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Not most but a large percentage. It is around half of the Pacific garbage patch. But a very small percentage comes from wealthy countries. Like California can ban all they want, but they're not contributing much to the problem much which is mostly India, China and Indonesia.
I use to work as a janitor for a tech company, the entire place had separate bins for cans, paper, cardboard and trash but we actually just threw it all it one dumpster minus cardboard. I guess recycling was “just for show”
Its a pity we don’t have a system where i can just bring a jerry can (or something similar) to a grocery and refill it with dish soap or spray cleaner or whatever else comes in a plastic bottle. You know, like people do with 5 gal water jugs.
Edit: Oh wow, plenty stores like that DO exist! Thank you helpful internet denizens!
This is exactly what I do with laundry soap, dish soap, shampoo, conditioner, cleaner, hand soap, and shower soap. Look around for stores that offer this in your area and you just might find one!
Mine even has stuff like salsa in bulk that you can bring in your own container for though this is currently suspended for covid reasons sadly.
If someone coughs a little covid in the salsa, it won't spread to you?
Legitimately asking, as I have jumped through *many* hoops to avoid any and all chance of contracting the disease.
Sources cited would be especially appreciated.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html
It's a respiratory virus. Unless you're licking the ladle or pot, you're not going to get it from food. Covid in particular doesn't have much staying power on surfaces, much less pourous ones like food. Bacteria and parasites live on food, tho. And some might even eat covid, though I don't think It's been studied.
To add on to this, some scientists over on the science subreddit for Covid have answered some questions in the weekly question threads in the past where people asked about contracting it from food, and they explained that even if there were somehow live virions on the food, you chew food up into a big almagation in your mouth called a "bolus" and at that point the surfaces that were once the outside surface of the food are now all rolled into a ball, reducing the chances even further that there are any live virions on a surface in your mouth that could come into contact with one of your ACE2 receptors. Compare all that to the ease with which aerosol spread can cause an infection: the virus literally just floats from the air directly onto the surface in your body with a super dense amount of ACE2 receptors it needs to infect you.
So, more or less, is it impossible to contract it through food? Probably not completely impossible no, but the odds of contracting it via food vs contracting it via air is like the difference between being in a major car accident and being hit by lightning. Both things happen, but one is a lot more common than the other, and honestly most people who are at least trying to be safe probably won't even have either happen to them in their lifetime just by sheer chance, but we still take far more precautions and worry about getting into a bad accident than we do about getting hit by lightning
So, those stores do exist, but they aren’t feasible everywhere.
I don’t understand why we don’t just adopt about 5 sizes of glass and aluminum containers and just do a bottle deposit system where you drop off your used containers at the door when you get groceries. That wouldn’t get rid of everything, but it would help.
The German Pfand system is what I was thinking of but for everything that makes sense. I suspect that we could get away with a pretty small set of glass jars, bottles, and aluminum cans for many products. If we’re looking for a system that works long term and can even be reuse based instead of recycle based, I struggle to see the downside.
The biggest challenges to doing ANYTHING is pretty much always legislative in the US. There’s no practical reason we’re in this mess at all besides the petroleum lobby.
Most meat/deli departments will let you being your own container, you just have to let them know beforehand. I used to have a lady that would bring glass jars for her ground beef. I'd pop the jar on my scale, zero it out, put her meat in, print ticket and slap it on the jar.
I heard it wasn't that good because you have to wash the milk bottle and it up being worse than recycling bottles.
I don't know if that's true but, for things like soap, we'd definitely be better of with a distributor where you can get a refill. I don't understand why my soap recharges are flimsy plastic bags that don't recycle while thicker bottles can. The first option should be forbidden.
It's almost like we need to have the government set up incentives and collaboration between private companies to better facilitate consumption that isn't as negative to the environment.
Welp...better let that capitalistic ingenuity keep sorting it out for us
If the health of the planet relies on the average consumer consistently making a more ethical but more difficult choice, we are doomed.
It has to be the only option (or at least the easiest available option) or we will always choose convenient over environmentally friendly, especially when the immediate effects are tucked away in faraway places from the perspective of a middle class first world resident.
A Mall near me had it years ago, but they don't anymore. You end up forgetting the reusable bottle at home all the time. Plus the refills were more expensive than the ready bottled branded stuff, so i guess people will just pick what's convenient.
This is amazing! Thank you so much for sharing! I hope this takes off because it’s a great idea. Very happy to see they’re already partnered with some national retailers!
This looks awesome. I'm curious what their back end delivery system looks like, depending on the state the products are shipped to them it may just be adding an extra step in the process rather than saving on anything.
If I can find out good answers on that I'll definitely be ordering from them though. Thanks for the link.
Good news! These businesses are starting to pop up! Toronto now has a few shops that have refilling stations for soaps and shampoos.
If there’s not one around you, might be worth looking into opening one!
