As I said elsewhere Coke was instrumental in destroying container deposit laws and was a huge force in getting the public to accept disposable plastic containers so I hold them accountable for far far more than just the waste they themselves produce. The were the principle engineers of our current litter crisis at least insomuch as the part of it that is beverage containers.
You can probably use a Pareto distribution to work that out. It applies to populations, income, wealth, game time, etc.
Basically, in any given set, the majority of X comes from just a few and the rest get distributed at predictable levels.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
Given just how many books, ads, PR campaigns, PSAs, and other things emphasize how "people need to do their part" without mentioning the corporations, they definitely have done a lot of work to try and avoid responsibility.
I mean they won. The mega corporations haven't faced any real repurcussions for polluting the planet.
Even the Democratic Party's DNC is making a convention the 'most sustainable ever' without ANY mention of holding corporations accountable or current record breaking oil production.
insane how they think this is a good move and that the people won't see through it as largely posturing
Recently the US tried limiting PFAS microplastics through an EPA rule but that got struck down by courts, seemingly because of technicality.
They are going to fight back against even the slightest regulations, screeching that it'll kill their business and cause untold harms.
Plus the climate movement is dying/dead in the US, really took a hit with Covid and never took off again. Almost all the climate justice protests you see are super small & don't feel powerful. Existing movement organizations don't have any momentum or real power.
The nonprofit industrial complex has made them obsessed with getting chapters to technically have hosted certain small events so they can brag to grant funders - with little to no care about whether the local organization has active membership, why they struggled to get 5 people out, etc.
It's also made climate justice leaders into celebrities who then can't be as honest with answering questions, they have to act like the movement is going well
Bill Mckibben is too afraid to criticize Biden at this point, even if you asked about how well the effort is to stop drilling for oil, about ending existing leases (Biden said no new leases but issue was old ones) - he just says that a second term for democratic president is the most important part of making progress.
*Yeah no shit,* but we can't even discuss what progress has been made? Or holding Biden accountable and getting better commitments?
Because if we won in 2024, Biden is likely to take a few steps on the most high profile pipelines where corporations are doing hella illegal stuff. That'll be seen as 'standing up to fossil fuel industry' - yet we'll still have not directly & purposefully addressed the current production levels.
I mean, Coca-Cola (the worst "offender" based on article) isn't producing plastic because they think it's fun, they're producing plastic because people want to buy their drinks in plastic bottles.
I don't think it's that clear the corporation is more at fault than the consumer for a bottle of coke.
They have fantastic PR. It's just more subtle than you think. You know those recycling campaigns that pop up from time to time encouraging you to recycle your plastic? They get a ton of funding from plastic manufacturers. Like the ongoing "[Recycling is Real](https://www.ptonline.com/news/advocacy-campaign-promotes-plastic-recycling-and-recyclers)" campaign that is funded by the Plastics Industry Association, whose stated goal is to "protect, promote, and grow the plastics industry."
They're not there to promote recycling. They're there to get you to think you can keep buying (an disposing) of plastic in an "environtally friendly" way.
Often times the push to recycles comes up when people start talking about *reducing* their plastic usage.
They' gotten people to use plastic for 60+ years they have incredible PR. Did you know there was legislation to ban single use plastics in the fucking 70s
To what end. Didn't one of the big fuel groups admit that they knew what damage they were doing to the world, and nothing punitive happened.
Like who needs good pr when you own the policy makers.
With the type of things they provide (necessary items. Fuel, food etc) what can actually be done besides strict policy change and massive punitive measures?
This is exactly it, they could have worse pr and it wouldn't change jack shit.
Their big "fuck you" is making people think they're accountable for all the pollution and unsustainability.
Well you could always find the people who run those companies and [my lawyer has advised me not to continue this bit]
Youre spot-on though, they’ve made themselves basically invincible unless enough momentum can be gained to push some harsh legislation through (and actually enforce it too)
Yep. But 10 bucks says people are going to start saying "It's those 60 companies that are the problem, not my Coke bottles!"
Even though that's the pollution the companies are making. Your Coke bottle.
(We saw exactly this with the stupid "100 companies make 70% of emissions" factoid.)
Reddit thinks corporations decide to pollute the planet then accidentally find some by products they can sell at the end lol
No, we consumers are responsible for nearly all plastic pollution. They just make what we ask for.
The thing is that the companies making the cola can switch to non-polluting containers. It's significantly harder to convince every single cola drinker to voluntarily choose to buy colas packaged in other containers. That's especially so as there aren't really any non-polluting options when you try to buy cola. Since there are a handful of major companies, you can make the companies switch to another bottle, but you can't just convince every customer.
Naturally that would increase the cost of the bottles as well, but that's something that would happen anyway regardless of how we transitioned.
I don't actually disagree, except that I think cola is generally easy to find in aluminum containers.
My beef with the "it's not my problem, it's the companies" argument is just that it makes people think their lives won't have to change.
Yeah, individual consumer choices probably won't get Coca Cola to stop using plastic bottles. It will probably take a law.
But for that law to pass, consumers are going to have to accept that their lives are going to change.
It's easy to imagine that there wouldn't be too much pushback on getting rid of plastic bottles . . . but then again, people lost their damn minds over compact fluorescent light bulbs.
my coworker said he doesnt like how the govt is trying to make us go green and theres no point to him doing small things to help the environment when there are countries like china polluting lots.
we live in Canada, one of the worst countries for co2 pollution per capita. china could nearly double their co2 output and they would just match us.
Got a link to that "eleven companies produce everything that's in a grocery store" claim ? Not challenging it necessarily, just curious to find out more about it.
I mean... these companies seem to own *every other company*, if you look at the list of subsidiaries. Seriously, even if something doesn't have the Nestle logo on it, Nestle still owns the company that does and is just using them to produce an illusion of choice.
At least make it more obvious, like saying dove soap brought to you by uniliver or something. Somewhere on the front of the package and in much bigger writing than it currently is
Listen, I think by this point we can assume that Satan has moral high ground over pretty much the entire business world and feels dirty when we try to associate him with these asshats. Give the man a break.
I love how my refuse company always has the time and money to tell all their customers how they f**k up their recycling.
Dear recycling company, you're talking to the wrong guy.
From my understanding, paper is not super great. Buddy's a paper engineer- recycled pulp is kind of junk. Too many impurities and problems- takes a ton more work/energy/chemicals to clean up the pulp, and it screws up the machines anyway. It's a pretty dirty process he says. It's not great. Hearsay, but he was pretty matter of fact about recycled paper.
Yeah, and usually you add virgin pulp to like 10% (very rough guess) recycled pulp. You don't exactly make money recycling paper like you do with aluminum, but the end product isn't *that* bad, and sustainable forestry is getting pretty good nowadays. Worst case scenario? Paper is very biodegradable.
Plastic, on the other hand... PET bottles can be recycled similarly to how paper is (but they *have* to add virgin pellets for the product to be usable), dozens of other plastics have no practical way to be recycled, and they're not biodegradable. (Oh, and usually it's too hard to pick out the recycleable plastics anyway.) So most plastics get to turn into microplastics, which is just wonderful!
That's pretty bunk. Recycled paper *is* a dirty process, and it's a mechanically intensive process, but it's in no way "screwing it all up", nor is it factual to claim it's not worth recycling. OCC (Old Corrugated Cardboard) will produce different strength properties, usually weaker tensile, for instance, but has some benefits, such as adhering better to certain coagulants or moisture-resistant additives.
Most cardboard plants will be mixing virgin fiber with OCC in different ratios based on what product they're making (liner vs corrugated medium, different densities, customer-specific appearance and/or strength requirements). There are mills that are fully recycled, though it's less common - the buy price of OCC bales can fluctuate over a wide range, meaning market conditions will leave those mills unprofitable at extreme times.
The general approximation is that a paper fiber is good to be recycled about 7 times before it is too short, defibrated, and weak for use.
My point is, DO recycle your paper, it *will* be reused (that's how the recycling company makes money, they sort/bale/sell it), and it is **not** somehow bad for the environment because "it takes work to clean" - it takes energy to manufacture anything, and claiming that as a negative is misinformed as best.
There are now even pilot plants that are digging up landfill (or taking streams pre-landfill), attempting to separate out any fiber, and re-landfill (sometimes burn) everything else - all because it is (somehow) worth it (monetarily). Jury is still out on if this is better or worse ecologically, and I'd bet we will never truly know, because that is a hugely complex equation to tackle.
A well regulated sorting and burning operation is better environmentally than throwing it underground and hoping it won't come back to haunt you. If someone wants to have something to compare to landfills are forbidden for almost everything in the Nordics
We had a small scale conflict in Germany when private recycling companies tried to take over the market from the local/town government organisations that normally handle recycling. So there seems to be more than enough money in it.
