Did the Plastic Industry Knowingly Push Recycling Myths For Decades? (pbs.org) 101
A PBS reporter "digs into a new report covering the plastic industry's tactics to push recycling — and avoid regulation," according to a new video from PBS News Weekend:
A new report by the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmentalist group, says newly uncovered statements from oil and plastics executives underscore the industry's decades-long secret skepticism about the viability and efficacy of recycling. The authors of the report reviewed old investigations and new documents, including previously unknown assertions from industry executives. In 1994, one Exxon Chemical executive put the industry's support for plastics recycling in blunt terms, saying "we are committed to the activities, but not committed to the results."
Another representative from Dupont noted in 1992 that recycling goals were set knowing full well "they were unlikely to meet them."
In the video NPR correspondent Michael Copley says "I think it's always striking, when you see a report like this that unearths new statements, new quotes, and to see the way in which they really seem to view recycling as sort of public relations tool, as opposed to an environmental tool that they sort of presented publicly..." I think the other reason why this matters is, it could potentially be legally problematic for the industry. And by that I mean the oil and gas industry right now is facing dozens of lawsuits from states and localities, based in part on statements it made about climate change and fossil fuel, going back decades. We know that the state of California has opened an investigation into the role of oil and gas companies and the petrochemical industry in the creation of the plastic waste crisis that we're facing. And the group that put out the report, the Center for Climate Integrity, was upfront, saying that it was compiling this to serve as kind of the fact basis, or the basis of evidence, for potential legal action.
A plastics trade group accused the report of citing "outdated, decades-old technologies" and "mischaracterizing the current state of the industry," saying they're looking to have all plastic packaging be "reused, recycled, and recovered by 2040."
But PBS's reporter counters that there's "deep skepticism" of the economics from market analysts — as well as from material scientists. "Obviously the industry has put out this promise. I think that its critics will say, 'We have been hearing these promises, or promises like it, for decades now, and that there's nothing in the record to think that now is any different."
He adds that activists and businesses agree that government regulation will ultimately play a big role. "That gets back in large part to the economics of this. If companies don't have to deal with these costs, it's hard to imagine that they will in a sustained way create systems to deal with this if they don't have to."
So what's the solution? Some ideas being seriously discussed:
Another representative from Dupont noted in 1992 that recycling goals were set knowing full well "they were unlikely to meet them."
In the video NPR correspondent Michael Copley says "I think it's always striking, when you see a report like this that unearths new statements, new quotes, and to see the way in which they really seem to view recycling as sort of public relations tool, as opposed to an environmental tool that they sort of presented publicly..." I think the other reason why this matters is, it could potentially be legally problematic for the industry. And by that I mean the oil and gas industry right now is facing dozens of lawsuits from states and localities, based in part on statements it made about climate change and fossil fuel, going back decades. We know that the state of California has opened an investigation into the role of oil and gas companies and the petrochemical industry in the creation of the plastic waste crisis that we're facing. And the group that put out the report, the Center for Climate Integrity, was upfront, saying that it was compiling this to serve as kind of the fact basis, or the basis of evidence, for potential legal action.
A plastics trade group accused the report of citing "outdated, decades-old technologies" and "mischaracterizing the current state of the industry," saying they're looking to have all plastic packaging be "reused, recycled, and recovered by 2040."
But PBS's reporter counters that there's "deep skepticism" of the economics from market analysts — as well as from material scientists. "Obviously the industry has put out this promise. I think that its critics will say, 'We have been hearing these promises, or promises like it, for decades now, and that there's nothing in the record to think that now is any different."
He adds that activists and businesses agree that government regulation will ultimately play a big role. "That gets back in large part to the economics of this. If companies don't have to deal with these costs, it's hard to imagine that they will in a sustained way create systems to deal with this if they don't have to."
So what's the solution? Some ideas being seriously discussed:
- Reducing plastic production "to a level that is more manageable with recycling systems."
- Getting rid of types of plastic that are "especially hard to recycle or you can't recycle."
- "Being more transparent about what chemicals go into this stuff that again make recycling hard."