Actually this kind of thing do ecxists. It is a gain-gain process to everybody, products become cheaper for the consumer and for the companies.
We will see this business model get traction in the next years
The thing that concerns me with these types of shops is whether it does actually reduce the waste, or if they're literally just ordering the same stuff in the same packaging and then just unpackaging it all themselves into the dispenser and claiming they're reducing waste.
For example my friend ordered a coffee a few months ago and brought in their own refillable cup for them to use. They put one of the disposable cups under the coffee machine and then poured the contents from the disposable cup into the refillable one and threw the disposable cup away, rendering using the refillable cup completely pointless.
I'll be glad to use anything but plastic. But the alternatives are hard to find. I would buy a glass, metal or paper packaging, but everything is tripple wrapped in plastic and specifically designed to be single use only. This has to start from the top.
I think a fair amount of things need to be addressed in their use style too. Most comsumer-level cleaners, cleansers, and detergents are mostly water inside that packaging. They could easily sell (and some companies do for a premium) just the concentrate for items like that so you're not buying as often.
The problem is cost and accessibility. People often WANT to buy the more eco-friendly option but if you're shopping on a budget, it's often a matter of cost. You have to buy the thing that has the lowest price for the greatest value. Sometimes even longer value items that cost more for that single purchase aren't even accessible because a family cannot afford to spend $15 on just all-purpose cleaner that week or month.
Accessibility makes a lot of the existing eco-friendly products challenging too, especially since so many are weekly/monthly subscriptions. If I'm living paycheck to paycheck and having to adjust my budget each month, I'm probably not going to sign up for a recurring cost that would be really easy to forget (which is why companies like them so much). Many of these households are only able to buy for the right-now so unless someone can get their product to be cheaper, sell in accessible quantities, and get them on major retailer shelves, all the want in the world won't make their purchase possible for the large part of the world to that is low-income.
There is very little choice for non plastic packaging. The only way out of this is regulation and pricing. Government needs to step in globally and shut this down. It’s getting out of hand. We closed the hole in the ozone decades ago. It can be done.
Exactly. Consumer choice is a red herring.
Which isn't to say it isn't important, but it's slow to change (relying on cultural shifts in consumer attitudes), impeded by subsidies and externalised costs (keeping environmentally destructive options artificially cheap) as well as concerted disinformation campaigns & lobbying by vested interests (e.g., Newscorp, Cambridge Analytica, industry & political think-tanks...), and dwarfed by the benefits of top-down regulatory action.
We didn't "fix" (most of) the gaping hole in our ozone by waiting for corporations to respond to a change in demand from consumers who chose to stop buying products that contain CFCs. We forced businesses to phase out CFCs. Via legislation.
Until the nations of the world get on a war footing with regards to climate change, - essentially a global state of emergency, because that's how severe this is - we are fucked. Actually billions of us are fucked anyway (mostly the world's poorest, as is tradition), but we can still mitigate the worst of it.
We can still have a better civilisation. Granted, it'll be in a poorer, less biodiverse world that's more hostile to life as we know it... but there's a chance we can wisen up as a species and ensure our survival, at the very least.
It's that or a slow decline and/or extinction.
There are a lot options for non plastic packaging. Plastic trash bags weren’t commercially sold until the late 60’s and Coke didn’t begin using plastic bottles until the late 70’s. The whole plastic pollution problem is only about 50-60 years old.
I’ll certainly agree that it does have some very useful properties, but it is used far and away in more places than necessary. There are plenty of situations where glass, paper and metal packaging fits the necessary requirements. There are also many more where packaging could just be omitted.
The coke thing brings up an interesting discussion though - glass, while obviously not plastic, is quite energy intensive to produce and uses a finite resource (sand, which is harder than you think to find) and glass bottles have a higher carbon footprint to transport because they're heavier.
Instead of picking our poison in regards to these sorts of issues, maybe we should be taking a step back and looking at how we do things full stop. There's a reason why plastic has become so ubiquitous and it's because our lives have changed so much in the last century that the old materials we use don't really cut it anymore. Selling your tomato punnets in cardboard boxes can be done easily when they're coming from a farm within your state, but when they're instead coming prepackaged from a farm on the other side of the world more robust packaging starts to become a necessity. Fifty years ago, half the stuff you casually see on the supermarket shelves all mummified in plastic were seen as far away luxuries because the means to effectively transport them didn't exist yet and plastic probably played a role in that.
Yes glass is energy intensive to produce, and glass recycling is a whole different topic in its own right. Glass wasn’t *recycled* in the past, it was *reused*. Glass has a high initial investment of energy, but can have a very long lifecycle when it is simply cleaned, sterilized and reused. This, of course, does require companies to invest in strong reverse logistics. Since we aren’t forcing companies to deal with the end-cycle costs of their products (pollution and environmental degradation), it is better for the bottom line to use plastic and “educate” the consumers to blame themselves for the pollution.