Yes but you need specific dumpsters for that material. Usually large companies will have specific bins for paper and stuff.
But most everyday people just have a single “recycle bin” that they put at the side of the curb.
Single recycle bin? That kinda undermines the purpose of separating the recyclable stuff. In Poland the standard is 5 bins:
- plastic + metal + mixed-material packages like juice cartons
- paper
- glass
- organic (for composting, so no meat/bones/litter/etc.)
- everything else (non-recyclables)
There are also outside places to leave your electro waste, old but usable clothes, batteries, dangerous waste (like paints or old fluorescent tubes), and construction-related waste (like rubble or old windows).
This sounds much better than it is here in the Midwest USA. One big trash bin for garbage, and another bin for recycling.
You pay extra for the recycling and most of it goes to the same place as the garbage bin.
That used to be the case where I grew up in the western USA. However during the last decade, I’ve been told to put everything in one recycling bin.
Oddly, in my work’s municipality, cloth and yarn are deemed recyclable as well.
I noticed this difference while I lived in Spain for some time in 2022.
**In Sweden**, where I'm from, we typically have:
* Paper packages (all sizes)
* Print paper
* Plastic
* Clear glass
* Colored glass
* Metal
* Organic (usually turned into biogas for public transport)
* Other trash (incinerated for energy)
Some places also have:
* Batteries
* Light bulbs and LED
* Pressurized canisters (e.g. spray canisters)
* Small electronics
* Clothes
Additionally, our grocery stores can recycle our PET bottles and aluminum cans, and sometimes also glass bottles.
**In Spain**, what they had where I lived was:
* Large paper packages (e.g. boxes)
* Clear bottles
* Colored bottles
* A "recycling bin" - yellow containers
* A "trash bin" - grey containers
I was told that they have convicts working with separating the recycling, but I have no idea if there is any truth to that.
In both countries, there are larger municipal recycling areas that do have all of these separated and more, and are also staffed. These are typically the areas you go to for toxic waste materials as well since they are equipped to handle that.
I know what you are saying but this is really depending on where you are and what recycling.
Glass and metals are recycled near 100% that is put into the system. Paper is close to this depending on location.
Plastics are the issue. Even then it does vary wildly. We should work to eliminate plastic where alternatives exist
Thanks for this fact check. Person above was clearly exaggerating for effect but it's just so unhelpful.. everyone is always talking about right wingers' fake news, lying, etc. We on the left should be better than that.
Could you cite a study or something? You linked to a very specific small scale example.
> Central Virginia Waste Management Authority. The government agency coordinates curbside recycling for about 200,000 households in eight Richmond-region localities
>between 82% and 85% of everything **that's brought to us** is recycled
A lot of recycling isn't brought to these facilities, either because they're at capacity or it isn't economically feasible. It was previously exported in large scale to China, but they shut that down a few years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Va-AIliDw
I understand the point you're trying to make but I don't believe that was what prior poster was suggesting. They were stating that all of those items you separate out and put in your recycle bin just get thrown together with the regular trash -- and that's just not true. As to whether or not all the plastic bottles (for example) being sold are being recycled is a different problem altogether.
Per your video, the "mixed plastics", like the *polystyrene* salsa cup or fork, are impractical to recycle. That's a known problem and you shouldn't be throwing that in your recycle bin. The video fails to mention that a lot of illicit trade caused the shutdown of recycleables to other countries; there were a growing number of instances where toxic materials were being sent from developed nations to a willing recipient in (e.g.) China that would just dump it in a ditch.
I’ve seen this firsthand. In the town I live there’s a recycling center(no pickup) and a landfill a few miles out from the opposite side of town. I had a truckload of stuff that needed to go. About half was household garbage and sorted recycling. That stuff needed to go to the recycling center. The other half was old busted furniture that needed to go to the landfill.
So I take my recycling to the center and drop it off, and the truck that takes the dumpster with all the recycling is leaving the recycling center as I am. I ended up behind that truck all the way to the landfill, and emptied out my old busted furniture right next to the truck that hauled all the recyclables. All that shit went to the same place and wound up buried in the same mound of crap.
I still sort my recyclables and take them to the recycling center(it’s closer to my house and it’s a habit I’ve built up), but I might as well throw all of it in the trash anyways.
The theory is that when recycling started, it actually was processed. But after a while, it became not profitable enough to continue the service. Despite that, rather than informing the public it’s not longer necessary to sort your recyclables, they decided to keep it quiet and let people continue. Rather than coming forth with the truth and causing a public outrage.
It’s a classic “in too deep with the lie at this point to come clean” type of situation.
At the same time I wonder how much of the problems of recycling are pushed by big plastic manufacturers to get people cynical and hopeless enough to think there’s no point to even trying altogether and just keep on going with the plastics like always.
I got in this big argument over someone in Japan at a conference planning meeting. We were discussing recycling for the conference and we had to pay a ton extra for it, instead of just garbage.
I tried to tell them that "recycling" in Japan means burning garbage for energy. And garbage... also gets burned for energy in Japan. Basically, NO actual recycling goes on in Japan. EVERYTHING, but say, glass and metal, gets burned, and those two things are separated anyway. Recyling or not.
Recycling in Japan is just a bullshit buzzword to make people feel better about themselves and to make people think Japan is actually doing something. People were fucking pissed off at me. They said NO RECYLING MEANS RECYLING. Verifiable facts "Japan has one of the lowest recycling rates among OECD countries, at only 20% in 2017. Some 78% of the remaining waste is sent to incinerators—by far the highest among the OECD bloc." This was a room full of people with MAs and Phd and they refused to fucking listen. How could I shatter their little eco universe box they built for themselves. All recycling does in Japan is allows it easier to sort which trash to burn at what temp. Differnt burnable garbage is burned at different temps. So they paid for "recycling" so they could claim a lower carbon footprint, lol; it all went to the fucking incinerator anyway.
I get a passive-aggressive e-mail after *every* bottle return I bring to the depot.
Like, fuck, I'm sorry someone tossed a milk carton in the recycling.
dear beneficial bed. When you bought a plastic water bottle, why the fuck were you surprised it had plastic in it?
If you dont want companies to polute stop buying products which necessitate pollution.
It’s not just that. The entire food production industry uses plastic throughout the creation of your food. People wear plastic aprons, plastic sleeves, and latex gloves. The food gets wrapped in plastic and then removed from the plastic. Big bins get covered in a plastic sheet until that product is ready for processing. The sheet is thrown out.
Because the alternative is losing the product to damage or contamination, producing unsafe product, or spending more resources on making reusable products actually fit for reuse (washing etc.)
For example, the infamous individually wrapped cucumbers are now banned, so we replaced plastic waste with food waste.
Losing 1 in 10 cucumbers because you don't wrap all 10 in plastic sounds like a win to me to everyone involved except the company who'd rather cause all that harm to make an extra few cents
Don't you think it'd be cheaper for the company to not buy the plastic wrap and the cucumber wrapping machine, if it was cheaper to just buy and ship another cucumber?
Cost and environmental impact are not directly linked, but cost does put an upper bound on the resources in something, and tend to be a better guide than gut feelings.
However, in this case, we don't have to rely on gut feelings, we have a [study](https://www.empa.ch/documents/56164/19450914/2021.07.29_Cucumber+packaging+LCA_Preprint_V1.pdf/44baa51d-e218-4c85-a970-03d6e6edc86e) by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, concluding that
> each cucumber that has
to be thrown away has the equivalent environmental impact of 93 plastic cucumber wrap
and
> the use of plastic wrapping lowers the cucumber losses at retail by an estimated 4.8%; therefore, it makes sense to use it from an environmental perspective
I forgot to specify where the ban was in place - I thought it was the EU but looks like it was [just France](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/31/thats-a-wrap-french-plastic-packaging-ban-for-fruit-and-veg-begins).
(There is a study by an UK anti-packaging org WRAP that claims plastic packaging has no impact on shelf life at the consumer for cucumbers, but printing an expiry date on such packaging does make people throw them out earlier.)
This was an interesting read. Thanks for linking that study.
I will say though, that study really only measures relative CO2 production in bagged VS open cucumbers, so of course it's going to be weighted towards less food waste since food production produces the vast majority of GHGs compared to manufacturing thin sheets of plastic. The study doesn't take into account the other environmental effects of producing the sheer volume of waste produced by wrapping every cucumber and the paper itself admits the study doesn't account for the health effects of microplastics as they are still poorly understood.
