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I can only assume attitudes towards plastics are different in the US to Europe? Here, sustainable packaging has become expected. If there's a non-plastic way to

• tiltowait 3y ago
  A lot of restaurants have moved to this style of packaging. Even if it does improve heat retention/reduce sogginess[0], it's frustrating. [0] They claim it does, but I'm not sure I notice any difference.
  • consp 3y ago
    Styrofoam is best, it's also horrible for the environment.
    • tristor 3y ago
      Styrofoam melts with hot foods and ruins the taste. It's one of the things I hate about take-out and why I rarely order take-out for any hot foods, because they always taste like plastic.
  • sgtnoodle 3y ago
    I'm friends with a small batch gelato maker. He mainly sells individual scoops, but he also sells pints. He started out using fully compostable pint containers, but their permeability leads to ice crystal formation while the product is stored. He's switched to more traditional pint containers, and the improvement is noticable.
• dbspin 3y ago
  That's actually astonishing. As so often it feels like the reactionary culture of the US is actively dragging the world down. Especially in relation to environmental protection, privacy rights and conflict escalation.
  • AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
    A microcosm of US mentality is the number of people who blast RATM's Killing In the Name Of purely for the refrain, "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me!" and have absolutely no idea what the rest of the song is about. Including the subset of people who fail to realize that the song is specifically about them.
  • 93po 3y ago
    Some of the most damaging reactionary culture is being anti-nuclear despite it clearly being the best method of power generation alongside wind and solar. And the US is not alone in being stupidly anti-nuclear
    • ffsm8 3y ago
      I don't think the data supports this thesis, even though it comes up every so often. We should absolutely use the existing nuclear reactors until they can't be maintained anymore, but it's economics never really made sense. It was only viable because the construction was essentially socialized and the storage for the waste never included in the calculation. But I'm not a specialist on the topic, so I'm not talking with authority here.
      • 93po 3y ago
        Nuclear is by far the cheapest large scale generation option if you factor in the cost in dollars and human lives for the nasty byproducts of fossil fuel based energy. And nuclear waste is somewhere between a solved problem and non-issue despite lots of propaganda saying otherwise. Millions of people die a year from fossil fuel burning. Effectively zero for nuclear.
• spirit557 3y ago
  Curious what is it like with grocery stores and plastic bags where you live? If I go to a large grocery store in US there could 100+ people in the store I can guarantee you I am the only one there with my resuable cloth/insulated grocery bags. Everyone else walks out with single use plastic bags.
  • beejiu 3y ago
    Well I'm in the UK and there's a plastic bag tax of 25p per bag. Since that law was introduced, everyone comes to the supermarket with their own bag.
    • vinay427 3y ago
      The bag tax is 10p [1]. California has had a similar one since 2016 with a 10 cent fee [2]. Anecdotally, the fee seems to work well in both places, or at least single-use plastic bag use seems relatively low as most people seem to bring a reusable bag or use a backpack or similar. [1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/carrier-bag-charges-retailers-responsibilities https://www.gov.uk/guidance/carrier-bag-charges-retailers-re... [2] https://calrecycle.ca.gov/plastics/carryoutbags/ https://calrecycle.ca.gov/plastics/carryoutbags/
      • mathgradthrow 3y ago
        in caifornia the bag tax is applied equally to paper and plastic bags.
    • graemep 3y ago
      Yes, but the reusable bags seem to have become less durable and there has been a huge increase in the number of them used and therefore the amount of plastic used. https://assets.ctfassets.net/bffxiku554r1/4TNPmg4tzrgoH39Ievy7lC/763dce615ef1b49a50d592c38c199bb8/Coop-Bag-to-Rights-Report.pdf https://assets.ctfassets.net/bffxiku554r1/4TNPmg4tzrgoH39Iev...
  • the_duke 3y ago
    Some countries have already sort-of banned single-use plastic bags (with exceptions where it makes sense). Where I live supermarkets now only have paper bags or sturdy multi-use bags. There will also be some EU wide legislation pretty soon.
• alecsm 3y ago
  Recently a friend went to the US for a couple weeks and he said "they still use plastic staws, that why they are a superpower and we're not". It's a joke but depicts the reality of plastic usage.
  • addicted 3y ago
    What’s the alternative to plastic straws? There was a push in many US cities to get rid of them but they switched to paper straws where the vast majority of them were possibly worse for the environment, and even if not, the benefits were not significant. Personally I carry my own metal straw around (especially for hot drinks…I’ve never understood people who drink hot drinks with plastic straws and I’d suspect whatever keeps a paper straw from not collapsing with hot drinks is likely to be something I don’t want in my system either) but am not sure if that’s a scalable solution? Is that what Europeans do? Alternatively, of course, you just don’t use straws. Glasses exist…
    • SoftTalker 3y ago
      > just don’t use straws This is what I do. Not sure why straws are so popular. I heard restaurants pushed them because it made people drink more/faster, but most places have free refills these days so that doesn't really make sense anymore.
      • rob74 3y ago
        It's kinda hard to drink a soft drink with ice cubes without a straw. Get rid of the ice cubes, and you don't need a straw anymore. Or you could use a (paper!) lid similar to that on coffee-to-go cups.
        • rascul 3y ago
          > It's kinda hard to drink a soft drink with ice cubes without a straw. What's hard about it? I seem to have no trouble.
      • Shog9 3y ago
• throwaway24124 3y ago
  I would love to see a comparison of the average amount of trash (especially plastic waste) the average American homeowner produces vs the average European homeowner. I bet the difference is astonishing.
  • RGamma 3y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2 hints at that with US at 2.5 times EU27 average CO2e production in 2022, trade-adjusted. But probably everything-consumption is really high, with a toxic transportation system (sand for roads), land use, electronics use (rare earths), etc. Fucking up the planet is the easiest way to increase GDP.
• mattmaroon 3y ago
  Well, we are a very low-density country, population-wise. Most of the country is uninhabited. Landfills are cheap and plentiful and fairly environmentally neutral. Even if plastic takes 500 years to decompose, we couldn’t fill 1% of the country with landfills full it in that time if we wanted to. Cost of living is a big issue here, what to do with all those used chicken wing packages is not. I’m not saying we don’t dislike single use plastic, we’re moving away from it somewhat too. But it’s just really not much of a problem. In many cases, plastic packaging is better for the environment. A friend of mine owns a sauerkraut company that switched from glass jars to plastic bags. Glass jars need a lot more energy (and thus co2 emissions) to both create and transport. One truck of plastic bags probably holds as many packages as 20 trucks of glass jars. Of course, there’s the issue of induced demand which makes everything murky. And certainly, there are many cases where we simply could go without packaging entirely. But it’s not nearly as clear cut as “plastic bad”
• namaria 3y ago
  Consumer facing, maybe. I've worked with manufacturers in Europe and the amount of packaging they go through just receiving components from China (batteries, PCB) and other European countries is staggering. So much plastic just unwrapped and tossed. And later more packaging added. People have no idea how little their personal choices and what they see in consumer facing products actually matter in the grand scheme of environmental impacts. Most of the efforts we see (plastic straws banned, caps that don't detach, "recycling") are just cosmetic. It's design to distract us from the real issue of industrial consumerism and preventing actual meaningful change.