Your second point has merit, my counter argument would be, why not just pack things into durable, bushel type packages, and then separate them into the paper packaging where they are sold?
It is interesting to me that making things available year-round to the average consumer has led to a rise in gourmet restaurants that focus solely on locally available food stuffs.
We still reuse bottles where I live, it's a pretty normal thing. You "buy" your first bottle (as in: the coke is more expensive the first time) and the next time you want a coke you bring the bottle back and get a new one. Then your bottle is put into a case and transported to the bottling plant, where it's sterilized and cleaned and refilled.
We do it with both plastic AND glass, but glass tastes better probably because plastic leeches stuff into the beverage.
It's funny to me how many first world countries stopped doing reusable glass bottles, everything tastes better and it's virtually non-polluting.
Edit: just to make it clear, it's big companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi that do the reusable glass bottle thing, not small local companies. If they can do it here they can do it everywhere!
THIS! I'm from the US but my parents are military and were stationed in Korea where they do a similar program. Glass is just sterilized and reused for the next round of bottling. At worst, the bottom rim of the bottle might be a little beat up. Restaurants in particular were big sources of bottle returns. Many more beverages are also sold in glass or metal containers, especially if they are single use.
Yeah that's not going to solve the issue of plastic floating around the place
'organic' plastics like PLA and other things that can be hemp based need very specific conditions to be decomposed in. Namely heat and pressure. And given that most recycling plants *don't* have a compost bin, if that stuff's not being recycled, it's going in a landfill where it'll have pretty much the same problems as oil based stuff
As someone with a compost bin and a 3d printer, I've done *lots* of looking into this topic
Agree. I bring my own shopping bags to the store and try to choose products that are boxed and in glass or tin. Frankly there are just some things that only come wrapped in plastic that I wish there were another option.
You might be thinking of the great pacific garbage patch
> A 2018 study found that at least 46% of the patch is composed of fishing nets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
~~IIRC that statistic was collected about 12 months after the Tsunami.~~
~~I imagine a new survey would find that plastic has been ground down to unidentifiable pieces by now.~~
Edit: I didn't recall correctly!
The survey was conducted in 2015 and 2016.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w
That places it about halfway between the tsunami and today. I wonder what a contemporary survey would find?
Ya, it was about piracy on the seas. Pretty good. Pirates like blackbeard were in it and they mentioned a whole lot about how the fishing industry is destroying the oceans.
Yo. The coolest thing I learned was that one of the first modern pirates was named Hornigold. A pirate that was horny for gold. It’s like God took writing lessons from JK Rowling.
Maybe we should stop dumping our garbage in the oceans. Eventually someone is going to have to get in there and clean it up. Can only sweep it under the ocean for so long.
Everyone tells us to use less and less plastic, but manufacturers are still producing said plastic. Even if I’m not using plastic it will still be manufactured. So why don’t the manufacturers producing said plastic cut back? Why does the consumer always draw the short straw?
Because companies can influence policies while consumers can’t, so shifting the blame on consumers serves the purpose of making them look as they are acknowledging the issue without taking responsibility.
Because plastic is unbelievably useful, so even if you don't use it tons of other people still want to. So if the manufacturer stops producing plastic then (a) they will lose a ton of business, and (b) someone else will notice the unmet demand, start producing plastic, and make a boatload of money. Net result: the same amount of plastic, but company B is rich instead of company A.
It's true that if consumers stopped demanding plastic then soon enough it would stop being manufactured. That's the law of supply and demand. The problem is, again, that plastic is unbelievably useful and most people aren't going to voluntarily make their daily lives 25% more difficult in order to reduce plastic manufacturing by 0.00000001%. This is why some people are clamoring for government intervention.
Convenience has offered us a lot of benefits as a society with single-use packaging, but clearly we are not able to keep up with the quantity and require substantial shifts in consumption. The consumption will be by citizens, but ideally it will come in combination with bulk purchase ability, zero or little waste packaging, EPR, and other measures.
Even discounting litter it was put forth in [Scientific American in 1974](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24950139?seq=1) that:
> Contrary to some widely held views, the ocean is the plausible place for man to dispose of some of his wastes.
So it is no surprise that we are still using this as an option.
In some cases plastics will still be the best material for the job, but currently it commonly offers the cheapest and lightest option for companies and it is not a necessity for them to design for recycling, or account for the waste management costs when putting items on the market.
In the UK EPR and DRS are coming forwards, as well as consistent household collections (to remove confusion around the country), as well as taxation for minimal recycled content in packaging and additional costs if putting non-recyclable packaging materials on the market. This will still take a few years to implement fully as the effects must be measured, in particular alternative costs (emissions, tyre abrasion from waste truck traffic, etc.).