Plastic recycling has always been a scam (Score:3, Insightful)
This shouldn't be news for anyone. When you account for all the energy needed to melt down the plastic and reshape it, you are probably better off just skipping the recycling step from an ecological standpoint given that you have to move this plastic in a large circle, which requires burning fossil fuels at numerous points in the line. You truck the product from a manufacturers warehouse to a distribution warehouse to a retail storefront to the customers door step to the recycling collection back to the manufacturers plant. All that moving around is literally burning fuel.
It's almost like our entire economy is built on a non-sustainable house of cards and we're busy pretending otherwise because their is profit to be made!
P.S. Cans and other metals are probably worth the attention for recycling but hard pass on the plastics.
Just burn it for energy. (Score:1)
One of the Nordic countries does it. The net effect is they get paid to generate their own energy.
Smart.
Re:Just burn it for energy. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Or instead of charging anybody, just require retailers to accept the waste plastic and then either recycle it themselves or return it to the manufacturers to recycle.
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Or instead of charging anybody, just require retailers to accept the waste plastic and then either recycle it themselves or return it to the manufacturers to recycle.
Because recycling plastic is stupid.
I am all for making it more expensive to use throw-away plastic. Tax it, or charge deposits, or whatever. But the money raised should be used for something sensible, like perhaps installing wind turbines.
Recycling plastic uses more energy than it saves. The trash has to be collected, sorted, and cleaned. Then, the plastic is loaded onto bunker-fuel-burning container ships and transported to Asia without auditing or accountability, where it is likely incinerated or dumped
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Then to avoid paying that cost, retailers will stop selling single use plastics. Problem solved.
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Then to avoid paying that cost, retailers will stop selling single use plastics. Problem solved.
Really? You know of some other packaging material that would preserve consumer goods through the cold chain? Or perhaps, keep that stupidly over-priced piece of tecchnology clean, hygenic and visible?
You could make a killing!!!
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Yes, there are many alternatives to plastic that we don't use right now because the economics don't work out.
Re: Just burn it for energy. (Score:3)
I call bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
Plastic is cheaper to make than it is to recycle.
Only if you externalize the real costs. If you leave the real cost of plastic, the waste problem, the environmental problems, the health problems, etc, out, only then it looks cheap.
It is not an oil industry problem only because corrupt politicians put the problem onto society, so the oil industry has the profit and not the costs.
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Plastic recycling is not an oil industry problem, it is a consumerism problem.
Capitalism appears to work well because it heavily externalizes costs; privatize the profits, socialize the risks.
Re:Plastic recycling has always been a scam (Score:4, Informative)
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Plastic is so much cheaper to produce and transport than glass or metal. The beverage companies can just pass the environmental costs onto everyone else but themselves.
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Metal and glass can general be recycled relatively easily. The inconvenient truth for everything else is that recycling, **done properly**, is too expensive and the economics just don't work.
Hate to burst your bubble but glass isn't really economical to recycle either. The starting materials for glass are so ridiculously cheap that it doesn't make economic sense to transport, sort and clean used glass for recycling. Sure, from an ecological standpoint glass should be recycled because dumping it in a landfill is wasteful, but economically it just makes more financial sense to dump it and make new glass.
Re:Plastic recycling has always been a scam (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember when almost all glass bottles were recycled. Milk came in glass bottles that were refilled over and over. Soda came in glass bottles which were refilled and used over and over. These bottles were worth money to retailers, not because the government put some sort of tax on them, but because they would resell them to the distributors who would wash them out and reuse them.
This system lasted much longer in some parts of the world than others. Recycling soda bottles was the norm in Latin America clear into the 90s, maybe longer. I moved back to the United States and I stopped paying attention. Of course, they weren't melting the bottles down or anything crazy like that. They simply washed them out. After a while the bottles would get so worn that they would get hazy on the outside. The still held Coca-Cola just fine.
I suspect that even the most granola of today's customers would be put off by this sort of recycling. And there is no question that gathering and washing glass bottles is definitely more expensive than simply manufacturing brand new plastic bottles. Before plastic, however, that was simply the world that we lived in. Even 30 years ago recycling glass was still economically viable in locations where the packaging machines hadn't been upgraded.