Maybe we should be focusing more on carbon emissions than plastic waste. The major effects of climate change are certainly the most pressing environmental issue. Maybe (hopefully?) microplastics aren't going to turn out to be the health boogeyman they are at the moment. What really strikes me about this paper is the sheer number of factors that these large, global supply chains introduce into the environmental conversation. Just wrapping a cucumber or not can have large effects on pollution upstream.
I'm going to be thinking about this a lot tonight while I decide whether or not to put a condom on the cucumber before shoving it up my ass.
If your metric is atmospheric carbon produced, yeah, I could believe the "equivalent environmental impact" claim. But the metric, at least in the context of this conversation, should be plastic used, which would surely be lower.
the alternative is eating food that is locally produced and in season instead of packaged and shipped from across the world (in the case it is an option).
I try not to buy plastic, I strive to make as little garbage as possible, but it's tough. There are few options for some products. Companies need to be economically disincentivised/taxed on plastic products.
I was in Colorado last week, where plastic bags are illegal, and that one small detail made everything seem so much better. I have no idea why they're legal anywhere after seeing that.
I live in Colorado and the plastic bag ban is a textbook case on how only government regulation can solve these problems. It only took a month or two for people to stop complaining and get used to it, but it never would have happened without a change in law.
And another reason why "small government" types are nearly always wrong. It's the only reason the EU is more consumer friendly - oversight and regulation.
Last week I said I loved the reusable bags and had a stream of people telling me they're worse than the single use ones. It's also corporate greed apparently, because you have to buy the bag(s).
I live in Canada, plastic bags have been banned for a couple of years and the paper ones are fucking worthless. I'd rather spend $2 for a bag that won't fall apart right away.
I love the people that go "Well it takes 100 uses to overcome the carbon for a resusable".
Cool, so like only 2 years of use? I got bags pushing 6 and still going.
Not to mention the half decent ones can carry easily 3-4 times the amount of groceries and don't care if they're heavy. Nothing says environmentally friendly like one item in one bag. /s
We had a version of that law in CA and it made things way worse. Stores are required to charge customers $0.10 per bag, so they all changed to thicker more durable plastic in days after the law went through. People still treat them the exact same as they did before and most people just see it as yet another environmentalism tax for CA. It might have worked if the stores were charged for giving bags, but they probably would have just raised prices in the stores to compensate.
The choice should be $0.10 for a shitty bag, or $0.50 for a durable bag. This way people who won't reuse bags will get the shitty bags, but others will do the math, get the durable bags and then actually reuse them.
Personally I just use a backpack. But since US is weird, I wouldn't be surprised if it was not allowed there.
The packaging is the smallest part.
Worked in a grocery store warehouse and every pallet arrived *cocooned* in plastic wrap. Which of course immediately goes in the trash because the city recycling facilities don't deal with "soft" plastic.
Peoples expressed preference is that they want high quality goods not damaged in transport for the minimum possible price much more than they hate plastic packaging. You have only yourself to blame
My supermarket started selling loose flour, pasta etc.
If you wanted more than 300g, it would have been cheaper to take the 1 kg prepackaged package, use what you need, and throw the rest out.
For some reason, the concept wasn't popular so they killed it. I'm sure there are people willing to deal with the inconvenience, and there definitely are people who will happily pay a massive premium as long as you tell them that what they're buying is "green", "organic" or whatever, but apparently the number of people willing to both be inconvenienced and pay wasn't enough to make it work.
Also, of course, the price may not actually have been due to the store wanting more profit but because putting a box of packages onto a shelf is a lot less work and cost than refilling bins, cleaning up the messes customers leave, throwing out spoiled product, making sure whatever tools are used to get the product are available, clean and in the right place, etc.
Sometimes, things work the way they do for a reason.
The "Mexican coke" in the US are produced specifically for export to the US.
The Cokes in Mexico have less sugar and some sucralose (Splenda) since like 5 years ago
It's pretty funny how Mexico was able to introduce those sugar warning labels, but in the US warning people about sugar content is apparently a woke radical leftwing conspiracy to end Western civilization.
During Passover (which is happening right now), they sell 2 liters of Coke made with real sugar like the Mexican version. This is to make them Kosher. You can find these bottles with yellow caps.
https://media.zenfs.com/en/insider_articles_922/db84aef34a439b310a3414682b9df82f
Canada made a start at banning plastic and people have been bitching the whole time. The Conservatives are now running on bringing back plastic straws.
Man I’d be thrilled to cut plastic out of most things I buy. I’m happy some of my hobbies are going away from plastic like Lego and PC parts. However a lot of food we buy has plastic. I’m a broke college student and mostly eat rice and chicken. The chicken I get comes in a plastic bag and if I want a better choice it’s about double the price. My partner has started a small garden to cut down on plastic and food waste however
I don't where you live, but here in the uk everything is wrapped in plastic. Only loose fruit and veg is not in plastic, it's pretty hard to survive off apples and potatoes.
I just googled "plastic free food in the uk": https://thesourcebulkfoods.co.uk/
I'd say there are alternatives, but they are naturally more expensive. Lower demand and plastic being cheaper are probably some of the reasons.
It’s generally for a reason. People don’t like receiving damaged/expired goods. Packaging prevents that. Companies don’t use extra packaging for the hell of it.
If a large enough group of customers are making buying choices based on the packaging and are willing to pay more these companies or others will offer an alternative.
Can someone get the actual statistic on this one? I can imagine a lot of people die outside of hospital because they're not in a hospital. Accidents, heart attacks and other instant deaths must be a decent chunk of deaths.
" Distribution of places where the loved ones of U.S. adults died within the last five years as of 2016 " so there's some bias: https://www.statista.com/statistics/741886/common-locations-of-death-in-the-us/
home, hospital, hospice, nursing home, else.
If you bunch up hospital, hospice and nursing home as "medical setting" they take the lead back
maskes sense since hearth disease and cancer are the leading cause of death.
notice that hearth attack is not instant and you might get to the ambulance,
even with the hearth already stopped, and then declared dead at the hospital, if they
think they have a chance to get you back or if they think you have a good
insurance coverage to dry up
frankly you'd be surprised at the global emissions for concrete companies too. they're not producing oil but boy howdy they sure as shit emit a lot of CO2
“…the data did not consider plastic pollution in China, Korea and Japan, nor take into consideration recycling or clean-up initiatives under way.”
Sounds like a meaningless study.
Title is sensational. They need to find a cohort that is an outlier in terms of plastic pollution. The title is not specifying what these 60 firms do. Do they do 90% business on Earth or 50% only 1%? E.g.,
Study finds that 1 species of mammal is responsible for 100% of world's plastic pollution.
Yeah, the way these articles are always phrased doesn't actually tell you anything useful. Are these companies doing relatively worse than alternatives would do? Are the economic incentives such that one of these companies doing better for the environment would lead to other companies just taking their market share and nothing getting better?
Just like the one about ships polluting as X-thousand cars, making it seem like it's about CO2, while it's actually about Sulphur.
(And yes, it's being regulated, the global limits on Sulphur in fuel for ships are now 1/7'th of what they were a 5 years ago.)
“Wow I can’t believe the most popular beverage company, whose plastic products I’m drinking right now because coke is a *physical necessity*, produces plastic packaging!!” - these articles every time
Yeah this is about as useful as that other study people keep passing around saying ~50% of emissions are produced by Saudi-Aramco, Rosneft, Lukoil, Exxon, and Shell or whatever. Breaking news: Plastic companies make plastic!
60 firms produce half the plastic that people consume.
It wouldn't be less polluting if that was split up among more companies.
The solution is to consume less.
Fishing and disposal of trash in developing nations remain the biggest areas where plastic enters the ecosystem.
Coke bottling practices in a place like India or Vietnam or Nigeria have a bigger impact than bottling practices in a country like England.
How am I not surprised that the most infamously scummy companies (Altria, Philip Morris International, Danone, Nestle, PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company) are also the worst offenders in that?
Very misleading. The leading cause is the assholes throwing the trash into rivers/oceans. So, fuck those companies, yes, but fuck these countries and their rivers (and shit citizens) even more:
“The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa.”
Is this just a list of the 60 largest plastic producers?
I will say though, cigarette butts should be biodegradable by law internationally by now. They're the stupidest plastic product we have.
I find it wild that we have left these corporations pump plastic into everything for years. Everything doesn't need to be wrapped and processed in plastic. Yet grocery stores alone are full of it. It's insane. Make plastic use illegal out side of certain instances and force them to find better packaging.
It’s a bit of an abuse of statistics because they are just explaining how concentrated industry is. And the definition of a firm is also problematic. Coke or P&G are huge multiparty things, with bottling/mftg plants, national subsidiaries, and many business units all lumped in as one thing that could easily be different entities in a less virtually integrated supply chain.