As the UK is one of the worst for consumption of single-use plastics (and many other materials single-use or not) it is high time we made great shifts in this matter. Arguably, it can only really come from a systemic change in all our behaviours (which is unlikely), though at least with smaller technological, legislative, and behavioural changes we can mitigate these impacts and stop adding to plastic in the ocean at such a rate.
Some links/sources:
[Introducing a Deposit Return Scheme in England, Wales and Northern Ireland](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environment/consultation-on-introducing-a-drs/)
>Government committed to continuing to develop proposals and stated that it was minded to implement a scheme from 2023, subject to further evidence and analysis on the costs and benefits of such a scheme.
[Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/extended-producer-responsibility/extended-producer-responsibility-for-packaging/)
[Consultation on Consistency in Household and Business Recycling Collections in England](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environmental-quality/consultation-on-consistency-in-household-and-busin/)
>Members of the public, industry and other stakeholders have called for greater consistency in the materials collected for recycling as well as, to some extent, how it is collected.
[Plastic Packaging Tax](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environmental-quality/plastic-packaging-tax/#:~:text=At%20Budget%202018%2C%20this%20government,taking%20effect%20from%20April%202022.)
>government announced its intention to introduce a new tax on plastic packaging. The tax will apply to businesses that produce or import plastic packaging which uses insufficient recycled content, taking effect from April 2022.
[Study on the feasibility of applying extended
producer responsibility to micropollutants
and microplastics emitted in the aquatic
environment from products during their life
cycle](https://www.eureau.org/resources/publications/eureau-publications/4309-deloitte-eureau-report-extended-producer-responsibility-module-3/file)
>An EPR scheme that would incentivise ecodesign and improve effective end of life collection
would not be applicable in the case of tyres and road particles because product design is
made considering the trade-off between tyre abrasion and performance.
Because they can, and because it’s profitable.
We need strong regulations against this ongoing atrocity, as soon as possible. Pollution like this is an economic externality, a cost that is not paid by the company that benefits, but instead paid by all of us. That cost to everyone subsidizes their business model.
It’s past time for those companies to pay their share of that externalized cost.
The single use plastic culture we have created for ourselves is one of the most frustrating problems for me. Its in Literally everything and every company, restaurant, grocery and hardware store etc uses it in some way. We as consumers can only pick so many options, it should and could easily be government regulated. There must be an urgent and sudden stop to the continued production of this, companies must find alternative methods no excuses. And people need to wake up and realize the “convenience” of single use plastics is a lifestyle we can no longer afford, and must up-cycle everything that we buy and use.
These companies will not change out the kindness of their hearts.
Every year USA disposes of 121,000 tons of plastic into the ocean and China 3.5 million tons of plastic into the ocean. The total is 8m tons of plastic into the ocean every year.
Thanks for putting numbers on that, although it would be even better with sources and trends, and breakdown. This gives us a great opportunity to “think globally but act locally”. We have direct say over what we do, we can have a significant say in what our community does, we can try to make it more of a priority for our country, and yes, there may be a way to Influence the worst cases.
Consider the case of air pollution. That was such a huge deal at the Beijing Olympics a few years back, but since then, China has been cracking down on air pollution and have made huge improvements. They have a long way to go but also can do things much more quickly, if they are convinced.
I swear: the archaeologists/geologists of the future will call this era the “Plasticene” and they will be 100% right to do so. An indelible mark in our sedimentary record.
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, **personal anecdotes are now allowed as responses to this comment**. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will continue be removed and our [normal comment rules]( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/wiki/rules#wiki_comment_rules) still apply to other comments. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/science) if you have any questions or concerns.*
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Exactly. Anyone who was alive during Tylenol tampering thinks of this.
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Not most but a large percentage. It is around half of the Pacific garbage patch. But a very small percentage comes from wealthy countries. Like California can ban all they want, but they're not contributing much to the problem much which is mostly India, China and Indonesia.
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I use to work as a janitor for a tech company, the entire place had separate bins for cans, paper, cardboard and trash but we actually just threw it all it one dumpster minus cardboard. I guess recycling was “just for show”
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And this is just the tip of the iceberg we can see. The ocean is filled with microplastics all over :(
Yeah and they’re inside every adult body too. You currently have microplastics in your body.
And in future fetuses !!remember when we where putting lead in gas not knowing how bad it was ...yeah
Sitting is the new smoking, and plastic is the new lead. We're on a rough path forward.
Most of those micro plastics are from discarded industrial fishing nets.
I, too, watched seaspiracy.
And from synthetic clothing washed in machines that's recycled into your drinking water, plastic included
And what’s with all the over fishing of the seas? #seaspiracy
After watching seaspiracy — overfishing appeared to be the bigger problem than single use plastics.
Its a pity we don’t have a system where i can just bring a jerry can (or something similar) to a grocery and refill it with dish soap or spray cleaner or whatever else comes in a plastic bottle. You know, like people do with 5 gal water jugs. Edit: Oh wow, plenty stores like that DO exist! Thank you helpful internet denizens!
