 4y ago

According to an eco site this will have some impact, they call it "leash the lid": > 6 Most Common Sources of Plastic Pollution > 1 of 6: Food Wrappers & Containers (31.14% of pollution in environment, by unit count) > 2 of 6: Bottle & Container Caps (15.5%) > Nobody really thinks about caps. Most of the attention when tossing a plastic bottle is on the bottle itself. Caps are terrible for the environment because they float on the surface of water and look like a tasty morsel for birds: “For some species, such as the Pacific Albatross, plastic ingestion is a major factor in their decline and potential extinction.” 5 Gyres believes that policy-makers should implement “leash the lid” rules, requiring manufacturers to attach caps to bottles to prevent their escape and encourage tandem recycling. https://www.treehugger.com/most-common-sources-plastic-pollution-4859259 https://www.treehugger.com/most-common-sources-plastic-pollu...

m-p-3 4y ago
I wish we'd just try to avoid recycling plastic in the first place, and reduce its presence wherever possible. Aluminium and glass are way less harmful to the environment and can be recycled almost infinitely.
wink 4y ago
I can count on one hand when I ever handed a plastic bottle without a cap back to recycling or to the store (we have deposits on everything and the cap is not included). I think the only people I remember tossing them were coworkers on a construction site. I will admit we sometimes took them off to repurpose them, e.g. for mixing colors for painting, but then they were tossed in the normal trash, so this wouldn't change anything. So either this is highly dependent on where you take those numbers or I will call complete bullshit.
- 323 4y ago
  You are literally giving anecdotal evidence with N=1. > But the Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii (B.E.A.C.H.) found that “plastic bottle caps are one of the top 10 items found during marine debris beach clean-ups and are the second most littered item after cigarette butts.” https://sustainability.weill.cornell.edu/recycling/bottle-caps-and-environment https://sustainability.weill.cornell.edu/recycling/bottle-ca... > The 2017 International Coastal Cleanup, an annual beach cleanup event run by ocean advocacy group Ocean Conservancy, reported that plastic bottle caps were the third most collected item worldwide https://resource.co/article/what-should-you-do-plastic-bottle-caps https://resource.co/article/what-should-you-do-plastic-bottl...
  - wink 4y ago
    No, not n=1. Every time I see cases of empty bottles (for example at the shop where I buy them, most of them on the spent cases are still on, if they sit in plain view), same with every person I know who I see drinking from a bottle. Also I live 800km from the sea, so maybe central Europe is simply different?
musicale 4y ago
This makes me wonder: where does most of the ocean plastic originate from, and what path does it take to get there? A web search turned up this interesting analysis: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics

by 323 4y ago

m-p-3 4y ago

I wish we'd just try to avoid recycling plastic in the first place, and reduce its presence wherever possible. Aluminium and glass are way less harmful to the environment and can be recycled almost infinitely.

wink 4y ago

I can count on one hand when I ever handed a plastic bottle without a cap back to recycling or to the store (we have deposits on everything and the cap is not included). I think the only people I remember tossing them were coworkers on a construction site. I will admit we sometimes took them off to repurpose them, e.g. for mixing colors for painting, but then they were tossed in the normal trash, so this wouldn't change anything. So either this is highly dependent on where you take those numbers or I will call complete bullshit.

323 4y ago
You are literally giving anecdotal evidence with N=1. > But the Beach Environmental Awareness Campaign Hawaii (B.E.A.C.H.) found that “plastic bottle caps are one of the top 10 items found during marine debris beach clean-ups and are the second most littered item after cigarette butts.” https://sustainability.weill.cornell.edu/recycling/bottle-caps-and-environment https://sustainability.weill.cornell.edu/recycling/bottle-ca... > The 2017 International Coastal Cleanup, an annual beach cleanup event run by ocean advocacy group Ocean Conservancy, reported that plastic bottle caps were the third most collected item worldwide https://resource.co/article/what-should-you-do-plastic-bottle-caps https://resource.co/article/what-should-you-do-plastic-bottl...
- wink 4y ago
  No, not n=1. Every time I see cases of empty bottles (for example at the shop where I buy them, most of them on the spent cases are still on, if they sit in plain view), same with every person I know who I see drinking from a bottle. Also I live 800km from the sea, so maybe central Europe is simply different?

musicale 4y ago

This makes me wonder: where does most of the ocean plastic originate from, and what path does it take to get there? A web search turned up this interesting analysis: https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics https://ourworldindata.org/ocean-plastics