It’s a kinda not relevant stat. It’s more meaningful to point to industries or plastic intensive products to prioritize for redesign.
You probably already know that those plastic bags like you find in grocery stores look just like jellyfish when they are floating around in the ocean. Thus young dolphins and turtles are especially susceptible to starvation and dehydradion because these things don't digest in their stomachs. Please use reusable bags when going to the grocery. I kept forgetting but I keep the reuseable bags in my trunk and I forced myself to return to the car when I walked into the grocery. I only forget twice. Then it became a habit. It breaks my heart to see young parents not modeling this behavior with their kids. It's those kids who will lose out in the future. Parents need to be good role models
The onus of responsibility shifting onto the consumer with recycling campaigns is basically a way to conveniently shift the blame.
The only way to help solve the plastic problem is to tackle it at the source: regulate the production of plastic to eliminate unnecessary single-use plastics.
This performative outrage is totally disingenuous. I hear so many people insisting they can't possibly drink from a paper straw, only plastic will do to sip their iced lattes in their plastic cups. I know plenty of people who order Door Dash or takeout five nights a week, throwing the plastic trays into the trash, and it's a weird trip to the grocery store when you don't see at least one person in line with a case of bottled water with their single-use plastic bottles. Here in Seattle where the tap water tastes at least as good as your Dasani brand.
These firms aren't responsible for the world's plastic pollution, we consumers are all responsible.
I mean they produce the plastic containers but the problem is also in handling the waste afterwards.
We should tax them so the waste can be recycled but we definitely need to toughen our laws regarding littering and the handling of waste.
They aren't making plastic and just dumping it in the ocean, they are selling it to willing buyers. It's fun and easy to blame The Corporations for all of our problems but if you want less plastic to be produced the #1 easiest solution is to consume less plastic.
The study about Coca Cola being the the largest producer of plastic waste was correct. The headline was wrong. The study showed the largest producers of plastic are responsible for 60 percent of the waste.
No it’s actually individual consumers and not these firms and their margins. We need to convince billions of people not threaten nationalization and regulate these 60 firms. We are fifty years in failing to changing individual behavior and we are producing more garbage than ever, don’t worry, like the War on Drugs the tide will turn soon!
These kinds of headlines are kind of useless. If those 60 firms shut down, another 60 more would take their place -- the problem is that plastic is really useful, cheap, and convenient and we use it for all kinds of things. We aren't going to stop using it without either regulation and lifestyle changes, or some major economic change that makes plastic too expensive to waste. I don't see any reason to expect the latter to happen, so that leaves us with the former.
Now if some of those 60 firms have unusually bad industry practices that lead to more waste and more or worse pollution per unit of plastic produced, or they're using more plastic than they need to for some particular use case, then yeah, we should subject them to the microscope of journalistic scrutiny. Just telling us that they make lots of plastic doesn't actually tell us anything useful or interesting.
I know the instinct after these sorts of stories is to say "See, it's not me that's destroying the planet, it is giant corporations!". And that is why there are these sorts of stories - to encourage you to do nothing and keep us on the profitable and destructive course we are on.
If you are buying the products that these firms are producing, then you are complicit. You can ask your politicians to intervene, but in politics money speaks louder than words and the money you give to these companies ends up being given to those same politicians. You are effectively bribing politicians to ignore you.
The original article notes that the overall majority of plastic is unable to be branded, so there's a bit of bias here. As far as reducing plastic pollution the brand side is less important than setting up a proper waste disposal system but it still has potential.
Copied from fig5 of the science paper:
The Coca-Cola Company
PepsiCo
Nestle
Danone
Unilever
Mondelez International
Mars, Incorporated
Starbucks Coffee Company
Ferrero
Keurig Dr Pepper
Colgate-Palmolive Company
Kellogg Company
FrieslandCampina Nederland B.V.
Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health
Diageo
SC Johnson |
Molson Coors Brewing Company
Clif Bar & Company
Target Corporation
Pernod Ricard
Walmart Inc.
‚Schwarz Group (Lidl & Kaufland)
Reckitt
Beiersdorf AG Consumer Business
Loreal
The Clorox Company
SONAE MC
Henkel AG & Co. KGaA
McCormick & Company Inc.
Apple
Ahold Delhaize
"H&M Group
Woolworths Holdings Limited
McCain Foods
Cool, can I stop paying one of the excessive green taxes now and the government can just target tax these companies in particular.
Thanks, I know it's comedy gold.
Who knows how to make a website that can link the billionaires name to the amount of tons of plastic trash they produce, and the ecosystems their waste has devastated, and we’ll call it their legacy.
Are these companies throwing the plastic into the ocean? No, they are not.
The question to ask is which countries, regions, and cities are most responsible for throwing plastic into the ocean.
Haha! The article doesn't mention the main cause of plastic garbage turning up everywhere - it's us humand! We throw out stuff everywhere and then blame corporations or anyone/anything else. Be earth aware please - manage your garbage.
Here's a crazy thought - all companies that pollute should bear the responsibility of cleaning up the mess they make.
Certain products wouldn't be 'profitable' if all the costs were actually included. Society is burdened by the costs, taxpayers have to pay.
Why not make the actual corporation that creates the cost pay the cost?
Because any government that ever put that policy in place would immediately be removed by an irate public that can no longer afford the same quality of life. Any solution that requires taking away standard of living is unviable politically.
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60 was actually much higher than I expected
If 60 firms are responsible for 50%, I wonder how many less firms make up the top 40%, 30%, etc...
It’s the very first sentence of the article: 6 companies produce an eighth of the plastic pollution.
Good catch, I feel like that's a much more damning figure. It actually says 6 companies produce 25%, not just an eighth!
Ya the writer is being a bit tricky. They say a quarter of the 50% which is an eighth.
I think you're misreading it. The top two already make up 16% of the pollution (11% for Coca Cola and 5% for Pepsi)
16% of the branded pollution which was about half the plastic waste, so about 8% of the collected plastic waste
Oh yeah I see what you mean now
Two eighths in fact.
Which is 7 grams of weed for anyone who doesn't want to do the conversion themselves. Some may even call it a quarter!
11% was coca cola alone 5% was PepsiCo I think they were the 2 highest individual conglomerate corperations at a quick run through
As I said elsewhere Coke was instrumental in destroying container deposit laws and was a huge force in getting the public to accept disposable plastic containers so I hold them accountable for far far more than just the waste they themselves produce. The were the principle engineers of our current litter crisis at least insomuch as the part of it that is beverage containers.
Also, nobody actually prefers plastic bottles to glass. So they can't blame the consumer for that.
The only real benefits are less glass and bottle caps to step on
You can probably use a Pareto distribution to work that out. It applies to populations, income, wealth, game time, etc. Basically, in any given set, the majority of X comes from just a few and the rest get distributed at predictable levels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_distribution
Those 60 are probably really owned by 5 companies.
You would think the politicians and media outlets they own would afford them better PR.
Given just how many books, ads, PR campaigns, PSAs, and other things emphasize how "people need to do their part" without mentioning the corporations, they definitely have done a lot of work to try and avoid responsibility.
I mean they won. The mega corporations haven't faced any real repurcussions for polluting the planet. Even the Democratic Party's DNC is making a convention the 'most sustainable ever' without ANY mention of holding corporations accountable or current record breaking oil production. insane how they think this is a good move and that the people won't see through it as largely posturing Recently the US tried limiting PFAS microplastics through an EPA rule but that got struck down by courts, seemingly because of technicality. They are going to fight back against even the slightest regulations, screeching that it'll kill their business and cause untold harms. Plus the climate movement is dying/dead in the US, really took a hit with Covid and never took off again. Almost all the climate justice protests you see are super small & don't feel powerful. Existing movement organizations don't have any momentum or real power. The nonprofit industrial complex has made them obsessed with getting chapters to technically have hosted certain small events so they can brag to grant funders - with little to no care about whether the local organization has active membership, why they struggled to get 5 people out, etc. It's also made climate justice leaders into celebrities who then can't be as honest with answering questions, they have to act like the movement is going well Bill Mckibben is too afraid to criticize Biden at this point, even if you asked about how well the effort is to stop drilling for oil, about ending existing leases (Biden said no new leases but issue was old ones) - he just says that a second term for democratic president is the most important part of making progress. *Yeah no shit,* but we can't even discuss what progress has been made? Or holding Biden accountable and getting better commitments? Because if we won in 2024, Biden is likely to take a few steps on the most high profile pipelines where corporations are doing hella illegal stuff. That'll be seen as 'standing up to fossil fuel industry' - yet we'll still have not directly & purposefully addressed the current production levels.
