What If We Could Reuse The Packaging on Consumer Products? (adage.com) 178
"The shampoo bottle, the deodorant stick, razors and even your toothbrush -- they all get thrown away when they're empty or worn out. But if they were reusable -- or refillable -- just imagine how much waste could be avoided."
That's how Bloomberg describes the new "Loop" initiative being tested for one year by the New Jersey recycling company TerraCycle: This week, Loop began its U.S. trial, allowing consumers to use steel, glass and durable plastic reusable packaging for everyday items. Kroger Co. and Walgreens, along with such consumer brands as Procter & Gamble, Nestle, The Clorox Co. and Unilever, are taking part... For the trial, Loop is available online to customers in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. You can order products made by the participating companies that will be delivered to you in special reusable packaging.
Under the program, manufacturers have redesigned product containers for some of their most well-known products. Loop will collect a refundable deposit, sometimes $5 to $10, that customers will get back when they return their containers. UPS will pick up your empties for no additional charge... Procter & Gamble has unveiled its Crest mouthwash in a sleek glass bottle -- with a rubber base to prevent breakage. It also has non-electric Oral B toothbrushes that have a head that pops off so users can keep the base and replace the brush. But it was the stainless steel ice cream container for Nestle's Haagen-Dazs (which isn't too cold to the touch but keeps ice cream cool longer) that was the crowd favorite at a Manhattan rollout this week.... During Loop's trial, returned containers will go to New Jersey and then Pennsylvania for washing, then back to the companies' factories for refilling...
[W]hile reusable packaging may require more energy and materials when first made, Tom Szaky, chief executive of TerraCycle, said the carbon cost becomes equal to that of disposable packaging after just two or three uses. His goal, he said, is to produce items that can be reused 100 times... Szaky explained that Loop is all about bringing back the milkman model, where glass bottles of milk were left on your porch, and you put the empties there to be picked up...
"We want you to see Loop packaging 50 years from now still going around," Szaky said.
That's how Bloomberg describes the new "Loop" initiative being tested for one year by the New Jersey recycling company TerraCycle: This week, Loop began its U.S. trial, allowing consumers to use steel, glass and durable plastic reusable packaging for everyday items. Kroger Co. and Walgreens, along with such consumer brands as Procter & Gamble, Nestle, The Clorox Co. and Unilever, are taking part... For the trial, Loop is available online to customers in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania. You can order products made by the participating companies that will be delivered to you in special reusable packaging.
Under the program, manufacturers have redesigned product containers for some of their most well-known products. Loop will collect a refundable deposit, sometimes $5 to $10, that customers will get back when they return their containers. UPS will pick up your empties for no additional charge... Procter & Gamble has unveiled its Crest mouthwash in a sleek glass bottle -- with a rubber base to prevent breakage. It also has non-electric Oral B toothbrushes that have a head that pops off so users can keep the base and replace the brush. But it was the stainless steel ice cream container for Nestle's Haagen-Dazs (which isn't too cold to the touch but keeps ice cream cool longer) that was the crowd favorite at a Manhattan rollout this week.... During Loop's trial, returned containers will go to New Jersey and then Pennsylvania for washing, then back to the companies' factories for refilling...
[W]hile reusable packaging may require more energy and materials when first made, Tom Szaky, chief executive of TerraCycle, said the carbon cost becomes equal to that of disposable packaging after just two or three uses. His goal, he said, is to produce items that can be reused 100 times... Szaky explained that Loop is all about bringing back the milkman model, where glass bottles of milk were left on your porch, and you put the empties there to be picked up...
"We want you to see Loop packaging 50 years from now still going around," Szaky said.
Story reuse (Score:5, Funny)
If only we could reuseit like slashdot reused this story
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why all the packaging? Is there something wrong with baskets at the grocery store with tubes of toothpaste in them?.
the reasons
1) advertising - that larger box often has more space to catch your eye
2) fine print - items often have have legal disclaimers on the box or other writing that may be pertinent to you
3) ease of packing, Storage and shipping - the box is easier to stack on the shelf and look appealing move around without it falling over Think why shipping containers and palettes are standard sizes same thing with the goods
4) Security - often small items are stolen so they package them in much larger single
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I don't get it - the idea is NOT NEW. Back when I was young there were many places you could take back the bottle to have it refilled - many supermarkets were set up so you could buy liquids in bulk that way. They sold you a bottle and you bought your product.