Part of the reason that I am so skeptical of any sort of recycling program is that recycling proponents always seem to gloss right over the history of what societies did before plastics were widespread. Humans have already solved how to package goods in a world less reliant on plastic. But instead of pushing for well known solutions to the problems of plastic we would rather point the finger at Big Oil and blame them for our plastics problem.
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The terminology you want is reuse, not recycling. Your point still stands, however.
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That is a good point. And it really drives the point home that what we want is reduce and reuse, but what we are sold is recycle. Thanks.
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Hate to burst your bubble but glass isn't really economical to recycle either.
Indeed. Recycling glass wastes more energy than recycling plastic when measured by units rather than weight.
Glass recycling is especially dumb since glass is inert. A glass bottle in a landfill or tossed in the ocean is just an oddly shaped rock.
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Metal and glass can general be recycled relatively easily. The inconvenient truth for everything else is that recycling, **done properly**, is too expensive and the economics just don't work.
Not surprised. I also don't see why we're mad at the plastic companies. Environmental activists pushed hard on the idea of recycling, plastics companies no doubt decided to embrace the inevitable. From the quotes, it seems the execs were saying "we make the plastics, we can tell you how to go about recycling, knock yer socks off implementing a program."
If anyone should be held accountable for recycling not working, it should be the activists who proposed and implemented the system. And the voters for not de
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Here's the real problem with all of this. It isn't economically viable simply because the externalities aren't factored in at the point of initial manufacturing. We have built an economic system that is heavily reliant on basically mortgaging the present and demanding the future pay for it; a sort of vast buy now, pay later (and by later we mean decades). If manufacturing plastics, glass and everything else had the long-term costs factored in up front, I suspect recycling in all cases would look more attrac
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This shouldn't be news for anyone. When you account for all the energy needed to melt down the plastic and reshape it, you are probably better off just skipping the recycling step from an ecological standpoint given that you have to move this plastic in a large circle, which requires burning fossil fuels at numerous points in the line. You truck the product from a manufacturers warehouse to a distribution warehouse to a retail storefront to the customers door step to the recycling collection back to the manufacturers plant. All that moving around is literally burning fuel.
You're right that this has to be accounted for in the energy use, but it's still more energy effective to recycle than to throw it out and make new plastic. The one virtue of plastic is that it's light, it's actually not very energy intensive to transport.
It's almost like our entire economy is built on a non-sustainable house of cards and we're busy pretending otherwise because their is profit to be made!
Can't disagree there!
P.S. Cans and other metals are probably worth the attention for recycling but hard pass on the plastics.
Not completely clear which end of the trade-off wins. Aluminum is indeed very easy to recycle, but as stated, plastic is light. Try hefting an empty plastic water bottle and comparing it to a glass bottle and an aluminum can. The plas
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> energy effective to recycle than to throw it out and make new plastic. The one
> virtue of plastic is that it's light, it's actually not very energy intensive to transport.
You've been lied to. All that transportation is environmentally pointless, because
when the plastic gets to its destination, it is not, in fact, actually recycled. It's picked
through by somebody who makes a dollar a day, for the 1% of it that
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You've been lied to.
Indeed, and this is essentially what the article is saying.
And, in particular, your point about there being a large number of types of plastics is accurate. This may be the insuperable difficulty with plastic recycling.
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Only if you're recycling the plastic into more plastic. And that's worthless.
What you should be doing is recycling it back into fuel for electricity production- but nobody wants that even with all the scrubbers- they made it illegal to EVER open a 2nd garbage burning electric plant in Oregon.
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Virtually all metals are worth recycling, yes. Also glass. It saves energy, because melting and reforming them is significantly less energy intensive than making them from raw materials (or, sand, whatever). Aluminum is particularly worthwhile to recycle, even though the ore is abundant, because the refining process is quite energy intensive. But even mundane, easy-to-refine base metals, like iron, are definitely worth recycli
Obviously (Score:1)
Any recycling would have been done via their production chains. They know exactly what is going on. And now their crap (via microplastics) is found in anything, food, human bodies, etc.
same old same old (Score:5, Insightful)
Every story like this says "Scientists inside the company knew and they covered it up!!!!". The reality is always more nuanced. Companies employ lots of people, and different people can look at the same information and come to different conclusions. Sometimes those conclusions are self-serving, political, nuanced, or just wrong.. Regardless management will look at it and decide how to proceed.