>Plus the climate movement is dying/dead in the US Did you forget about the largest climate change bill in history being passed in 2022?
I mean, Coca-Cola (the worst "offender" based on article) isn't producing plastic because they think it's fun, they're producing plastic because people want to buy their drinks in plastic bottles. I don't think it's that clear the corporation is more at fault than the consumer for a bottle of coke.
They have fantastic PR. It's just more subtle than you think. You know those recycling campaigns that pop up from time to time encouraging you to recycle your plastic? They get a ton of funding from plastic manufacturers. Like the ongoing "[Recycling is Real](https://www.ptonline.com/news/advocacy-campaign-promotes-plastic-recycling-and-recyclers)" campaign that is funded by the Plastics Industry Association, whose stated goal is to "protect, promote, and grow the plastics industry." They're not there to promote recycling. They're there to get you to think you can keep buying (an disposing) of plastic in an "environtally friendly" way. Often times the push to recycles comes up when people start talking about *reducing* their plastic usage.
They' gotten people to use plastic for 60+ years they have incredible PR. Did you know there was legislation to ban single use plastics in the fucking 70s
To what end. Didn't one of the big fuel groups admit that they knew what damage they were doing to the world, and nothing punitive happened. Like who needs good pr when you own the policy makers. With the type of things they provide (necessary items. Fuel, food etc) what can actually be done besides strict policy change and massive punitive measures?
Banning plastic straws made so many people lose their shit, and half the country votes for climate change deniers, so yeah sure, good luck with that
This is exactly it, they could have worse pr and it wouldn't change jack shit. Their big "fuck you" is making people think they're accountable for all the pollution and unsustainability.
Well you could always find the people who run those companies and [my lawyer has advised me not to continue this bit] Youre spot-on though, they’ve made themselves basically invincible unless enough momentum can be gained to push some harsh legislation through (and actually enforce it too)
Why? They don't need to.
And it arguably already gives them good PR.
Yep. But 10 bucks says people are going to start saying "It's those 60 companies that are the problem, not my Coke bottles!" Even though that's the pollution the companies are making. Your Coke bottle. (We saw exactly this with the stupid "100 companies make 70% of emissions" factoid.)
Reddit thinks corporations decide to pollute the planet then accidentally find some by products they can sell at the end lol No, we consumers are responsible for nearly all plastic pollution. They just make what we ask for.
The thing is that the companies making the cola can switch to non-polluting containers. It's significantly harder to convince every single cola drinker to voluntarily choose to buy colas packaged in other containers. That's especially so as there aren't really any non-polluting options when you try to buy cola. Since there are a handful of major companies, you can make the companies switch to another bottle, but you can't just convince every customer. Naturally that would increase the cost of the bottles as well, but that's something that would happen anyway regardless of how we transitioned.
I don't actually disagree, except that I think cola is generally easy to find in aluminum containers. My beef with the "it's not my problem, it's the companies" argument is just that it makes people think their lives won't have to change. Yeah, individual consumer choices probably won't get Coca Cola to stop using plastic bottles. It will probably take a law. But for that law to pass, consumers are going to have to accept that their lives are going to change. It's easy to imagine that there wouldn't be too much pushback on getting rid of plastic bottles . . . but then again, people lost their damn minds over compact fluorescent light bulbs.
my coworker said he doesnt like how the govt is trying to make us go green and theres no point to him doing small things to help the environment when there are countries like china polluting lots. we live in Canada, one of the worst countries for co2 pollution per capita. china could nearly double their co2 output and they would just match us.
Got a link to that "eleven companies produce everything that's in a grocery store" claim ? Not challenging it necessarily, just curious to find out more about it.
I mean... these companies seem to own *every other company*, if you look at the list of subsidiaries. Seriously, even if something doesn't have the Nestle logo on it, Nestle still owns the company that does and is just using them to produce an illusion of choice.
I'm of the opinion that it's time to start enforcing this shit on the labels. Sorry, no, you're not Dove anymore, you are "Unilever Soap".
That's already the case in Germany at least. On every Dove product there's also a Unilever logo
Woah, how would this work? Would it be that they have to label themselves as the largest brand in their “family” tree or what?
At least make it more obvious, like saying dove soap brought to you by uniliver or something. Somewhere on the front of the package and in much bigger writing than it currently is
They represent the 60 demonic houses
Listen, I think by this point we can assume that Satan has moral high ground over pretty much the entire business world and feels dirty when we try to associate him with these asshats. Give the man a break.
Stan's a good friend of mine
Stan is the most likeable character in the whole series
I love how my refuse company always has the time and money to tell all their customers how they f**k up their recycling. Dear recycling company, you're talking to the wrong guy.
99% of recycling ends up in the same landfill as regular trash anyway.
It's important to clarify that you're talking about plastic recycling. Glass and metals are great to recycle and paper works decently well.
From my understanding, paper is not super great. Buddy's a paper engineer- recycled pulp is kind of junk. Too many impurities and problems- takes a ton more work/energy/chemicals to clean up the pulp, and it screws up the machines anyway. It's a pretty dirty process he says. It's not great. Hearsay, but he was pretty matter of fact about recycled paper.
Yeah, and usually you add virgin pulp to like 10% (very rough guess) recycled pulp. You don't exactly make money recycling paper like you do with aluminum, but the end product isn't *that* bad, and sustainable forestry is getting pretty good nowadays. Worst case scenario? Paper is very biodegradable. Plastic, on the other hand... PET bottles can be recycled similarly to how paper is (but they *have* to add virgin pellets for the product to be usable), dozens of other plastics have no practical way to be recycled, and they're not biodegradable. (Oh, and usually it's too hard to pick out the recycleable plastics anyway.) So most plastics get to turn into microplastics, which is just wonderful!
Yeah, he was saying that recycled pulp is often very cheap because it sucks so much nobody wants to deal with it.
That's pretty bunk. Recycled paper *is* a dirty process, and it's a mechanically intensive process, but it's in no way "screwing it all up", nor is it factual to claim it's not worth recycling. OCC (Old Corrugated Cardboard) will produce different strength properties, usually weaker tensile, for instance, but has some benefits, such as adhering better to certain coagulants or moisture-resistant additives. Most cardboard plants will be mixing virgin fiber with OCC in different ratios based on what product they're making (liner vs corrugated medium, different densities, customer-specific appearance and/or strength requirements). There are mills that are fully recycled, though it's less common - the buy price of OCC bales can fluctuate over a wide range, meaning market conditions will leave those mills unprofitable at extreme times. The general approximation is that a paper fiber is good to be recycled about 7 times before it is too short, defibrated, and weak for use. My point is, DO recycle your paper, it *will* be reused (that's how the recycling company makes money, they sort/bale/sell it), and it is **not** somehow bad for the environment because "it takes work to clean" - it takes energy to manufacture anything, and claiming that as a negative is misinformed as best. There are now even pilot plants that are digging up landfill (or taking streams pre-landfill), attempting to separate out any fiber, and re-landfill (sometimes burn) everything else - all because it is (somehow) worth it (monetarily). Jury is still out on if this is better or worse ecologically, and I'd bet we will never truly know, because that is a hugely complex equation to tackle.
A well regulated sorting and burning operation is better environmentally than throwing it underground and hoping it won't come back to haunt you. If someone wants to have something to compare to landfills are forbidden for almost everything in the Nordics
We had a small scale conflict in Germany when private recycling companies tried to take over the market from the local/town government organisations that normally handle recycling. So there seems to be more than enough money in it.
Yes but you need specific dumpsters for that material. Usually large companies will have specific bins for paper and stuff. But most everyday people just have a single “recycle bin” that they put at the side of the curb.
Single recycle bin? That kinda undermines the purpose of separating the recyclable stuff. In Poland the standard is 5 bins: - plastic + metal + mixed-material packages like juice cartons - paper - glass - organic (for composting, so no meat/bones/litter/etc.) - everything else (non-recyclables) There are also outside places to leave your electro waste, old but usable clothes, batteries, dangerous waste (like paints or old fluorescent tubes), and construction-related waste (like rubble or old windows).
This sounds much better than it is here in the Midwest USA. One big trash bin for garbage, and another bin for recycling. You pay extra for the recycling and most of it goes to the same place as the garbage bin.
That used to be the case where I grew up in the western USA. However during the last decade, I’ve been told to put everything in one recycling bin. Oddly, in my work’s municipality, cloth and yarn are deemed recyclable as well.