And even when that wasn't the case, you could buy refills for many products like liquid soap and such - when the dispenser you bought was done, you opened the larger plain bottle of refill and fill up the dispenser again. And the refills were typically
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Most people are going to take the 'lazy' route. They just ARE. Even if they think they SHOULD do something, they will take the alternative that takes less up-front work.
"So... take the milk home, wash/rinse the bottle, bring it back in, and exchange it for another bottle of milk,"
or...
"Take the milk home. Throw the empty container away."
People are going to take option two, even those few who think they should be doing option one. Most people won't even get to that head space. "Recycle? Why should I do that
Been there, done that (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Been there, done that (Score:5, Informative)
In Europe we've had a small recycling fee that you paid for all bottles (Coke, Pepsi, beer etc.) and you got it back when you returned the bottles as an incentive to not just throw things away. This is that exact thing applied to different kinds of packaging.
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Recycling fees are common. The problem is that fee or no fee there's no money in it. You have to pay people to take it, and in most cases it just goes into a landfill anyway. Most recycling went to China, and China no longer takes it. So recycling centers are closing; there's no place to get your money back.
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Actually? Wrong. Glass is recycled locally because it DOES save money.
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So much this. Saving up bottles over the year and returning them in December made for a decent Christmas budget for several years.
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So much this. Saving up bottles over the year and returning them in December made for a decent Christmas budget for several years.
I do this when living in a house where there is enough storage when in an apartment/unit/townhouse space is limited and taking small quantities wasn't worth it. Note where I am we can't crush the can or plastic bottle they want it whole and intact sol multiply required space by 10
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I wouldn't disagree so long as it's 100% refundable, but if some legislator decides to call it a 'tax' and siphons it in whole or part to something else,
Sounds reasonable. Raising it to 25cents will roughly adjust for inflation since those things were passed.
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They need to increase the recycling fee to 25 cents a bottle.
The homeless would be driving better cars than I have at that rate.
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The homeless would be driving better cars than I have at that rate.
That's ok.
If it bothers you, just return your own cans and bottles and problem solved.
Re: Been there, done that (Score:2)
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Unfortunately, there are still different recycling systems in different European countries. You couldn't buy a bottle (and pay the recycling deposit), cross the border to another EU country, and get your deposit back there.
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Some recycled plastics ends up as fuel in cement kilns too - and they aren't too picky about it either, as long as it burns it's fine and a lot of the contaminants are absorbed into the limestone used in the process so your scrapped plastic tarp may be part in the cast paving tiles you buy later.
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A lot of glass bottles at least used to be washed and re-used several times before scrapped and re-melted (recycled).
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Re: Been there, done that (Score:2)
Reduce, REUSE, Recycle
Remember?
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Part of the problem is products not being designed for recycling. If they used clear plastic bottles in a standard shape with a machine-removable label and encouraged consumers to accept minor imperfections they could re-use a lot of those bottles after cleaning them.
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Wait a minute! For decades I have been throwing plastic soda bottles and cans into RECYCLING bins. Now are you telling me that they have not been RECYCLED this whole time?
Thats right you see you need to separate and clean all these items for the recycling to be cost effective. As westerners are too lazy and time poor to do this, we originally we all sent it to China India and other places where the wages were low enough however the product was so contaminated even they could justify the recycling cost so they just sent it back the problem is they didn't use a boat like we did when we sent it to them. https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
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The difference is that plastic bottles and soda cans are at best melted down and remade into containers. That uses additional resources compared to washing and reusing a glass or durable metal container as-is.
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and things came in useful wooden boxes and tongue and groove construction. let's bring back the wooden boxes. no, they're not made of rainforest trees, but pine from farms.
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With local distributors and cheap labor or automation it makes sense. Shipping containers halfway across the country to Refill. doesn't make much sense to me.
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And other items were once packaged in wood boxes and wood wool or other biodegradable stuff.
But in the name of cost saving it was changed.
Notice that when Ford made the Model T they actually re-used the packaging crates for the floor in the cars to really limit the amount of waste and save cost.
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If only there was a way to reuse bottles, without the bother of having to return them, just leave them on your doorstep, where they would be replace by full bottles?
Britain had this system for milk delivery for decades. Milk was delivered in the morning and the milkman picked up the bottles, took them back to the depot, after which they were cleaned, refilled and delivered to the next
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One of my grandmothers (in Mississippi) used to get her coca-colas delivered that way. Case(s) of glass bottles - leave the empties out to be swapped for full ones. I think she died before that option disappeared, but I'm not sure - it's not been an option for a long time...