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Moreover, it has been well-known for many decades that plastic recycling was highly inefficient, if done at all, and that because of that, almost no plastic was being recycled. As predicted before they started "recycling based or relatively simple and well-understood facts. That's why most of us said to not bother with it.
Only the environmentalists somehow missed this, and are now stunned to find out that, sure enough, cracking things back to their base, then refining it back to the plastic i
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The whole point of this report is not that anyone's surprised that plastics are hard to recycle, it's that oil & plastics producers verifiably knew this from the beginning, yet knowingly marketed recycling as a solution to the huge plastics waste problem they were creating and profiting from, despite its ineffectiveness.
We long suspected that this push for recycling was a cynical attempt to deflect the issue onto consumers, so that they could continue to sell cheap but hard-to-recycle plastics with no r
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They didn't market anything. What happened was a whole bunch of eco-warriors *demanded* something be done, figuring you could just take old trash bags and 6-pack rings, shove them in an extruder and get brand new eco-friendly product out the bottom.
"The Industry" told them it wasn't going to work, said eco-warriors said, "look, it's Big Oil standing in the way of the solution!" and effectively demanded it be done.
This is not new information, I was around then and even in the 70's there
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You have some points, but you're a remarkably crabby old man. Ok, apparently people shouldn't try to do anything about pollution? What is your alternative proposal? You do have a proposal, right? Right?
By "a whole bunch of eco-warriors", I take it you mean "five hippies in 1978", but I get that you're a Republican. Nobody else is terrified of hippies or even takes them seriously.
Of course big companies will lie to you. We should aim to hold them accountable.
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Hold everyone accountable for their lies. Is that so difficult? Whataboutism does not excuse anything.
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No, I think you should try to *do something useful* about pollution - not a empty gesture that makes you feel better but actually makes the problem worse.
I live in the same environment you do, and I care about it just as much (or more) than you do. But you super-duper caring about it is utterly worthless, if you have no idea what to do aside from rending your garments and getting hand-wringing housewives and news reporters spun up to *demand* fixes. Fixes that don't work because, I hav
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They didn't market anything.
They absolutely did [climateintegrity.org].
What happened was [unsourced opinions omitted]
If you're not going to offer sources to bolster your claims then repeating them won't help. They're directly contradicted by TFA, which you apparently aren't interested in reading. The above link has dozens of examples dating back decades of industry groups promoting a wide gamut of plastic recycling "solutions" - whilst internally describing these same recycling initiatives as "ineffective" but helpful for market and profit expansion nonetheless.
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RTFA.
I don't think environmentalists were ever espousing the virtues of all things plastic. Given what was obviously becoming a problem since discarded plastic waste doesn't degrade, conservation minded people tried their hand at working with an industry for a better solution. Unfortunately, the industry already knew it was bogus, but played along to further ingrain their products and meld the public perception of mindless simpletons who think being an environmentalist is somehow a bad thing.
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But because it is completely prohibitive, it doesn't happen. What happens is that it gets shipped to some other country to "be recycled" when in fact the ship goes about 100 miles offshore and dumps it in the ocean, then comes back for more.
About energy, generating that energy to do your unworkable process also causes issues, and you would likely be the first in line to protest a new coal plant, gas plant, etc. that would be needed to provide this energy. Or rather, dozens of new coal plants. So your own a
TLDR (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes.
Next question.
it's gotten much, much worse (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking _everthing_ is in plastic packaging and uses absolutely unnecessary additional plastic for every aspect of a package.
it's infuriating.
Shit is poisoning the planet and they are making it worse.
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What is the alternative to driving, if one doesn't live in a heavily metropolitan area with plenty of access to public transportation?