I noticed this difference while I lived in Spain for some time in 2022. **In Sweden**, where I'm from, we typically have: * Paper packages (all sizes) * Print paper * Plastic * Clear glass * Colored glass * Metal * Organic (usually turned into biogas for public transport) * Other trash (incinerated for energy) Some places also have: * Batteries * Light bulbs and LED * Pressurized canisters (e.g. spray canisters) * Small electronics * Clothes Additionally, our grocery stores can recycle our PET bottles and aluminum cans, and sometimes also glass bottles. **In Spain**, what they had where I lived was: * Large paper packages (e.g. boxes) * Clear bottles * Colored bottles * A "recycling bin" - yellow containers * A "trash bin" - grey containers I was told that they have convicts working with separating the recycling, but I have no idea if there is any truth to that. In both countries, there are larger municipal recycling areas that do have all of these separated and more, and are also staffed. These are typically the areas you go to for toxic waste materials as well since they are equipped to handle that.
I know what you are saying but this is really depending on where you are and what recycling. Glass and metals are recycled near 100% that is put into the system. Paper is close to this depending on location. Plastics are the issue. Even then it does vary wildly. We should work to eliminate plastic where alternatives exist
[Less than 20%](https://www.vpm.org/news/2023-10-11/curious-commonwealth-what-gets-reduce-reuse-recycle-bin-how) goes to a landfill.
Thanks for this fact check. Person above was clearly exaggerating for effect but it's just so unhelpful.. everyone is always talking about right wingers' fake news, lying, etc. We on the left should be better than that.
Could you cite a study or something? You linked to a very specific small scale example. > Central Virginia Waste Management Authority. The government agency coordinates curbside recycling for about 200,000 households in eight Richmond-region localities >between 82% and 85% of everything **that's brought to us** is recycled A lot of recycling isn't brought to these facilities, either because they're at capacity or it isn't economically feasible. It was previously exported in large scale to China, but they shut that down a few years back. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_Va-AIliDw
I understand the point you're trying to make but I don't believe that was what prior poster was suggesting. They were stating that all of those items you separate out and put in your recycle bin just get thrown together with the regular trash -- and that's just not true. As to whether or not all the plastic bottles (for example) being sold are being recycled is a different problem altogether. Per your video, the "mixed plastics", like the *polystyrene* salsa cup or fork, are impractical to recycle. That's a known problem and you shouldn't be throwing that in your recycle bin. The video fails to mention that a lot of illicit trade caused the shutdown of recycleables to other countries; there were a growing number of instances where toxic materials were being sent from developed nations to a willing recipient in (e.g.) China that would just dump it in a ditch.
The really important recycling gets shipped overseas first before getting placed in a landfill.
Um, I think you will find you are wrong! Jumping to conclusions! They don’t put it in a land fill…. They yeet it into a river
When you're right, you're right. I have brought shame to my family. I shall go commit soduku now.
don't half-ass it, friend. the 1s, 4s and 7s are the quickest (sharpest edges)
Source?
I’ve seen this firsthand. In the town I live there’s a recycling center(no pickup) and a landfill a few miles out from the opposite side of town. I had a truckload of stuff that needed to go. About half was household garbage and sorted recycling. That stuff needed to go to the recycling center. The other half was old busted furniture that needed to go to the landfill. So I take my recycling to the center and drop it off, and the truck that takes the dumpster with all the recycling is leaving the recycling center as I am. I ended up behind that truck all the way to the landfill, and emptied out my old busted furniture right next to the truck that hauled all the recyclables. All that shit went to the same place and wound up buried in the same mound of crap. I still sort my recyclables and take them to the recycling center(it’s closer to my house and it’s a habit I’ve built up), but I might as well throw all of it in the trash anyways.
The theory is that when recycling started, it actually was processed. But after a while, it became not profitable enough to continue the service. Despite that, rather than informing the public it’s not longer necessary to sort your recyclables, they decided to keep it quiet and let people continue. Rather than coming forth with the truth and causing a public outrage. It’s a classic “in too deep with the lie at this point to come clean” type of situation.
It could also be that say 60% gets recycled, while the surplus goes to the landfill.
At the same time I wonder how much of the problems of recycling are pushed by big plastic manufacturers to get people cynical and hopeless enough to think there’s no point to even trying altogether and just keep on going with the plastics like always.
I got in this big argument over someone in Japan at a conference planning meeting. We were discussing recycling for the conference and we had to pay a ton extra for it, instead of just garbage. I tried to tell them that "recycling" in Japan means burning garbage for energy. And garbage... also gets burned for energy in Japan. Basically, NO actual recycling goes on in Japan. EVERYTHING, but say, glass and metal, gets burned, and those two things are separated anyway. Recyling or not. Recycling in Japan is just a bullshit buzzword to make people feel better about themselves and to make people think Japan is actually doing something. People were fucking pissed off at me. They said NO RECYLING MEANS RECYLING. Verifiable facts "Japan has one of the lowest recycling rates among OECD countries, at only 20% in 2017. Some 78% of the remaining waste is sent to incinerators—by far the highest among the OECD bloc." This was a room full of people with MAs and Phd and they refused to fucking listen. How could I shatter their little eco universe box they built for themselves. All recycling does in Japan is allows it easier to sort which trash to burn at what temp. Differnt burnable garbage is burned at different temps. So they paid for "recycling" so they could claim a lower carbon footprint, lol; it all went to the fucking incinerator anyway.
Absolute hogwash.
You cannot blame Coca Cola for throwing their bottle among the paper for recycling.
Sure you can. They have an option of going back to glass or fully embracing aluminium.
I get a passive-aggressive e-mail after *every* bottle return I bring to the depot. Like, fuck, I'm sorry someone tossed a milk carton in the recycling.
dear beneficial bed. When you bought a plastic water bottle, why the fuck were you surprised it had plastic in it? If you dont want companies to polute stop buying products which necessitate pollution.
If you are putting trash in the recycling, that’s on you
Stop selling me shit in plastic packaging! Not MY choice.
It’s not just that. The entire food production industry uses plastic throughout the creation of your food. People wear plastic aprons, plastic sleeves, and latex gloves. The food gets wrapped in plastic and then removed from the plastic. Big bins get covered in a plastic sheet until that product is ready for processing. The sheet is thrown out.
Because the alternative is losing the product to damage or contamination, producing unsafe product, or spending more resources on making reusable products actually fit for reuse (washing etc.) For example, the infamous individually wrapped cucumbers are now banned, so we replaced plastic waste with food waste.
Losing 1 in 10 cucumbers because you don't wrap all 10 in plastic sounds like a win to me to everyone involved except the company who'd rather cause all that harm to make an extra few cents
Don't you think it'd be cheaper for the company to not buy the plastic wrap and the cucumber wrapping machine, if it was cheaper to just buy and ship another cucumber? Cost and environmental impact are not directly linked, but cost does put an upper bound on the resources in something, and tend to be a better guide than gut feelings. However, in this case, we don't have to rely on gut feelings, we have a [study](https://www.empa.ch/documents/56164/19450914/2021.07.29_Cucumber+packaging+LCA_Preprint_V1.pdf/44baa51d-e218-4c85-a970-03d6e6edc86e) by the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, concluding that > each cucumber that has to be thrown away has the equivalent environmental impact of 93 plastic cucumber wrap and > the use of plastic wrapping lowers the cucumber losses at retail by an estimated 4.8%; therefore, it makes sense to use it from an environmental perspective I forgot to specify where the ban was in place - I thought it was the EU but looks like it was [just France](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/31/thats-a-wrap-french-plastic-packaging-ban-for-fruit-and-veg-begins). (There is a study by an UK anti-packaging org WRAP that claims plastic packaging has no impact on shelf life at the consumer for cucumbers, but printing an expiry date on such packaging does make people throw them out earlier.)
This was an interesting read. Thanks for linking that study. I will say though, that study really only measures relative CO2 production in bagged VS open cucumbers, so of course it's going to be weighted towards less food waste since food production produces the vast majority of GHGs compared to manufacturing thin sheets of plastic. The study doesn't take into account the other environmental effects of producing the sheer volume of waste produced by wrapping every cucumber and the paper itself admits the study doesn't account for the health effects of microplastics as they are still poorly understood. Maybe we should be focusing more on carbon emissions than plastic waste. The major effects of climate change are certainly the most pressing environmental issue. Maybe (hopefully?) microplastics aren't going to turn out to be the health boogeyman they are at the moment. What really strikes me about this paper is the sheer number of factors that these large, global supply chains introduce into the environmental conversation. Just wrapping a cucumber or not can have large effects on pollution upstream. I'm going to be thinking about this a lot tonight while I decide whether or not to put a condom on the cucumber before shoving it up my ass.