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North America had that system for milk for decades too. It wasn't cost that killed it either. It was the creeping regulations because companies started cutting corners on cleaning and a bunch of people got sick from ecoli in milk for instance. It was an easy chain too, milk picked up on farms from cold tanks. Trucked to the central depot, dumped at the depot, trucks roll out to get more more milk. See where the ecoli comes in? The trucks, they'd drive them right into the building.
Nowadays trucks don't
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Milk is something that would be quite easy to sell as a refillable bottle, at the supermarket. The store has a big vat of milk, customers come in and fill up their bottles.
Companies that sell heavily branded products wouldn't like that because they'd miss out on the free advertising.
The best thing about Quebec was that they had bulk wine stores. Walk in with your empty bottles, stick the hose in, and fill it up.
It had nothing to do with what "everyone wanted". (Score:3)
Glass beer bottles, pop bottles, milk bottles, remember them. We had them all and all were recycled. It worked very well, but everyone loved the convenience of throw away plastic better.
It had nothing to do with what "everyone wanted".
The recycling of such bottles was banned by various governments as a "health measure".
It's similar to the way California shut down private pay-you-for-your-recyclable-waste companies and deposit bottle recycling in stores in favor of blue-waste pickup by city-contracted trash
Aluminum seems to work (Score:1)
Aluminum seems to be the compromise material. Glass is fragile. Plastic has all sorts of funky additives, which makes consumer recycling of plastic difficult. Aluminum containers are cheap to manufacture, and aluminum can be remelted. Aluminum is not transparent. Alternately, aluminum can be just thrown away.
Beware the rhetorical "everyone". (Score:2)
I'm not going to call you out on it, because I know it's rhetorical. Certainly a perfect 100% didn't love plastic better. I know you mean it's a majority. No data is cited, so it's hard to say.
Plastic packaging, like so many things, was quietly foisted upon us.
I don't have stats either, but I don't think too many people "loved" disposable plastics. In fact, the hard-to-open clam-shell packaging is, dare I say, *almost* universally reviled.
It seems as though people are, if anything, more likely to fond
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Glass beer bottles, pop bottles, milk bottles, remember them. We had them all and all were recycled. It worked very well, but everyone loved the convenience of throw away plastic better.
There is nothing "convenient" about ever-increasing taxes due to waste management.
If it worked "very well", then understand the real reason it went away; the rise of the Plastic Industrial Complex.
Well that, and the fact that our cities are full of folks who have no regard for the land around then and are happy to throw their drink containers around wherever. If you think all the broken glass on the ground from car break-ins and beer bottles is bad, think how much worse it would be if every plastic pop bottle or milk carton was tossed into the street as well.
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The full bottles have to be delivered from the huge regional factory to the end consumers somehow, chances are the vehicles which do this will be returning to the regional factory empty. Why not have them return with empty bottles?
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Once the item is consumed, the container is given a quick rinse
That is another problem where I am the country has been in drought and dam levels are down to nearly 50% last time that happened Pubs (Bars to Americans) started serving beer in plastic cups to save water in washing up.
Re: Been there, done that (Score:2)
Recycling paper is stupid. It's biodegradable and literally grows on trees. I recycle all of my plastic, glass, and metal products - even though I'm aware that much of it will end up in the landfill anyway - but I refuse to pretend that recycling paper makes any sense whatsoever. All of the paper/cardboard stuff just goes in my burn pile.
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Calculations (Score:5, Insightful)
The math behind this stuff is tricky. The reason certain packaging is used is because it's cheap. The reason it's cheap is it doesn't use a lot of energy or raw materials to produce. It also means it really isn't worth the energy to recycle, as you aren't getting that much in return.
So is it better to use more durable packaging that, probably, will use more energy and raw materials to produce, but will have a chance of being recycled or reused? Or is it better to use disposable packaging that is relatively light on energy and material usage?
The answer isn't that cut-and-dried.
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The math behind this stuff is tricky. The reason certain packaging is used is because it's cheap. The reason it's cheap is it doesn't use a lot of energy or raw materials to produce. It also means it really isn't worth the energy to recycle, as you aren't getting that much in return. So is it better to use more durable packaging that, probably, will use more energy and raw materials to produce, but will have a chance of being recycled or reused? Or is it better to use disposable packaging that is relatively light on energy and material usage?