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Re:it's gotten much, much worse (Score:4, Interesting)
What really pisses me off is that Amazon used to have an option called "frustration free packaging", which used generic brown cardboard with minimal print instead of ugly ass plastic layers, and it was easy to open without any tools. That feature is LONG gone.
Because, yes, we all need over-sized retail hang tab packaging when ordering shit on the internet, am I right !?
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I still get this kind of packaging for a lot of stuff, especially cheap, small things. Cables, etc. The worst of the packaging is almost always the name-brand stuff, where they still make packages meant to go on shelves and frustrate thieves and attract shopper attention.
If you can find a cheap Chinese knockoff (sometimes exactly the same product) you're often better off not just from a price perspective, but also a packaging perspective.
Recycling [Re:Was it the plastic companies pus...] (Score:5, Interesting)
No. No it wasn't. It was the useful idiot Democrats who claim recycling is better for the environment.
Not really. It was the environmentalists who said we need to reduce, reuse, recycle, but then the plastics industry-- which didn't like the "reduce, reuse" idea-- who jumped in saying "recycle! we can recycle!" Whether or not they could.
Metal and glass can easily be recycled and it roughly uses the same amount of dirty energy as producing it new.
No, much less. Recycling aluminum takes about 5% of the energy as making it in the first place. Yes, you do have to melt it, but to make it in the first place requires mining the ore and reducing it to metal, which is much more energy intensive than just melting it.
For glass, about 40% less energy to melt and recycle old glass than make new glass.
Everything else is pretty toxic.
Pretty much everything at an industrial scale is "pretty toxic." Agriculture at an industrial scale is pretty toxic.
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But that's disingenuous because the people against recycling weren't against it because they thought the plastic industry was scamming people, they were against it because they didn't care about the environment or were too lazy to recycle (even recycling stuff that makes sense to recycle). Even the people against recycling took the plastics industries claim at face value
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But that's disingenuous because the people against recycling weren't against it because they thought the plastic industry was scamming people,
That is a complete lie, many were against it for EXACTLY this reason, it's a waste of money and resources.
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Dozens of people!
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If YOU took the word of the plastics industry at face value that makes YOU the idiot, the liar, the fraud.
You have a... truly unique definition of "liar" and "fraud", if you think the people being lied to and defrauded are themselves the liars and fraudsters, simply because they were naive enough to believe the industry that assured them they were helping.
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then the plastics industry-- which didn't like the "reduce, reuse" idea-- who jumped in saying "recycle! we can recycle!" Whether or not they could.
But then people like YOU ran with that and pushed recycling on everyone, never stopping to check if it made any sense.
I'm baffled as to why you say that. Checking if it makes sense requires knowing and analyzing the numbers, and people like Anonymous Coward, who made inaccurate statements stating metal and glass recycling uses "roughly uses the same amount of dirty energy as producing it new", are simply spreading confusion.
No, recycling takes less energy than making metal or glass de novo. A lot less energy for aluminum and steel; somewhat less energy for glass.
to be fair, the point that transporting the recyclables to
Microplastics are heavily implicated in stroke (Score:5, Informative)
Source:
https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.10... [nejm.org]
Recyling may reduce the amount of microplastics getting into our bodies but we just don't know.
The "industry" didn't lift a finger for or against (Score:3)
I think the basic idea, from proponents, was that by collecting a big enough pile of plastic in centralised locations there'll end up being an economical solution. End of story.
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Maybe if laws made it the responsivity of the manufacturers to also dispose of the packaging we might see some real action.
I'm totally fine (Score:4, Insightful)
This one is probably different than (Score:3)
The plastics industry knew full well that most plastics can’t be easily recycled unless society is perfectly orderly and robotic about cleaning and sorting, which absolutely anybody with passing knowledge of the human species knew was never gonna happen. But society had gone all-in on recycling, for totally well-meaning and noble reasons. So, the plastics industry just sort of shrugged it’s shoulders and played ball knowing full well the outcome. But I think it’s disengenuous to accuse them of conspiracy.
The microplastics thing was actually pretty unexpected. Unlike AGW, there weren’t entire scientific communities screaming about the dangers of microplastics several decades ago. Not fair to lay that on the plastics industry, either.