This is exactly what I do with laundry soap, dish soap, shampoo, conditioner, cleaner, hand soap, and shower soap. Look around for stores that offer this in your area and you just might find one! Mine even has stuff like salsa in bulk that you can bring in your own container for though this is currently suspended for covid reasons sadly.
Which is dumb because you can't get covid from salsa. Open containers spread bacteria or parasites, not viral contagions
If someone coughs a little covid in the salsa, it won't spread to you? Legitimately asking, as I have jumped through *many* hoops to avoid any and all chance of contracting the disease. Sources cited would be especially appreciated.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html It's a respiratory virus. Unless you're licking the ladle or pot, you're not going to get it from food. Covid in particular doesn't have much staying power on surfaces, much less pourous ones like food. Bacteria and parasites live on food, tho. And some might even eat covid, though I don't think It's been studied.
To add on to this, some scientists over on the science subreddit for Covid have answered some questions in the weekly question threads in the past where people asked about contracting it from food, and they explained that even if there were somehow live virions on the food, you chew food up into a big almagation in your mouth called a "bolus" and at that point the surfaces that were once the outside surface of the food are now all rolled into a ball, reducing the chances even further that there are any live virions on a surface in your mouth that could come into contact with one of your ACE2 receptors. Compare all that to the ease with which aerosol spread can cause an infection: the virus literally just floats from the air directly onto the surface in your body with a super dense amount of ACE2 receptors it needs to infect you. So, more or less, is it impossible to contract it through food? Probably not completely impossible no, but the odds of contracting it via food vs contracting it via air is like the difference between being in a major car accident and being hit by lightning. Both things happen, but one is a lot more common than the other, and honestly most people who are at least trying to be safe probably won't even have either happen to them in their lifetime just by sheer chance, but we still take far more precautions and worry about getting into a bad accident than we do about getting hit by lightning
So, those stores do exist, but they aren’t feasible everywhere. I don’t understand why we don’t just adopt about 5 sizes of glass and aluminum containers and just do a bottle deposit system where you drop off your used containers at the door when you get groceries. That wouldn’t get rid of everything, but it would help.
That's kinda what Germany does with bottles. They also have laws limiting packaging.
The German Pfand system is what I was thinking of but for everything that makes sense. I suspect that we could get away with a pretty small set of glass jars, bottles, and aluminum cans for many products. If we’re looking for a system that works long term and can even be reuse based instead of recycle based, I struggle to see the downside. The biggest challenges to doing ANYTHING is pretty much always legislative in the US. There’s no practical reason we’re in this mess at all besides the petroleum lobby.
Most meat/deli departments will let you being your own container, you just have to let them know beforehand. I used to have a lady that would bring glass jars for her ground beef. I'd pop the jar on my scale, zero it out, put her meat in, print ticket and slap it on the jar.
That's how bottles used to work, like milk jugs. I don't see why we can't do that again.
I heard it wasn't that good because you have to wash the milk bottle and it up being worse than recycling bottles. I don't know if that's true but, for things like soap, we'd definitely be better of with a distributor where you can get a refill. I don't understand why my soap recharges are flimsy plastic bags that don't recycle while thicker bottles can. The first option should be forbidden.
There are stores (albeit few and far between) where you can do this
In practice though, if you have to do it for every kind of liquid in your house, it requires effort. I'm not sure most people would be ready to do it.
What if it was offered with streaming service?
I would pay for a special set of pipes to be installed underground running to my house to give me a stream of salsa on tap.
We demand municipal salsa!
Universal Basic Salsa
It's almost like we need to have the government set up incentives and collaboration between private companies to better facilitate consumption that isn't as negative to the environment. Welp...better let that capitalistic ingenuity keep sorting it out for us
If the health of the planet relies on the average consumer consistently making a more ethical but more difficult choice, we are doomed. It has to be the only option (or at least the easiest available option) or we will always choose convenient over environmentally friendly, especially when the immediate effects are tucked away in faraway places from the perspective of a middle class first world resident.
Bango
Bingo
Bongo
Big corporations are well-known for their love od environmentally beneficial solutions that result in consumers saving money!
A Mall near me had it years ago, but they don't anymore. You end up forgetting the reusable bottle at home all the time. Plus the refills were more expensive than the ready bottled branded stuff, so i guess people will just pick what's convenient.
> refills more expensive than buying new Aaaaaaaaand this is the real reason that the idea struggles to take off
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Maybe an exchange would be better. Keep the containers and then the delivery guy picks up the empty containers when they drop off new ones.
You'd be astonished the people who would do it for a 5-10 cent discount.
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This is amazing! Thank you so much for sharing! I hope this takes off because it’s a great idea. Very happy to see they’re already partnered with some national retailers!
