6 ms·

> Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States, but it is becoming more widely accepted So now the relatively small amount of

> Currently only about 3% of PP products are being recycled in the United States, but it is becoming more widely accepted So now the relatively small amount of mass in the cap is just as recyclable as the bottle itself -- neither are actually going to be recycled. There's nothing to see here but marketing. And a an interesting engineering puzzle solved, sure. "How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled" 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-...

ddejohn 3y ago
Based on the title, I had originally assumed clicking on this thread that it would be about their glass bottles with the white metal caps.
- whycome 3y ago
  And those caps were probably fully recyclable. I expected to at least see photos of the cap and the one it's replacing.
  - numpad0 3y ago
    I think this is about newer upside down bottles, the one that has a giant flip open cap with a gasket that don't open until the bottle is squeezed hard enough.
audunw 3y ago
But PP is one of the plastics that CAN be recycled, and IS recycled, often at a much higher rate than in the US. One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful. The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material. The ideal solution is the bottle recycling machines (like Tomra) found in Northern Europe, that only accepts aluminium and plastic cans/bottles, which goes right back to making new cans/bottles. Well, the plastic bottle part is work in progress, but there are bottles made from 100% recycled materials now, and the key to that is to have a clean well-separated stream of recycled materials coming in. Funny story: I saw a documentary from a local advanced recycling centre, where they mentioned that the bales of plastic that actually went to be reused in new products/bottles smelled really nice. Because a big portion of them was PP shampoo bottles.
- RandallBrown 3y ago
  Bottle and can recycling machines are common in the United States as well, although only in places with bottle/can deposits. Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.
  - lobochrome 3y ago
    The first principle hack here is to put the waste stream separation burden on the consumer. Here in Japan we are sorting and packaging our trash all at home and putting it out to be collected individually. There is - cardboard (to be cut flat and bundled with string) - unlaminated and clean paper (to be bundled with string or collected in a paper bag) - PET (clean, no bottle cap, label removed) - Milk cartons above 1l (cut open, flattened and tied up with string) - glass - cans - aluminum - other plastics (if clean) - other metals Of the top of my head ;) What’s left over is classified as Burnable or non-Burnable and collected separately. Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. I spend about an hour sorting trash each week. Given the opportunity cost, I really consider what to buy, order online etc.
    - gwbas1c 3y ago
      > I spend about an hour sorting trash each week That gets to the clear difference between Japanese culture and US culture. Americans will sort their trash, but they won't spend that much time sorting their trash. Japanese culture has an immense amount of civic pride and responsibility that isn't present in the US.
      - themaninthedark 3y ago
        >Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. >Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. Part of it is the fact that neighbors police each other. Culturally we tend to reject when others are intruding in our business. Note the disdain for HOA and busybodies. Having that culture might be a good thing in respect to recycling but it is also a brake to other societal change as it is a consecutive force.
drewdevault 3y ago
The only genuine path to sustainability is reduction. There is no sustainable way to have disposable single-use packaging that you throw away when the bottle empties. Glass bottles with a deposit to incentivize bottle return, following which they are washed and refilled with new product (ideally locally, with fresh ketchup arriving to local distribution centers in bulk), is a much more reasonable approach.
- 0_____0 3y ago
  There's a cost associated with bottle return as well. Consumers also may feel weird about buying used packaging. What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.
  - sandos 3y ago
    Consumers _always_ feel weird about reused packaging? That is probably not true. Here in Swede we used to have an awesome system of plastic containers for a about 20 or so glass bottles of soda. These were always recycled (and so much cheaper than PET for some reason!), and it was obvious due to the wear on the glass bottles. Literally nobody cared about it. Google for "drickaback" to see how it looked like.
    - 0_____0 3y ago
      I did qualify that with "may," not "always." Do you have a sense for what the collection and reprocessing costs were for the reused glass containers where you are? I suspect that the warehousing and distribution systems we use in the US complicate collection of empty containers, i.e. there are several warehousing and stocking steps between the manufacturer and the retailer. If you have a product made locally and distributed in a van, it's no problem to collect the empties. If you supply a distributor who supplies a supermarket chain that warehouses product regionally... It's a lot of steps for the bottle to get back to the manufacturer for reuse.
  - 3y ago
juujian 3y ago
Yup. recyclable != will be recycled. If recyclers don't know that the cap specifically is recycable, it won't be recycled. In fact, if only this brands cup is recycable, the chance of it being recycled is probably 0
- asadotzler 3y ago
  worse recyclable != recyclable most of the time .it's all a scam. wake up.