Paper isn't plastic isn't metal isn't glass, sure it's all energy through E = mc^2 but that's not really a good metric because they're fundamentally different elements. Glass for example is just melted sand, we got a Sahara full of it and it's totally inert. But it's heavy, takes a lot of energy to produce and glass shards are a pain in the ass and can ruin park areas, beach areas etc. for a long time. Aluminum cans are so vastly much more practical for a party. But you can't store a wine for years on them,
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There's one problem with non-disposable packaging though, you have to deal with the worst your customers can do to them. For example one of the things people do with beer cans is to use them as ash trays. You don't know if any of them decided to use a container as a piss bottle, collect the spill oil from their car or whatever. That's what killed many of the recycling efforts around here, you had to go to such extreme lengths to make sure it was usable in terms of energy and chemicals it wasn't very green after all. Yes, if everyone treated it by the book it should be an easy rinse-off and back to refilling but it's not. Even then food grade paper becomes toilet paper, not new food grade paper. Not sure there's an easy solution to this one.
This is not a trivial matter. Aside from cleaning costs, the lawsuits arising from someone getting a cigarette butt in their Aluminum screw top eco-Pepsi "bottle" aren't going to help. As well, who's responsible for people getting sick from the bacteria growing in their bamboo straws?
This isn't coming from an anti-recycler, either. My family recycles as much as we can.
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lawsuits arising from someone getting a cigarette butt in their Aluminum screw top eco-Pepsi "bottle" aren't going to help
Solved long ago. Machine vision and a clear plastic bottle. Inspect prior to filling.
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lawsuits arising from someone getting a cigarette butt in their Aluminum screw top eco-Pepsi "bottle" aren't going to help
Solved long ago. Machine vision and a clear plastic bottle. Inspect prior to filling.
Ahem - so you are going to ban aluminum containers? Plastic is already a pariah, so it's looking like clear glass only under penalty of law.
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Transparent aluminium, natch.
Aluminium cans are easier to recycle than plastic anyway.
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"Recycled" in a industrial setting isn't reusing something
Its often milling it back to small particles, and then fusing those back together. The problem with recycling is that it needs to be a big scale project top down, otherwise it will fail horribly because a lot of the materials that is disposable is so cheap there is no size of scale for small enterprises to really salvage anything.
At some point you have to accept that recycle can mean "shred, burn, salvage, then recycle".
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Aluminum cans are so vastly much more practical for a party. But you can't store a wine for years on them, at least beer and soda will start to taste metallic if left for too long.
Sorry, but that's your imagination fucking with you.
Aluminum cans holding beer and soda are coated with plastic on the inside. Beverage never touches aluminum.
Some STEEL cans may react with the contents inside them cause they are made out of tin-electroplated steel.
But even those tend to be coated with a layer of white plastic on the inside nowadays.
And beer and wine don't come packaged in steel cans. [wikipedia.org]
Particularly wine, which comes packaged primarily in bullshit and snobbery. [youtube.com]
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Nobody seems to talk about other costs like the water used to clean reusable or recyclable containers. We used to be scolded about dripping faucets and lawn watering, but now we can wash bottles all day long. And no, you can't really convince me that the masses are going to used super-efficient dishwashers to do this either.
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Try to close the loop - require that packaging contain a certain percent recycled content and continually crank it up. As an added benefit it probably results in more jobs. The energy argument is orthogonal to waste reduction.
We already do a lot of that. 67 percent of US paper is recycled. https://newsroom.domtar.com/li... [domtar.com] One thing happens over time to a lot of the recycled material. It gets weaker. Things like paper lose fiber particle length with every re-use, and eventually are useless.
And you can guess what is on that 30 percent that is no longer recycled.
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The west really need to adopt bidet toilets and stop using so much toilet paper. Unfortunately they cost more and people don't consider the TCO.
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The west really need to adopt bidet toilets and stop using so much toilet paper. Unfortunately they cost more and people don't consider the TCO.
In some places they use rocks.
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Short of that this needs to be done in baby-steps to get people used to the idea of not just dropping containers in the tra
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It's part of the *Shopping Bag Industrial Complex*
They are pulling off the biggest environmental scam ever. They're just making more money by removing a needed service.
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You would know the answer to that if you were in the loop.