We clearly need to pull as much non-bio-degradeable plastics out of our manufacturing as we can, but it’s gonna be difficult. Finding replacements for those materials will be easy in some spots, damn-near-impossible in other spots. You can’t replace every plastic item with paper or polylactic acid.
The way I remember it... (Score:2)
when recycling came on the scene the skeptics, and there were plenty of them, were immediately shouted down by groups who believed that recycling was an obvious, common sense way to help save the planet. It was an early version of trying to “cancel” anybody who challenged the validity of recycling. And now we’re going to criticize the industry executives who were bullied into keeping quiet?
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Which "industry executives" were bullied into keeping quiet about whether recycling plastic could
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That's a fair question. But I'm not saying that the industry executives were warning anybody back then. They were not - precisely because they would be shouted down mercilessly. They just went with the flow even though they knew better. Much like the environment today in which if you dare to speak out against the reigning dogma governing certain issues you will be mercilessly canceled. Heck, today you can't even admit that you don't completely understand some topics without threat of cancellation. The
conspiracy theory (Score:2)
Why would an industry knowingly push myths that help the industry?
Modifying the recycling symbol for accuracy (Yale) (Score:1)
It shames people, rationalizes profits and waste (Score:2)
Probably not. (Score:4, Interesting)
For example: Industry bad. It's dirty. Get it out. (that is, we need it, could you send it to a different country with cheap child slave labor?) etc.
They don't consider what it takes to switch away from plastics (world wide)... and in all fairness, the vast majority would not accept their new world. They just wouldn't.
i full expect this to get clobbered here, and it only goes to justify my position. Just saying.
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Sure, there's plenty of zealotry to go around.
But there's basically NO WAY to get away from plastics. Try buying any frozen food without buying a tonne of plastic. A lot of FRESH food comes wrapped in plastic. I shop at a small grocer, and I can get away from some of it, but any baked goods that are brought in from off-site are in plastic. It's everywhere. I can't make the decision not to use it, without deciding to not eat half the groceries that are available. Even bags of rice are in woven plastic bags m
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But there's basically NO WAY to get away from plastics
I agree that plastics are here to stay for many reasons, but the reasons you list above aren't them. We had frozen foods before we had plastic packaging. Fresh foods need not be in plastic (they even have plastic-like vegetable bags made from cellulose these days, but there is nothing wrong with brown paper bags), baked goods don't require plastic (light cardboard with or without a wax coating works fine), and as you point out, rice (and anything similar) can be sold in burlap bags, no plastic required.
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Oh, sorry, I meant that as a consumer, you can't escape them, not that they're necessary. I 100% believe that we could make do without them if they would just stop using them. But if I want to buy frozen corn, right now, I have no options.
Didn't plastic recycling "work"? (Score:2)
IIRC, plastic recycling did "work" for quite a while. I'm putting work in quotes because the way it "worked" was to bundle that stuff up and send it to China, where something could in theory be done with it--but as labor costs rose and the quality of the feedstock failed to improve it became impractical once again. Even if China was always land-filling the stuff, our "recycling" program "worked". Now it doesn't.
Plastics are petrochemicals. (Score:1)
Did the oil industry knowingly harm the environment for corporate gain? Gee, I wonder if there's a connection here...
Joe Scott (Score:3)
Yet another irrelevant article (Score:2, Informative)
How is this remotely connected to Technology ?
Yet another article completely unrelated. Slashdot really is shit these days.
EVs (Score:1)
As we shift from petrol to EVs the price of petrochemicals will increase, increasing the price of plastics to a point where we won't take plastics for granted.
Right now I can make a wooden surfboard cheaper than a plastic surfboard can be made.