buildsjets 3y ago
eli5: The bottle is PET and is easily and commonly recycled, if it actually makes it to the recycling facility. About 30% of PET sold in the US actually gets recycled. It's the clear soda bottle plastic. The cap was previously 99% PP and 1% Silicone and was not recyclable at all. The cap is now 100% PP and therefore recyclable in theory, but in practice there are limited facilities that can recycle PP.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Do we honestly with a straight face tell ourselves that consumers are going to remove this cap before recycling and place them in the right bins or there is a recycling facility somewhere with workers removing caps from ketchup bottles? It’s a ludicrous greenwashing idea from the get go. I love the idea of recycling but I just don’t do it anymore when I realized my city’s single stream recycling was likely just ending up being shipped to Asia with fossil fuels and dumped in the ocean eventually and adding to the Pacific plastic gyre. Burying it in a landfill seems highly more optimal than that.
  - sandos 3y ago
    Works in the EU. I wonder how the cultures can be so different!
    - wolverine876 3y ago
      Does the EU have reactionaries who deny anything and everything is possible?
    - Mistletoe 3y ago
      https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/environment/plastic-for-recycling-from-europe-ends-up-in-asian-waters/ https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/environment/plastic-for... >They discovered that a massive 46 per cent of European separated plastic waste is exported outside the country of origin.
- coryrc 3y ago
  It doesn't matter in Seattle, it's too small for the machines to sort. Only recyclable lids over 3 inches are allowed. And if you can't even recycle it in Seattle...
bastardoperator 3y ago
Can't a metal/aluminum cap be endlessly recycled? Looks more like a cost cutting venture versus a lets save the planet venture.
- chickenchase-r 3y ago
  needs a seal
ccc3 3y ago
This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high. Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.
- rekttrader 3y ago
  My bet is that it is just cheaper to make without the silicone and as an added bonus it’s more recyclable. It’s just cost savings that can be greenwashed.
  - gs17 3y ago
    But is that so bad? Assuming it works about as well, it's likely more resource efficient to make in general, too.
    - asadotzler 3y ago
      But you don't know that. All the previous equipment obsoloeted and tosssed somewhere. All the previous workers retrained or fired. It could be far worse. Trusting plastic makers to tell you the truth about plastic recycling is like trusting WWE to tell you the truth about sport.
      - gs17 3y ago
        And you're assuming they weren't redesigning it anyways.
  - madeofpalk 3y ago
    Nice! It's cheaper and less bad? Seems like a win/win.
nerdponx 3y ago
On the topic of the interesting engineering puzzle... I went to a university job fair in 2014 and Heinz had a booth there. I remember asking the recruiter what kind of positions they were recruiting for, and her only response was "We are looking for top talent. Are you top talent?" I was pretty thrown off by that, so pressed her with "Top talent in what? I know statistics and programming, do you need anyone who can do that?" Her only response was "well, do you think you're top talent?" I think I tried to ask a couple more times what they were actually looking for, but she just kept repeating the top talent line. I think I eventually said something like "I think I'm pretty good" before dropping off my résumé, grabbing a pickle-shaped lapel pin, and walking away. Totally weird experience, and very different from the usual job fair recruiter. If it wasn't for the lapel pin that I still have, I wouldn't even be sure it was a real memory. I sometimes wonder if my life would've been different if I had had the self-esteem and confidence to look her right in the eye and say "yes, I am top talent". I also wonder if Heinz is actually hiring and retaining "top talent". When I look at their ketchup bottle design innovations over the years, I wonder if maybe they really are! Has anyone here ever interviewed there or worked there? Are you in fact top talent? Were you surrounded by top talent? Is a packaged food company secretly where all the really smart people go for jobs? That article about the Unilever ice cream factory the other day makes me think there's more to it than meets the eye.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  The screening technique is straightforward and not surprising: They have to filter a few people from possibly hundreds of resumes. They need a way to narrow it down rapidly, even if imperfectly. They don't want to invest time in your resume if even you don't think you qualify. There's a false negative problem, as in all interviews: interviewing well is a different skill than engineering bottle caps. Still, confident, talented people who are on their toes and accustomed to pressure may respond convincingly. So will con artists and the self-deluding types like megalomaniacs, so there's also a false positive problem ...
  - nerdponx 3y ago
    I just thought it was a particularly extreme version, to the point of being silly and funny in hindsight. Were they looking for chemists? Programmers? Mechanical engineers? Project managers? Janitors? I'm top talent with a vacuum cleaner (at least according to my mom), but I wasn't thinking along those lines at the job fair.
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
spandrew 3y ago
This is a weird take? It's not Heinz' job to solve every issue in the recycling supply chain. If more of their products can be recycled; more of their products will be recycled. That's still progress. Anyone with a modicum of product and process exp. knows progress > perfection.