Questionable simplicity (Score:2)
Okay
So lets take a quick idea of what this is
So for consumer products, instead of the store receiving a carton filled with bottles/tins, you get one large bag of liquid. This bad of liquid is feed into a mechanism to deplete that into smaller containers. The enviroment saving is that instead of producing more bottles, you would buy some premium bottles to have shampoo/lotion/detergent on. This is great for anything with a +12 months of opened shelf life, where tapping a vacuum sealed container won't really
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No, read the article. That is not what this is at all. This is not the consumer or even the store refilling bottles from bulk storage. This is about selling really expensive containers with luxury brands while minimizing the environmental guilt of the wealthy by including a pre-paid return label for shipping to return the package to a sorting center 100's of miles away where it will be discarded/crushed for scrap if it has the slightest flaw. A solution for first world marketing problems, and not a real w
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Because it's expensive (Score:3)
I've seen a few hippy style stores in different cities that allow you to refill your own containers for Detergent, Dish Soap and a few other things. Why can't the brick and mortar stores just allow me to refill the containers and charge my by the weight?
Because there is less profit to them. What you propose is more expensive to do and likely not very popular with most customers. It's messy, cumbersome, requires special handling and training of staff, costs more, and most customers won't want it anyway. There also are some OSHA requirements for having staff or customers handling chemicals of any description directly. Just because a few "hippies" go to the trouble doesn't mean it is ready for the mass market.
Honestly I have to admit I really have no inte
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Show me the economic model (Score:2)
Would you be interested in an inverted model? Instead of the packaging being trucked back and forth, the product was trucked to homes where it could be filled into containers on-site similar to a residential propane tank.
How much dish soap are you planning to use? While I don't have any objection in principle to such an arrangement I can't imagine how this would be profitable given the extremely modest volumes that get used by most households under normal circumstances.
WTF? (Score:1)
I already recycle the cardboard box from my toothpaste, the plastic bottle from my shampoo and a shit ton of other stuff.
My municipality collects so much recyclable material that they are now refusing entire classes of recyclables.
I guess I shouldn't be surprise by this "genius" idea. The author probably thinks that "up-cycling" is a totally new concept. Just wait til they think of changing from "wasteful plastic" packaging to things like reusable glass bottles! Mind blown. But, remember, you heard it here
Mouthwash refill stations would be better (Score:1)
Re: Mouthwash refill stations would be better (Score:1)
So increase greenhouse gases to save landfills? (Score:3)
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So what is the point, other than allowing rich consumers to feel better about themselves?
Bingo. That is the main point, right there.
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About damn time (Score:3)
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>"made everyone lazy af and brought on extreme amounts of trash that even they are now rejecting!"
Most people I know, like myself, recycle everything we reasonably can. I have far more recycling waste, by volume, than trash. If you exclude cat litter, I have more recycling by weight, too. One major problem is that the stuff isn't ACTUALLY being recycled. So we aren't necessarily lazy, there is just a breakdown on the back-end.
>"It's long overdue that we go back to the old method of shopping daily"
All well and good... (Score:2)
Logistics (Score:2)
Sounds great....... in theory. In practice I don't know if it makes any sense at a retail level, especially when you're funneling it through UPS. The impact of onetime use items is significant, but compared to the infrastructure and logistics of shifting millions of reusable containers through the supply chain back and fourth efficiently, that would be a tough thing to pull off. It might make a little sense if you're returning items to a central location that happens to be on a route you'd normally take,
Why not just use biodegradable paper and wood? (Score:2)
Recyclable plastic doesn't get recycled and just ends up in landfills for hundreds of years.
Best to use paper and wood packaging which will easily degrade.
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The reason why so much recycling ends up in landfills is our idiotic usage of "single stream recycling". Basically throwing everything it a massive soup of mismatched materials (glass, plastic 1-7, metal), crushing it all together and then trying to sort it out at the other end. We need to do at least some level of presorting and standardization. We used to do this somewhat my area at least, there was a facility where there were separate bins for each plastic/metal/glass and someone on hand to ensure tha
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Papyrus isn't paper. Also, the papyrus and paper that survives for any length of time does so in pretty specially controlled (purposely or otherwise) environments.
So why have we been recycling for 20 years? (Score:2)
The fact this article exits suggest that every recycling effort of the last 20 years or so has been a colossal failure that forces people to separate out "recyclables" from regular trash.
Evidently all that was just "environmental theater" that didn't actual achieve any real goals.
Also, $5-10 an item sounds like a money-grab when you can find durable glass bottles on grocery items costing less than $1.