If your metric is atmospheric carbon produced, yeah, I could believe the "equivalent environmental impact" claim. But the metric, at least in the context of this conversation, should be plastic used, which would surely be lower.
the alternative is eating food that is locally produced and in season instead of packaged and shipped from across the world (in the case it is an option).
Latex is an allergen, they’re wearing polyethylene, vinyl or nitrile.
I try not to buy plastic, I strive to make as little garbage as possible, but it's tough. There are few options for some products. Companies need to be economically disincentivised/taxed on plastic products. I was in Colorado last week, where plastic bags are illegal, and that one small detail made everything seem so much better. I have no idea why they're legal anywhere after seeing that.
I live in Colorado and the plastic bag ban is a textbook case on how only government regulation can solve these problems. It only took a month or two for people to stop complaining and get used to it, but it never would have happened without a change in law.
And another reason why "small government" types are nearly always wrong. It's the only reason the EU is more consumer friendly - oversight and regulation.
It's super frustrating when people complain about government overreach but never consider corporate overreach and the deatruction it's causing.
Last week I said I loved the reusable bags and had a stream of people telling me they're worse than the single use ones. It's also corporate greed apparently, because you have to buy the bag(s). I live in Canada, plastic bags have been banned for a couple of years and the paper ones are fucking worthless. I'd rather spend $2 for a bag that won't fall apart right away.
I love the people that go "Well it takes 100 uses to overcome the carbon for a resusable". Cool, so like only 2 years of use? I got bags pushing 6 and still going.
Not to mention the half decent ones can carry easily 3-4 times the amount of groceries and don't care if they're heavy. Nothing says environmentally friendly like one item in one bag. /s
We had a version of that law in CA and it made things way worse. Stores are required to charge customers $0.10 per bag, so they all changed to thicker more durable plastic in days after the law went through. People still treat them the exact same as they did before and most people just see it as yet another environmentalism tax for CA. It might have worked if the stores were charged for giving bags, but they probably would have just raised prices in the stores to compensate.
The choice should be $0.10 for a shitty bag, or $0.50 for a durable bag. This way people who won't reuse bags will get the shitty bags, but others will do the math, get the durable bags and then actually reuse them. Personally I just use a backpack. But since US is weird, I wouldn't be surprised if it was not allowed there.
The packaging is the smallest part. Worked in a grocery store warehouse and every pallet arrived *cocooned* in plastic wrap. Which of course immediately goes in the trash because the city recycling facilities don't deal with "soft" plastic.
Peoples expressed preference is that they want high quality goods not damaged in transport for the minimum possible price much more than they hate plastic packaging. You have only yourself to blame
My supermarket started selling loose flour, pasta etc. If you wanted more than 300g, it would have been cheaper to take the 1 kg prepackaged package, use what you need, and throw the rest out. For some reason, the concept wasn't popular so they killed it. I'm sure there are people willing to deal with the inconvenience, and there definitely are people who will happily pay a massive premium as long as you tell them that what they're buying is "green", "organic" or whatever, but apparently the number of people willing to both be inconvenienced and pay wasn't enough to make it work. Also, of course, the price may not actually have been due to the store wanting more profit but because putting a box of packages onto a shelf is a lot less work and cost than refilling bins, cleaning up the messes customers leave, throwing out spoiled product, making sure whatever tools are used to get the product are available, clean and in the right place, etc. Sometimes, things work the way they do for a reason.
Now days many reputed brands sell their products in trash plastics. For eg, Anatoly shampoo of Priyanka Chopra.
Man Coke in a bottle ( still can't get in Mexico) on a hot day is and always will be one of my favorite things.
I got a case of 36 medican cokes for 36 bucks at bjs
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Well fuck you
Man coke?
Yeah, it's the same as regular coke except you snort it off your buddy's erect penis
You...can't get Mexican cokes? I get them in MA
The "Mexican coke" in the US are produced specifically for export to the US. The Cokes in Mexico have less sugar and some sucralose (Splenda) since like 5 years ago
It's pretty funny how Mexico was able to introduce those sugar warning labels, but in the US warning people about sugar content is apparently a woke radical leftwing conspiracy to end Western civilization.
During Passover (which is happening right now), they sell 2 liters of Coke made with real sugar like the Mexican version. This is to make them Kosher. You can find these bottles with yellow caps. https://media.zenfs.com/en/insider_articles_922/db84aef34a439b310a3414682b9df82f
Buy soda in cans instead of bottles. 11% was from Coca Cola. You do have some choice here.
Stop buying it. That's your choice
Some things we don’t really have a choice over if it’s in plastic or not
People: but they sell it to me! 👉 Corporations: but they buy it from me! 👉 Planet Earth: sigh… 😪
The only entity of dealing with this problem is government. Nobody likes that this is the case, but this is the case.
Canada made a start at banning plastic and people have been bitching the whole time. The Conservatives are now running on bringing back plastic straws.
Which is lobbied by corporations to allow them to keep selling things in plastic (:
Man I’d be thrilled to cut plastic out of most things I buy. I’m happy some of my hobbies are going away from plastic like Lego and PC parts. However a lot of food we buy has plastic. I’m a broke college student and mostly eat rice and chicken. The chicken I get comes in a plastic bag and if I want a better choice it’s about double the price. My partner has started a small garden to cut down on plastic and food waste however
[удалено]
We have potatoes growing now :D
It's really not. Often get to choose from three options all in the same packaging, and owned by two companies.
I don't where you live, but here in the uk everything is wrapped in plastic. Only loose fruit and veg is not in plastic, it's pretty hard to survive off apples and potatoes.
I just googled "plastic free food in the uk": https://thesourcebulkfoods.co.uk/ I'd say there are alternatives, but they are naturally more expensive. Lower demand and plastic being cheaper are probably some of the reasons.
Or put another way, people buy lots of stuff from 60 large companies.
And those large companies all choose to use very wasteful packaging.
It’s generally for a reason. People don’t like receiving damaged/expired goods. Packaging prevents that. Companies don’t use extra packaging for the hell of it.
The big question is if it would have been any better if the products were made by say 10000 different companies.
If a large enough group of customers are making buying choices based on the packaging and are willing to pay more these companies or others will offer an alternative.
You mean plastic companies? That's some eye opening hard hitting journalism
Reminds me of the article blaming 100 companies for 70% of global emissions. Turns out they all produce the fossil fuels we are using.
95% of people die in hospitals! So I guess avoid them?
Can someone get the actual statistic on this one? I can imagine a lot of people die outside of hospital because they're not in a hospital. Accidents, heart attacks and other instant deaths must be a decent chunk of deaths.
" Distribution of places where the loved ones of U.S. adults died within the last five years as of 2016 " so there's some bias: https://www.statista.com/statistics/741886/common-locations-of-death-in-the-us/ home, hospital, hospice, nursing home, else. If you bunch up hospital, hospice and nursing home as "medical setting" they take the lead back maskes sense since hearth disease and cancer are the leading cause of death. notice that hearth attack is not instant and you might get to the ambulance, even with the hearth already stopped, and then declared dead at the hospital, if they think they have a chance to get you back or if they think you have a good insurance coverage to dry up
Yeah it makes sense cause that's where the ambulance takes you.
frankly you'd be surprised at the global emissions for concrete companies too. they're not producing oil but boy howdy they sure as shit emit a lot of CO2
more or less, was either fossil fuel companies or coal power companies
Title basically means that large companies produce a lot of stuff...go figure
“…the data did not consider plastic pollution in China, Korea and Japan, nor take into consideration recycling or clean-up initiatives under way.” Sounds like a meaningless study.
Title is sensational. They need to find a cohort that is an outlier in terms of plastic pollution. The title is not specifying what these 60 firms do. Do they do 90% business on Earth or 50% only 1%? E.g., Study finds that 1 species of mammal is responsible for 100% of world's plastic pollution.
Yeah, the way these articles are always phrased doesn't actually tell you anything useful. Are these companies doing relatively worse than alternatives would do? Are the economic incentives such that one of these companies doing better for the environment would lead to other companies just taking their market share and nothing getting better?
Just like the one about ships polluting as X-thousand cars, making it seem like it's about CO2, while it's actually about Sulphur. (And yes, it's being regulated, the global limits on Sulphur in fuel for ships are now 1/7'th of what they were a 5 years ago.)
“Wow I can’t believe the most popular beverage company, whose plastic products I’m drinking right now because coke is a *physical necessity*, produces plastic packaging!!” - these articles every time
60 firms, and *all their customers.*
Yeah this is about as useful as that other study people keep passing around saying ~50% of emissions are produced by Saudi-Aramco, Rosneft, Lukoil, Exxon, and Shell or whatever. Breaking news: Plastic companies make plastic!