ddejohn 3y ago

Based on the title, I had originally assumed clicking on this thread that it would be about their glass bottles with the white metal caps.

whycome 3y ago
And those caps were probably fully recyclable. I expected to at least see photos of the cap and the one it's replacing.
- numpad0 3y ago
  I think this is about newer upside down bottles, the one that has a giant flip open cap with a gasket that don't open until the bottle is squeezed hard enough.

audunw 3y ago

But PP is one of the plastics that CAN be recycled, and IS recycled, often at a much higher rate than in the US. One of the barriers of effectively recycling PP is the mixing of materials in packaging. I know some brands in my country switched labels to make sure the bottle was uniform and recognises by recycling machines as PP. So what Heinz is doing here is actually meaningful. The other problem USA has is poor education and lack of well separated waste streams. I’ve personally experienced ridiculous “wishcycling” from my extended family in the US where they just throw whatever they want to feel good about throwing away in the recycling bin without looking up what should go in there. Not to mention that the idea of a “recycling” bin is ridiculous to start with. You need one bin for each type of material. The ideal solution is the bottle recycling machines (like Tomra) found in Northern Europe, that only accepts aluminium and plastic cans/bottles, which goes right back to making new cans/bottles. Well, the plastic bottle part is work in progress, but there are bottles made from 100% recycled materials now, and the key to that is to have a clean well-separated stream of recycled materials coming in. Funny story: I saw a documentary from a local advanced recycling centre, where they mentioned that the bales of plastic that actually went to be reused in new products/bottles smelled really nice. Because a big portion of them was PP shampoo bottles.

RandallBrown 3y ago
Bottle and can recycling machines are common in the United States as well, although only in places with bottle/can deposits. Many recycling centers in the US use single stream recycling where the waste is separated into separate streams at the recycling plant. I'm sure this only works well for glass and metal items but I don't see any reason that it eventually wouldn't get better.
- lobochrome 3y ago
  The first principle hack here is to put the waste stream separation burden on the consumer. Here in Japan we are sorting and packaging our trash all at home and putting it out to be collected individually. There is - cardboard (to be cut flat and bundled with string) - unlaminated and clean paper (to be bundled with string or collected in a paper bag) - PET (clean, no bottle cap, label removed) - Milk cartons above 1l (cut open, flattened and tied up with string) - glass - cans - aluminum - other plastics (if clean) - other metals Of the top of my head ;) What’s left over is classified as Burnable or non-Burnable and collected separately. Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. I spend about an hour sorting trash each week. Given the opportunity cost, I really consider what to buy, order online etc.
  - gwbas1c 3y ago
    > I spend about an hour sorting trash each week That gets to the clear difference between Japanese culture and US culture. Americans will sort their trash, but they won't spend that much time sorting their trash. Japanese culture has an immense amount of civic pride and responsibility that isn't present in the US.
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      >Collection happens at central points shared by a few houses. So if you fuck it up, your neighbors will know. >Collection happens through individual small trucks and the guy check the items and sort them directly into larger bins. If you made a mistake they will label it and leave it behind. Part of it is the fact that neighbors police each other. Culturally we tend to reject when others are intruding in our business. Note the disdain for HOA and busybodies. Having that culture might be a good thing in respect to recycling but it is also a brake to other societal change as it is a consecutive force.