Don't look back, you're not going that way (Score:5, Interesting)
Once again, this is the wrong direction. I mean, it's yet another great way to make people spend more money, but it's the exact opposite of good for the planet.
Let's take a closer look.
The very first step: consumer spends $5-$10 on a glass bottle. Sounds like a great way to rip-off consumers. So if I want to "go green" in my bathroom, I'm basically going to spend $200 in bottles and brushes and reusable stuffs.
Then, the factory churns out glass bottles with rubber bottoms -- I don't want to know how much more pollution is created by a glass bottle instead of a paper or plastic one. We all know it's much more -- probably more than double.
Then, the wonderful world of shipping transports a one-pound glass bottle, instead of a 1 ounce plastic bottle. Sounds like fuel and surcharges to me.
Then, everyone's happy right? Can I get these reusable bottles refilled from a vending machine at my grocery store? Nope. Let's transport them back! More fuel, more surcharges -- I know, UPS will do it for free. Great. On their schedule. In their territories. And bullshit. They'll add those charges to their other services. It doesn't happen for free. "included" is not "free".
So, what were the words? "the carbon costs become equal after [three-ish] uses"? Putting aside the "carbon costs" ignoring all of the other costs, when was the last time you dropped something? A shampoo bottle in the shower perhaps? Love me a white bathtub full of broken glass. Really love me a brown-tile and grey-grout shower floor full of glass. Wait, why's it suddenly turning red? Oh yeah, that would be my wife beating me to death because I just cost us another $10 !! There's still shampoo in my eyes, by the way.
Once again, this is all in the wrong direction. Nature doesn't work this way. Do you know of any animals that re-use their own trash? Ever see a bird disassemble an old nest? Even to construct a new one? No.
Instead, nature does an amazing job of something we've always said: "one man's trash is another man's treasure". In nature, each species eats the trash of another species. All the way. Some species literally eat the shit of other species, exclusively. Some species literally eat the rotting flesh of dead carcasses, exclusively. Some species seek out sick animals before that sickness can spread across the landscape.
What we want to do, and I can't believe that I need to be the one to tell everyone, (mainly because I don't care about saving the planet, it'll last long enough for me to live my life, and I've got no children to save it for) is to simply only produce trash that other species like to eat. That's it.
Imagine, the shampoo bottle that's healthy for salmon to eat. Throw your trash into the ocean, that's actually the best place for it! Feed the fish, feed the planet.
Imagine the milk carton that's nutritionally balanced for the raccoons -- put your trash at the curb, no need for a garbage truck, it'll be gone by morning.
Birds, fish, ants, insects, how many millions of species do we have on this goddam planet? Oh yeah, trees, plants, flowers. You're telling me we can't produce packaging that any of them want to eat?
Fine. Here's an idea. In New York, concrete is strengthened with gravel. In Florida, concrete is strengthened with sea shells. Why can't we strengthen concrete with plastic? Imagine all of our roads and highways as locked-up plastic. Hey, if they don't degrade, wouldn't that me fucking fantastic against potholes and other weather effects?
No, instead, let's spend more money, and more effort, desperately clinging to a shampoo bottle that was sold on the idea of 100 reuses, that must be reused 3 times to break even, but will likely be reused only twice because there's shampoo in my eyes. How's that math? Spend an extra $5 per bottle, bleed a bit standing in broken glass, and oh wait, forgot the whole other side.
Children's bottles won't be glass, for obvious reasons -- so 80% of most family house
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You know something, that's true for any single material, but it doesn't rule out layers which can ultimately be separated. Obviously paper is easily compostable, and waxes can be made in any number of bio-beneficial manners. Both are easily molded. Certainly, chemical resistant and shelf-stable are the tough ones there.
But if we adjust ingredients, like those of shampoo, to fit within the chemical resistance of our containers, instead of the other way around, and if we reduce shelf stability to something
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That seems kind of mean-spirited; though it might have been directed at the state of the society, and not to me. But given that it came with no arguments, and that you aren't willing to put your name to your opinion, I gather it's just a bot spewing generic non-sense. At this point, you'll need to prove that you're human for me to value your words. So tell me, which high-school subject benefits most from a field-trip to an amusement park? And which musical instrument would you consider to be the most ana
Just use paper and wood (Score:4, Interesting)
Our CO2 imbalance comes from digging up oil, coal, and natural gas and burning them. These are hydrocarbons which were buried underground (thought to be ancient plants which died and transformed under pressure and time into oil, coal, and natural gas). The carbon they contained used to be CO2 in the atmosphere, but some ancient plant pulled it out of the air, converted it into wood, and died and was buried, thus sequestering it underground. Until we came along, dug it up, and burned it thus releasing the carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2.