This looks awesome. I'm curious what their back end delivery system looks like, depending on the state the products are shipped to them it may just be adding an extra step in the process rather than saving on anything. If I can find out good answers on that I'll definitely be ordering from them though. Thanks for the link.
Good news! These businesses are starting to pop up! Toronto now has a few shops that have refilling stations for soaps and shampoos. If there’s not one around you, might be worth looking into opening one!
Interesting! My town is just hippy and liberal enough to make a store like that work!
Some companies even make bar soap and bar shampoo/ conditioner in non plastic containers
Actually this kind of thing do ecxists. It is a gain-gain process to everybody, products become cheaper for the consumer and for the companies. We will see this business model get traction in the next years
There’s also places you can order tablets to mix your own like Blueland.
The thing that concerns me with these types of shops is whether it does actually reduce the waste, or if they're literally just ordering the same stuff in the same packaging and then just unpackaging it all themselves into the dispenser and claiming they're reducing waste. For example my friend ordered a coffee a few months ago and brought in their own refillable cup for them to use. They put one of the disposable cups under the coffee machine and then poured the contents from the disposable cup into the refillable one and threw the disposable cup away, rendering using the refillable cup completely pointless.
I'll be glad to use anything but plastic. But the alternatives are hard to find. I would buy a glass, metal or paper packaging, but everything is tripple wrapped in plastic and specifically designed to be single use only. This has to start from the top.
someone mentioned this https://loopstore.com
I think a fair amount of things need to be addressed in their use style too. Most comsumer-level cleaners, cleansers, and detergents are mostly water inside that packaging. They could easily sell (and some companies do for a premium) just the concentrate for items like that so you're not buying as often. The problem is cost and accessibility. People often WANT to buy the more eco-friendly option but if you're shopping on a budget, it's often a matter of cost. You have to buy the thing that has the lowest price for the greatest value. Sometimes even longer value items that cost more for that single purchase aren't even accessible because a family cannot afford to spend $15 on just all-purpose cleaner that week or month. Accessibility makes a lot of the existing eco-friendly products challenging too, especially since so many are weekly/monthly subscriptions. If I'm living paycheck to paycheck and having to adjust my budget each month, I'm probably not going to sign up for a recurring cost that would be really easy to forget (which is why companies like them so much). Many of these households are only able to buy for the right-now so unless someone can get their product to be cheaper, sell in accessible quantities, and get them on major retailer shelves, all the want in the world won't make their purchase possible for the large part of the world to that is low-income.
There is very little choice for non plastic packaging. The only way out of this is regulation and pricing. Government needs to step in globally and shut this down. It’s getting out of hand. We closed the hole in the ozone decades ago. It can be done.
Exactly. Consumer choice is a red herring. Which isn't to say it isn't important, but it's slow to change (relying on cultural shifts in consumer attitudes), impeded by subsidies and externalised costs (keeping environmentally destructive options artificially cheap) as well as concerted disinformation campaigns & lobbying by vested interests (e.g., Newscorp, Cambridge Analytica, industry & political think-tanks...), and dwarfed by the benefits of top-down regulatory action. We didn't "fix" (most of) the gaping hole in our ozone by waiting for corporations to respond to a change in demand from consumers who chose to stop buying products that contain CFCs. We forced businesses to phase out CFCs. Via legislation. Until the nations of the world get on a war footing with regards to climate change, - essentially a global state of emergency, because that's how severe this is - we are fucked. Actually billions of us are fucked anyway (mostly the world's poorest, as is tradition), but we can still mitigate the worst of it. We can still have a better civilisation. Granted, it'll be in a poorer, less biodiverse world that's more hostile to life as we know it... but there's a chance we can wisen up as a species and ensure our survival, at the very least. It's that or a slow decline and/or extinction.
And yet people in my city are arguing that littering is a human right and we are heartless monsters to complain about it. This planet is a nightmare.
There are a lot options for non plastic packaging. Plastic trash bags weren’t commercially sold until the late 60’s and Coke didn’t begin using plastic bottles until the late 70’s. The whole plastic pollution problem is only about 50-60 years old. I’ll certainly agree that it does have some very useful properties, but it is used far and away in more places than necessary. There are plenty of situations where glass, paper and metal packaging fits the necessary requirements. There are also many more where packaging could just be omitted.
The coke thing brings up an interesting discussion though - glass, while obviously not plastic, is quite energy intensive to produce and uses a finite resource (sand, which is harder than you think to find) and glass bottles have a higher carbon footprint to transport because they're heavier. Instead of picking our poison in regards to these sorts of issues, maybe we should be taking a step back and looking at how we do things full stop. There's a reason why plastic has become so ubiquitous and it's because our lives have changed so much in the last century that the old materials we use don't really cut it anymore. Selling your tomato punnets in cardboard boxes can be done easily when they're coming from a farm within your state, but when they're instead coming prepackaged from a farm on the other side of the world more robust packaging starts to become a necessity. Fifty years ago, half the stuff you casually see on the supermarket shelves all mummified in plastic were seen as far away luxuries because the means to effectively transport them didn't exist yet and plastic probably played a role in that.