drewdevault 3y ago

The only genuine path to sustainability is reduction. There is no sustainable way to have disposable single-use packaging that you throw away when the bottle empties. Glass bottles with a deposit to incentivize bottle return, following which they are washed and refilled with new product (ideally locally, with fresh ketchup arriving to local distribution centers in bulk), is a much more reasonable approach.

0_____0 3y ago
There's a cost associated with bottle return as well. Consumers also may feel weird about buying used packaging. What I have seen work quite well is bulk filling stations in hippie groceries. So far liquid dispensing is limited to non-food e.g. laundry detergent but if people can grasp that model I think it can expand to a lot more items.
- sandos 3y ago
  Consumers _always_ feel weird about reused packaging? That is probably not true. Here in Swede we used to have an awesome system of plastic containers for a about 20 or so glass bottles of soda. These were always recycled (and so much cheaper than PET for some reason!), and it was obvious due to the wear on the glass bottles. Literally nobody cared about it. Google for "drickaback" to see how it looked like.
  - 0_____0 3y ago
    I did qualify that with "may," not "always." Do you have a sense for what the collection and reprocessing costs were for the reused glass containers where you are? I suspect that the warehousing and distribution systems we use in the US complicate collection of empty containers, i.e. there are several warehousing and stocking steps between the manufacturer and the retailer. If you have a product made locally and distributed in a van, it's no problem to collect the empties. If you supply a distributor who supplies a supermarket chain that warehouses product regionally... It's a lot of steps for the bottle to get back to the manufacturer for reuse.
- 3y ago

juujian 3y ago

Yup. recyclable != will be recycled. If recyclers don't know that the cap specifically is recycable, it won't be recycled. In fact, if only this brands cup is recycable, the chance of it being recycled is probably 0

asadotzler 3y ago
worse recyclable != recyclable most of the time .it's all a scam. wake up.

buildsjets 3y ago

eli5: The bottle is PET and is easily and commonly recycled, if it actually makes it to the recycling facility. About 30% of PET sold in the US actually gets recycled. It's the clear soda bottle plastic. The cap was previously 99% PP and 1% Silicone and was not recyclable at all. The cap is now 100% PP and therefore recyclable in theory, but in practice there are limited facilities that can recycle PP.

Mistletoe 3y ago
Do we honestly with a straight face tell ourselves that consumers are going to remove this cap before recycling and place them in the right bins or there is a recycling facility somewhere with workers removing caps from ketchup bottles? It’s a ludicrous greenwashing idea from the get go. I love the idea of recycling but I just don’t do it anymore when I realized my city’s single stream recycling was likely just ending up being shipped to Asia with fossil fuels and dumped in the ocean eventually and adding to the Pacific plastic gyre. Burying it in a landfill seems highly more optimal than that.
- sandos 3y ago
  Works in the EU. I wonder how the cultures can be so different!
  - wolverine876 3y ago
    Does the EU have reactionaries who deny anything and everything is possible?
  - Mistletoe 3y ago
    https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/environment/plastic-for-recycling-from-europe-ends-up-in-asian-waters/ https://www.europeanscientist.com/en/environment/plastic-for... >They discovered that a massive 46 per cent of European separated plastic waste is exported outside the country of origin.
coryrc 3y ago
It doesn't matter in Seattle, it's too small for the machines to sort. Only recyclable lids over 3 inches are allowed. And if you can't even recycle it in Seattle...