We're trying our damnedest to figure out a way to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and sequester the carbon underground to counteract our coal mining and oil/gas drilling, when a natural process already exists. All we have to do is accelerate the rate at which trees grow and get buried underground. Since the trees already collect all the energy needed for this from the sun by themselves, we don't even need to pay the energy cost of pulling the CO2 out of the atmosphere. The only cost we need to pay is that of collecting the trees and burying them (and planting new trees to replace the ones we've collected.
Well guess what - there's something we're already doing that involves collecting and burying underground. Trash. So if we stopped trying to recycle paper and compost wood, and started burying used paper and wood products underground, we'd actually be offsetting the coal, oil, and gas we're digging up from the ground to burn for energy. The loss of paper from the recycling chain would mean the price of paper goes up. Which creates an incentive to chop down more trees for wood and paper. All we need to do is be sure to plant new trees to replace those we've cut down. As long as the rate at which we plant new trees equals or exceeds the rate at which we're cutting them down (multiplied by a factor to compensate for trees which die naturally), it's sustainable. This is something most developed countries already do [fs.fed.us].
And the best part is, it costs us nothing. The energy cost is collected and paid for by the tree. And the logistics is something we're already doing (trash collection and landfills) so there are no additional costs for doing it. We just need to stop trying to recycle paper and compost wood waste, and start throwing them away so they end up underground in landfills. The only additional cost is that landfills would fill up quicker so we'd need to figure out a way to make new, deeper ones. I suggest filling up coal mines with our trash. Carbon in, carbon out.
Look, recycling and reusing is good and all. But the best they can do is create a zero balance between consumption and production. Zeroing out our CO2 production isn't good enough. We actually need to push our CO2 production into the negative, to counteract all the CO2 production from over a century of mining and drilling coal and oil. That means we need to be burying carbon back underground to replace what we extracted in the past. In this case, that means throwing away our wood and paper products after a single use, is actually better for the environment than recycling them.
Re: (Score:2)
This is close to a good idea. There are properties (like water proofing) that plastic provides that are really hard to get with cellulose. Using wax... I hate to tell you, but that comes from petroleum these days, and you're energetically better off using plastic.
The enzyme plants use to reduce CO2 is RuBisCO. This enzyme is not actually as energy efficient as what we can do via plasma processing or electrochemistry for conversion of atmospheric CO2 into something more usable. It does have the great benef
Re: (Score:2)
2. Yes photosynthesis is not particular efficient. But the key is that plants do it at no cost to us. Once we've reached a point where 100% of our energy
How do you counter infectious germs thru cleaning? (Score:1)
The reason we partly have a disposable industry is that it's a prevention method to counter infectious germs and diseases. I still question the cleaning process and eradication of germs with today's super bacteria that are just everywhere these days and are extremely difficult to effectively eradicate. Steering clear of plastics at all costs would be helpful in the long run but has anyone considered killing off the styrofoam industry?
Ice cream! (Score:2)
I see a lot of legitimate complaints about glass containers but... nobody wants to talk about the stainless steel ice cream container?
It's funny because Harry and David's shipped ice cream in steel containers for years and years. Thin and not even stainless and decorated with artwork on the lids. Ice cream in stainless steel has a luxury feel to it. If returning the container defrays some of the luxury cost, I'm all for it. It even has the benefit of if you foul up and leave the ice cream out for some r
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
So? The energy used to dump used motor oil down the local storm sewer is far less than the cost of collecting it in 55 gallon drums and shipping it for recycling/reuse. Does that make it a good idea?
Re:All manufacturers could do this easily. (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't anything new. Anyone over 40 or so remembers when we use to have returnable soda bottles. Anyone over 60 remembers glass milk jugs from "milk men". Beer bottles used to be returnable for deposits. Why can't we go back to that model instead of this dumb recycling one?
Glass containers are heavier than plastic, thus requiring more energy to transport.
Glass containers are more prone to breakage than plastic.
Glass containers are more expensive to produce.
The trade-offs are complex; for some products the old model might actually be better.
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, costing fractions of a penny more.