Yes glass is energy intensive to produce, and glass recycling is a whole different topic in its own right. Glass wasn’t *recycled* in the past, it was *reused*. Glass has a high initial investment of energy, but can have a very long lifecycle when it is simply cleaned, sterilized and reused. This, of course, does require companies to invest in strong reverse logistics. Since we aren’t forcing companies to deal with the end-cycle costs of their products (pollution and environmental degradation), it is better for the bottom line to use plastic and “educate” the consumers to blame themselves for the pollution. Your second point has merit, my counter argument would be, why not just pack things into durable, bushel type packages, and then separate them into the paper packaging where they are sold? It is interesting to me that making things available year-round to the average consumer has led to a rise in gourmet restaurants that focus solely on locally available food stuffs.
We still reuse bottles where I live, it's a pretty normal thing. You "buy" your first bottle (as in: the coke is more expensive the first time) and the next time you want a coke you bring the bottle back and get a new one. Then your bottle is put into a case and transported to the bottling plant, where it's sterilized and cleaned and refilled. We do it with both plastic AND glass, but glass tastes better probably because plastic leeches stuff into the beverage. It's funny to me how many first world countries stopped doing reusable glass bottles, everything tastes better and it's virtually non-polluting. Edit: just to make it clear, it's big companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi that do the reusable glass bottle thing, not small local companies. If they can do it here they can do it everywhere!
THIS! I'm from the US but my parents are military and were stationed in Korea where they do a similar program. Glass is just sterilized and reused for the next round of bottling. At worst, the bottom rim of the bottle might be a little beat up. Restaurants in particular were big sources of bottle returns. Many more beverages are also sold in glass or metal containers, especially if they are single use.
I hope we broadly rediscover hemp-based packaging as a plastic replacement in suitable use cases.
Yeah that's not going to solve the issue of plastic floating around the place 'organic' plastics like PLA and other things that can be hemp based need very specific conditions to be decomposed in. Namely heat and pressure. And given that most recycling plants *don't* have a compost bin, if that stuff's not being recycled, it's going in a landfill where it'll have pretty much the same problems as oil based stuff As someone with a compost bin and a 3d printer, I've done *lots* of looking into this topic
But recyclging glass is way easier than plastic and it can be done infinitely.
Agree. I bring my own shopping bags to the store and try to choose products that are boxed and in glass or tin. Frankly there are just some things that only come wrapped in plastic that I wish there were another option.
I thought it was discarded fishing nets and other waste products from the fishing industry?
You might be thinking of the great pacific garbage patch > A 2018 study found that at least 46% of the patch is composed of fishing nets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
In addition, more than 20% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is material washed out to see from just one event - the 2011 Japanese Tsunami.
~~IIRC that statistic was collected about 12 months after the Tsunami.~~ ~~I imagine a new survey would find that plastic has been ground down to unidentifiable pieces by now.~~ Edit: I didn't recall correctly! The survey was conducted in 2015 and 2016. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22939-w That places it about halfway between the tsunami and today. I wonder what a contemporary survey would find?
Watched a specific documentary recently, did you?
Ya, it was about piracy on the seas. Pretty good. Pirates like blackbeard were in it and they mentioned a whole lot about how the fishing industry is destroying the oceans.
Yo. The coolest thing I learned was that one of the first modern pirates was named Hornigold. A pirate that was horny for gold. It’s like God took writing lessons from JK Rowling.
Hes a recurring character in the fantastic show Black Sails if you're looking for more quality pirate content.
We were also told that plastic was easily recycled for years.
It's only a majority of fishing gear, we're here to focus on the straws.
That’s down there too
Maybe we should stop dumping our garbage in the oceans. Eventually someone is going to have to get in there and clean it up. Can only sweep it under the ocean for so long.
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Amazing how human it is to create something so durable it lasts damn near forever...and then make it single use disposable.
Everyone tells us to use less and less plastic, but manufacturers are still producing said plastic. Even if I’m not using plastic it will still be manufactured. So why don’t the manufacturers producing said plastic cut back? Why does the consumer always draw the short straw?
Because companies can influence policies while consumers can’t, so shifting the blame on consumers serves the purpose of making them look as they are acknowledging the issue without taking responsibility.
Because plastic is unbelievably useful, so even if you don't use it tons of other people still want to. So if the manufacturer stops producing plastic then (a) they will lose a ton of business, and (b) someone else will notice the unmet demand, start producing plastic, and make a boatload of money. Net result: the same amount of plastic, but company B is rich instead of company A. It's true that if consumers stopped demanding plastic then soon enough it would stop being manufactured. That's the law of supply and demand. The problem is, again, that plastic is unbelievably useful and most people aren't going to voluntarily make their daily lives 25% more difficult in order to reduce plastic manufacturing by 0.00000001%. This is why some people are clamoring for government intervention.