bastardoperator 3y ago

Can't a metal/aluminum cap be endlessly recycled? Looks more like a cost cutting venture versus a lets save the planet venture.

chickenchase-r 3y ago
needs a seal

ccc3 3y ago

This is a pessimistic, anti-progress perspective. As you point out, there are plenty of other problems in the recycling chain. But this is a small step in the right direction. And the investment here is pretty small too. $1.2m probably covered a handful of engineers for around a year plus the cost of tooling. Given that Heinz sells a lot of ketchup, I would expect that the impact/dollar here is pretty high. Also, I’d bet that the new cap is cheaper than the old one. I’m sure that helped justify the investment to management. Kudos to the engineers who made this happen for finding a solution that is palatable to management and also makes the packaging more sustainable.

rekttrader 3y ago
My bet is that it is just cheaper to make without the silicone and as an added bonus it’s more recyclable. It’s just cost savings that can be greenwashed.
- gs17 3y ago
  But is that so bad? Assuming it works about as well, it's likely more resource efficient to make in general, too.
  - asadotzler 3y ago
    But you don't know that. All the previous equipment obsoloeted and tosssed somewhere. All the previous workers retrained or fired. It could be far worse. Trusting plastic makers to tell you the truth about plastic recycling is like trusting WWE to tell you the truth about sport.
    - gs17 3y ago
      And you're assuming they weren't redesigning it anyways.
- madeofpalk 3y ago
  Nice! It's cheaper and less bad? Seems like a win/win.

nerdponx 3y ago

On the topic of the interesting engineering puzzle... I went to a university job fair in 2014 and Heinz had a booth there. I remember asking the recruiter what kind of positions they were recruiting for, and her only response was "We are looking for top talent. Are you top talent?" I was pretty thrown off by that, so pressed her with "Top talent in what? I know statistics and programming, do you need anyone who can do that?" Her only response was "well, do you think you're top talent?" I think I tried to ask a couple more times what they were actually looking for, but she just kept repeating the top talent line. I think I eventually said something like "I think I'm pretty good" before dropping off my résumé, grabbing a pickle-shaped lapel pin, and walking away. Totally weird experience, and very different from the usual job fair recruiter. If it wasn't for the lapel pin that I still have, I wouldn't even be sure it was a real memory. I sometimes wonder if my life would've been different if I had had the self-esteem and confidence to look her right in the eye and say "yes, I am top talent". I also wonder if Heinz is actually hiring and retaining "top talent". When I look at their ketchup bottle design innovations over the years, I wonder if maybe they really are! Has anyone here ever interviewed there or worked there? Are you in fact top talent? Were you surrounded by top talent? Is a packaged food company secretly where all the really smart people go for jobs? That article about the Unilever ice cream factory the other day makes me think there's more to it than meets the eye.

wolverine876 3y ago
The screening technique is straightforward and not surprising: They have to filter a few people from possibly hundreds of resumes. They need a way to narrow it down rapidly, even if imperfectly. They don't want to invest time in your resume if even you don't think you qualify. There's a false negative problem, as in all interviews: interviewing well is a different skill than engineering bottle caps. Still, confident, talented people who are on their toes and accustomed to pressure may respond convincingly. So will con artists and the self-deluding types like megalomaniacs, so there's also a false positive problem ...
- nerdponx 3y ago
  I just thought it was a particularly extreme version, to the point of being silly and funny in hindsight. Were they looking for chemists? Programmers? Mechanical engineers? Project managers? Janitors? I'm top talent with a vacuum cleaner (at least according to my mom), but I wasn't thinking along those lines at the job fair.

aaron695 3y ago

[dead]

spandrew 3y ago

This is a weird take? It's not Heinz' job to solve every issue in the recycling supply chain. If more of their products can be recycled; more of their products will be recycled. That's still progress. Anyone with a modicum of product and process exp. knows progress > perfection.