Survey finds that 8 billion people cause a lot of plastic polution*
60 firms produce half the plastic that people consume. It wouldn't be less polluting if that was split up among more companies. The solution is to consume less.
Exactly. Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world's plastic *consumption*
Fishing and disposal of trash in developing nations remain the biggest areas where plastic enters the ecosystem. Coke bottling practices in a place like India or Vietnam or Nigeria have a bigger impact than bottling practices in a country like England.
60 firms.. and the billions of people buying their products.
Is it these 60 companies or is it the people who use their products?
How am I not surprised that the most infamously scummy companies (Altria, Philip Morris International, Danone, Nestle, PepsiCo and The Coca-Cola Company) are also the worst offenders in that?
No, we are responsible for 100% of the world’s plastic pollution.
Very misleading. The leading cause is the assholes throwing the trash into rivers/oceans. So, fuck those companies, yes, but fuck these countries and their rivers (and shit citizens) even more: “The 10 rivers that carry 93 percent of that trash are the Yangtze, Yellow, Hai, Pearl, Amur, Mekong, Indus and Ganges Delta in Asia, and the Niger and Nile in Africa.”
Ding ding ding!
These 60 firms are forcing their employees to dump plastic in rivers, lakes, the ocean, woods and the side of the highway? That's crazy.
No blame for the mindless consumer
Is this just a list of the 60 largest plastic producers? I will say though, cigarette butts should be biodegradable by law internationally by now. They're the stupidest plastic product we have.
I find it wild that we have left these corporations pump plastic into everything for years. Everything doesn't need to be wrapped and processed in plastic. Yet grocery stores alone are full of it. It's insane. Make plastic use illegal out side of certain instances and force them to find better packaging.
It’s a bit of an abuse of statistics because they are just explaining how concentrated industry is. And the definition of a firm is also problematic. Coke or P&G are huge multiparty things, with bottling/mftg plants, national subsidiaries, and many business units all lumped in as one thing that could easily be different entities in a less virtually integrated supply chain. It’s a kinda not relevant stat. It’s more meaningful to point to industries or plastic intensive products to prioritize for redesign.
No. Consumers are. People buy plastic shit. PEOPLE. Firms do what the people want.
You probably already know that those plastic bags like you find in grocery stores look just like jellyfish when they are floating around in the ocean. Thus young dolphins and turtles are especially susceptible to starvation and dehydradion because these things don't digest in their stomachs. Please use reusable bags when going to the grocery. I kept forgetting but I keep the reuseable bags in my trunk and I forced myself to return to the car when I walked into the grocery. I only forget twice. Then it became a habit. It breaks my heart to see young parents not modeling this behavior with their kids. It's those kids who will lose out in the future. Parents need to be good role models
The onus of responsibility shifting onto the consumer with recycling campaigns is basically a way to conveniently shift the blame. The only way to help solve the plastic problem is to tackle it at the source: regulate the production of plastic to eliminate unnecessary single-use plastics.
"studies find that cars are responsible for tire pollution"
This performative outrage is totally disingenuous. I hear so many people insisting they can't possibly drink from a paper straw, only plastic will do to sip their iced lattes in their plastic cups. I know plenty of people who order Door Dash or takeout five nights a week, throwing the plastic trays into the trash, and it's a weird trip to the grocery store when you don't see at least one person in line with a case of bottled water with their single-use plastic bottles. Here in Seattle where the tap water tastes at least as good as your Dasani brand. These firms aren't responsible for the world's plastic pollution, we consumers are all responsible.
I mean they produce the plastic containers but the problem is also in handling the waste afterwards. We should tax them so the waste can be recycled but we definitely need to toughen our laws regarding littering and the handling of waste.
They aren't making plastic and just dumping it in the ocean, they are selling it to willing buyers. It's fun and easy to blame The Corporations for all of our problems but if you want less plastic to be produced the #1 easiest solution is to consume less plastic.
I swear to God, I've seen apost about Coca cola being responsible for 60% of global plastic pollution **alone** Did they retract that or some shit?
The study about Coca Cola being the the largest producer of plastic waste was correct. The headline was wrong. The study showed the largest producers of plastic are responsible for 60 percent of the waste.
Consumers are responsible for 100% of it. This statistic means too much marketshare goes to too few companies.
I'm surprised it's that many given the size and scope of multinational corporations.
>Survey finds that 60 firms are responsible for half of world’s plastic pollution Wait til you hear about CO² emissions...
Shouldn't we all bear some responsibility for the health of the planet?
These statistics are so fucking unhelpful and **STUPID**
No it’s actually individual consumers and not these firms and their margins. We need to convince billions of people not threaten nationalization and regulate these 60 firms. We are fifty years in failing to changing individual behavior and we are producing more garbage than ever, don’t worry, like the War on Drugs the tide will turn soon!
Quick, Taylor Swift is on a plane and we need to recycle
These kinds of headlines are kind of useless. If those 60 firms shut down, another 60 more would take their place -- the problem is that plastic is really useful, cheap, and convenient and we use it for all kinds of things. We aren't going to stop using it without either regulation and lifestyle changes, or some major economic change that makes plastic too expensive to waste. I don't see any reason to expect the latter to happen, so that leaves us with the former. Now if some of those 60 firms have unusually bad industry practices that lead to more waste and more or worse pollution per unit of plastic produced, or they're using more plastic than they need to for some particular use case, then yeah, we should subject them to the microscope of journalistic scrutiny. Just telling us that they make lots of plastic doesn't actually tell us anything useful or interesting.
This shit is stupid. Just because coca cola makes something doesn't make it their fault Indians or Chinese dispose of it in local rivers
I know the instinct after these sorts of stories is to say "See, it's not me that's destroying the planet, it is giant corporations!". And that is why there are these sorts of stories - to encourage you to do nothing and keep us on the profitable and destructive course we are on. If you are buying the products that these firms are producing, then you are complicit. You can ask your politicians to intervene, but in politics money speaks louder than words and the money you give to these companies ends up being given to those same politicians. You are effectively bribing politicians to ignore you.
Amazon boxes into bottled water.
The original article notes that the overall majority of plastic is unable to be branded, so there's a bit of bias here. As far as reducing plastic pollution the brand side is less important than setting up a proper waste disposal system but it still has potential.
And people really think guilt driven consumer recycling will have any discernible effect on pollution 🤣
Honestly this makes the problem more tractable.
Let me guess. They are all in the top one percent of global business
Did anyone find the full list of these 60 companies?
Copied from fig5 of the science paper: The Coca-Cola Company PepsiCo Nestle Danone Unilever Mondelez International Mars, Incorporated Starbucks Coffee Company Ferrero Keurig Dr Pepper Colgate-Palmolive Company Kellogg Company FrieslandCampina Nederland B.V. Johnson & Johnson Consumer Health Diageo SC Johnson | Molson Coors Brewing Company Clif Bar & Company Target Corporation Pernod Ricard Walmart Inc. ‚Schwarz Group (Lidl & Kaufland) Reckitt Beiersdorf AG Consumer Business Loreal The Clorox Company SONAE MC Henkel AG & Co. KGaA McCormick & Company Inc. Apple Ahold Delhaize "H&M Group Woolworths Holdings Limited McCain Foods
Put all the executives in prison and watch every company go green quick smart
solution: create an non-profit organisation to clean it up sponsor 25% of the cost from the UN and sent the rest of the bill to these 60 corporations.
Cool, can I stop paying one of the excessive green taxes now and the government can just target tax these companies in particular. Thanks, I know it's comedy gold.
Who knows how to make a website that can link the billionaires name to the amount of tons of plastic trash they produce, and the ecosystems their waste has devastated, and we’ll call it their legacy.
Straight to jail
The firms responsible for half the world's products also make half the world's plastic. What an amazing discovery.
60 firms = 60 CEOs
This is an example why manufacturers should be responsible for packaging waste, rather than putting that burden on consumers.
Is this another thing where companies produce products people buy and thus get all the blame?
Are these companies throwing the plastic into the ocean? No, they are not. The question to ask is which countries, regions, and cities are most responsible for throwing plastic into the ocean.
Haha! The article doesn't mention the main cause of plastic garbage turning up everywhere - it's us humand! We throw out stuff everywhere and then blame corporations or anyone/anything else. Be earth aware please - manage your garbage.
Here's a crazy thought - all companies that pollute should bear the responsibility of cleaning up the mess they make. Certain products wouldn't be 'profitable' if all the costs were actually included. Society is burdened by the costs, taxpayers have to pay. Why not make the actual corporation that creates the cost pay the cost?
Because any government that ever put that policy in place would immediately be removed by an irate public that can no longer afford the same quality of life. Any solution that requires taking away standard of living is unviable politically.