China (Score:2)
Latest Recycling Effort (Score:3)
Re: Latest Recycling Effort (Score:1)
Have to start somewhere
Recycle me! (Score:2)
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The Procedure (Score:2)
Applies to everything:
1. Idea is proposed
2. The idea is shouted down
3. Whoever suggested it is fired.
4. Humans get closer to godless savagery and living in their own filth.
5. Start from one again.
Symptom of a wider problem (Score:2)
When our economies depend on ever-increasing consumption of finite resources as well as pouring ever increasing pollution into a finite, closed system, we end up with the problems we have today. Even if 99% of plastics were recycled, it wouldn't solve our problems, neither will electric cars, solar panels, wind farms, etc. (although they do help increase efficiency). The simple fact is we need need to cons
Death of the milkman? (Score:4, Interesting)
In the 1970's and earlier we had people like this too. They were called milkmen. They would deliver glass jars of juice, milk, and even soft drinks into a metal box outside your house, then they would retrieve the empty containers which of course a deposit had been paid for. The jars would be transported back to the central, washed, inspected for damage, refilled, resealed and reused. The glass would generally be of a high quality promoting a high number of reuses and, though I know nothing about glass blowing, seems to be a material which, at the cost of great energy be reblasted into a new container with little waste.
Why are we still receiving milk and juice in plastic and wax coated paper, and every other beverage in plastic? Why is it that food delivered in glass jars are being thrown into glass waste bins where they are smashed and we have to melt them in order to reuse them?
Let's go further. Uber Eats and similar services around the world deliver food in single use containers. Why is this even legal? If I order food and don't want to take the time to wash the dishes, I'm certainly willing to place the containers the food is delivered in within a pickup box or hand them to the driver next time I order (at a cost of course) and I would even order more often if we could address the waste problem.
Then there's meats. Holy WTF!?!?!?! when I go to the store and buy meat
1) It's defrosted for some dumb ass reason. Why the hell is it defrosted? How dare they? Are you seriously trying to suggest that the meat was butchered and shipped thawed? I can understand if I visit the butcher and I buy meat that is thawed because, well you don't grind meat when it's frozen and the same is true about different cuts, but why is it thawed and rotting before I even buy it at a grocery store?
2) There's a plastic container. Why the hell did you put the meat in a single use plastic container or a pressed (with craploads of chemicals) paper container? Stop charging me for the plastic and pay someone to stand behind a counter and wrap it in paper. It creates a job for a nice kid who is willing to work and I can store the meat in a covered glass dish or the freezer when I get home.
3) There's a maxipad in the container. Since they're defrosting the bloody meat, they've placed a women's sanitary pad into my food to catch the blood. WTF that's precisely what I want to think about when opening up that lovely t-bone steak.
4) There's a high tech meat freshness indicator in the package. Freeze the damn meat, leave it frozen and I don't need to buy the (probably overpriced) one time use, throw away, probably made with forever chemicals indicator. I don't want it, don't need it, stop pushing that crap on me.
5) There's a transparent plastic cover over the meat. Yeh, more plastic. You've defrosted the meat to make it beautiful and wrapped it in planet killing everything so I can choose the 125g slice of individually wrapped steak that looks prettier than the other which I'm going to buy anyway because 125g doesn't make a dinner, so we're going to really try to kill earth by buying two small packages.
6) There's multiple printed labels on the packaging.
Better yet, show me a picture of a big fat juicy steak on a website, let me choose how much I want and whether I want it delivered frozen or if the steak should start thawing on the way for consumption today.
Single use plastic is a problem and ALL plastic is single use. It doesn't matter if it's something you wrap a cucumber in (yeh, Norway individually wraps EVERY cucumber and EVERY bell pepper in plastic), or if it's a Tupperware container that will make it to landfill when die at the age of 62 years old thanks to plastic j
Ayn Rand was wrong? (Score:1)
The only way you'll double this is with a tax (Score:3)
PBS is wrong yet again. (Score:2)
So, the disclaimer: I write code for recycling machines. You know, the one which separate the recyclable plastics from the stuff that can't be recycled.
In 1992, the technology to recycle plastics was in its infancy. So taking statements made more than 3 decades ago and pretending they apply today is a bit deceptive. Think about comparing the PC of 1992, with it's (gasp!) 10 megabyte hard drive to one built today.
Today, we are not only able to separate and recycle the various plastics, we have machin
It's a gris-gris (Score:1)