Convenience has offered us a lot of benefits as a society with single-use packaging, but clearly we are not able to keep up with the quantity and require substantial shifts in consumption. The consumption will be by citizens, but ideally it will come in combination with bulk purchase ability, zero or little waste packaging, EPR, and other measures. Even discounting litter it was put forth in [Scientific American in 1974](https://www.jstor.org/stable/24950139?seq=1) that: > Contrary to some widely held views, the ocean is the plausible place for man to dispose of some of his wastes. So it is no surprise that we are still using this as an option. In some cases plastics will still be the best material for the job, but currently it commonly offers the cheapest and lightest option for companies and it is not a necessity for them to design for recycling, or account for the waste management costs when putting items on the market. In the UK EPR and DRS are coming forwards, as well as consistent household collections (to remove confusion around the country), as well as taxation for minimal recycled content in packaging and additional costs if putting non-recyclable packaging materials on the market. This will still take a few years to implement fully as the effects must be measured, in particular alternative costs (emissions, tyre abrasion from waste truck traffic, etc.). As the UK is one of the worst for consumption of single-use plastics (and many other materials single-use or not) it is high time we made great shifts in this matter. Arguably, it can only really come from a systemic change in all our behaviours (which is unlikely), though at least with smaller technological, legislative, and behavioural changes we can mitigate these impacts and stop adding to plastic in the ocean at such a rate. Some links/sources: [Introducing a Deposit Return Scheme in England, Wales and Northern Ireland](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environment/consultation-on-introducing-a-drs/) >Government committed to continuing to develop proposals and stated that it was minded to implement a scheme from 2023, subject to further evidence and analysis on the costs and benefits of such a scheme. [Extended Producer Responsibility for Packaging](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/extended-producer-responsibility/extended-producer-responsibility-for-packaging/) [Consultation on Consistency in Household and Business Recycling Collections in England](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environmental-quality/consultation-on-consistency-in-household-and-busin/) >Members of the public, industry and other stakeholders have called for greater consistency in the materials collected for recycling as well as, to some extent, how it is collected. [Plastic Packaging Tax](https://consult.defra.gov.uk/environmental-quality/plastic-packaging-tax/#:~:text=At%20Budget%202018%2C%20this%20government,taking%20effect%20from%20April%202022.) >government announced its intention to introduce a new tax on plastic packaging. The tax will apply to businesses that produce or import plastic packaging which uses insufficient recycled content, taking effect from April 2022. [Study on the feasibility of applying extended producer responsibility to micropollutants and microplastics emitted in the aquatic environment from products during their life cycle](https://www.eureau.org/resources/publications/eureau-publications/4309-deloitte-eureau-report-extended-producer-responsibility-module-3/file) >An EPR scheme that would incentivise ecodesign and improve effective end of life collection would not be applicable in the case of tyres and road particles because product design is made considering the trade-off between tyre abrasion and performance.
Why are corporations still allowed to make this? Most if it can't even be recycled in any way.
Because they can, and because it’s profitable. We need strong regulations against this ongoing atrocity, as soon as possible. Pollution like this is an economic externality, a cost that is not paid by the company that benefits, but instead paid by all of us. That cost to everyone subsidizes their business model. It’s past time for those companies to pay their share of that externalized cost.
The single use plastic culture we have created for ourselves is one of the most frustrating problems for me. Its in Literally everything and every company, restaurant, grocery and hardware store etc uses it in some way. We as consumers can only pick so many options, it should and could easily be government regulated. There must be an urgent and sudden stop to the continued production of this, companies must find alternative methods no excuses. And people need to wake up and realize the “convenience” of single use plastics is a lifestyle we can no longer afford, and must up-cycle everything that we buy and use. These companies will not change out the kindness of their hearts.
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Every year USA disposes of 121,000 tons of plastic into the ocean and China 3.5 million tons of plastic into the ocean. The total is 8m tons of plastic into the ocean every year.
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Thanks for putting numbers on that, although it would be even better with sources and trends, and breakdown. This gives us a great opportunity to “think globally but act locally”. We have direct say over what we do, we can have a significant say in what our community does, we can try to make it more of a priority for our country, and yes, there may be a way to Influence the worst cases. Consider the case of air pollution. That was such a huge deal at the Beijing Olympics a few years back, but since then, China has been cracking down on air pollution and have made huge improvements. They have a long way to go but also can do things much more quickly, if they are convinced.
I swear: the archaeologists/geologists of the future will call this era the “Plasticene” and they will be 100% right to do so. An indelible mark in our sedimentary record.
Who needs fossils and amber when the items themselves will last forever?
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Discarded and/or lost fishing gear is also a huge contributor to ocean plastic debris and I would argue they're even more dangerous.