It's practically impossible to avoid plastic without great effort. I think even if we collectively don't do much towards that goal, each of us should think about it while we go about our daily lives.
For instance, there are times where the choice is wholly ours. Eggs, for instance, often come in plastic or cardboard, so aside from taking a few extra seconds to consider the kind of eggs we want, that's easy. If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic.
But there's still so much we can do. When we know that a store puts plastic utensils in an order without asking, and/or gives us our purchase in a plastic bag, it's simple to ask them for neither. It's also simple to carry a reusable bag or two, or a travel mug, et cetera.
Spending just a little energy can easily reduce default plastic use quite a lot. This story is a good reminder that perfect should never be the enemy of good, so at very least we should try where we can.
Cardboard and glass packaging used to be a lot more common. The key to reducing to use of plastic is fiddling with the economics. It's cheap for companies to use plastic as long as they don't have to worry about cleanup or recycling. As soon as you start charging them for the privilege of mass polluting our world with their cost savings, they can adapt pretty rapidly.
In the Netherlands, there are some discussions about going back to using cardboard packaging for dairy products. That was basically all there was when I grew up. Before cardboard, glass was very common for this stuff. But In recent years, a lot of plastic bottles were used for milk. But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled, that just got a lot less attractive. Plastic is only convenient if you don't have to recycle it.
Same with plastic bags. At some point those stopped being free (in most of Europe at least). And then people started pushing for paper bags. Problem solved. There are a lot less plastic bags now. I actually carry a nice foldable plastic bag made out of recycled plastic in my backpack these days. Fits behind the laptop compartment. So, I rarely need to buy paper bags.
Note that cardboard for liquid packaging often has a plastic lining, aluminum cans have plastic/epoxy lining, glass containers have plastic seals in the lids, etc.
Yep, otherwise they don't work. Cardstocks don't hold milk, sterile. Pure aluminum cans dissolve into food contents. Glass lids can't seal tight enough.
Food producers and public health authorites has food poisoning lawsuit and human safety at higher priorities than environmentalism. So they just make it all packaged up in plastics.
Doesn't mean some sort of waterproof inner wall coatings can't be made in the future, though. Maybe if we substitute PE with engineered PLA made from agri wastes and made sure to burn it, that could make sense someday.
truly this. you start deconstructing packaging only to e.g. realize they've glued LDPE into the inside of an otherwise fully recyclable item to make it look slightly better in stores for longer due to moisture.
This is true. But it's worth noting that in terms of mass, it's a lot less than regular plastic packaging as these are very thin coatings. But you are right that this is not a perfect solution. I'm guessing there might be some biodegradable alternatives though for some of these things.
At least cans are being recycled in parts of Europe now. You pay a little deposit when you buy cans of beer/soda and you get that back when you return it. I'm guessing the plastic just burns off when they melt the metal. Even regular cans without a deposit that go in the trash are being separated out probably and recycled.
In USA, I hope we can talk about:
The amount of plastic in junk mail. Maybe instead of stamps, we sell envelopes without a window.
The concentration of plastics in receipts. Maybe we replace those printers with photographable screens, and have a separate lane for people desiring print. Receipts expose you to far more plastic than more-emotionally-attentive items like shampoo.
Even with deposit schemes for recycling of plastic as well, the industry prefers plastic as it's cheaper to recycle than reuse of glass bottles. So you still need to dictate or tax plastic use extra. There are also environmental tradeoffs until renewable use for transport and industrial use are at sufficient levels.
Glass bottles weigh as much as its content. Aluminums and plastics are more like few percent.
Tripling energy expended for transport of liquids don't make sense. That's one of reasons why glass bottles are on a long phaseout.
It doesn't make sense when your energy is dirty enough. When your energy sources get clean enough you eventually reach an inflection point where glass bottles are less environmentally harmful.
Tire dusts are also a factor, for example. Plastics aren't always non-renewable either, some like PLA can be made from sugar cane wastes.
No way it's ever going to be environmentally good thing to source extra 2 gallon-water worth of energy per 1 gallons of water just to move the bottles around. Burning shredded corn meal bottles using some sort of smart home electric kiln is going to make a lot more sense.
The question will be what leaves more undestroyed plastic waste, not whether or not it is non-renewable, but if we can get to a point where using biodegradable plastics works for bottles, then that would change things significantly. Burning is insufficient, because people will keep dropping bottles outside the home; it needs to biodegrade fully without that kind of heat.
EDIT: There are potential hazards of bioplastics even when they are degradable. Not saying it might not become a solution, but it's not yet clear.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230601160216.h...
If the plastic recycled properly, why is it a problem?
Is it energy/waste effective? Washing a glass bottle might be more expensive (due to unpriced negative externalities) but still be better for the environment or human health. (I genuinely have no idea, to be clear.)
Because not all of it will be.
> But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled
Statiegeld! I really liked this scheme there for beer bottles.
When I lived there most milk came in tetra pak though. I thought it was recyclable?
Car dominated societies inevitably will expose their inhabitants to micro plastics through synthetic tire rubber dust. There is basically no possible way to avoid them without regulation.
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Plastic is too perfect to stop using. Honestly we need to find some miracle plastic that is completely biodegradable after say 10 years. The byproducts of the biodegradation process should be completely harmless as well.
I know people are going to say that we already have biodegradable plastic but the key point here is degrade more or less around 10 years, not earlier.
Just implement better recycling programs, and develop better technology for recycling (so "contamination" isn't a problem, etc.). This might not work so well for societies where it's socially acceptable to just throw your trash on the ground and have trash littering the landscape though.
If no new plastic was available, maybe we could recycle better, but at a very high energy cost. Even Japan, famous for its recycling where end users clean and sort their plastic in great detail, burns a lot of their plastic for energy.
Not all plastics can be recycled and there may not be any financial incentive to do so. Most paper in my state that goes into the curbside recycle bin ends up in the trash.
Recycling is hard because different plastic molecules don’t always play nice together - and the same goes for metal.
So you need to sort everything carefully. This is hard, slow, and way too imperfect.
I wonder if a better approach could one day be to burn it and then use some future catalyst or reaction to convert the smoke into something useful, or to chop the raw plastic up and feed it to a vat ful of special bacteria.
Yeah, that's why I said we should develop better recycling technology, because what we have today isn't that good. The bacteria idea is a good one I think. We already have microorganisms that can eat plastic, so it seems like it should be possible to genetically-engineer better plastic-eating bacteria for this purpose.
Just don’t let them loose!
We have lots of buried plastic pipes and cables.
Does that actually matter or is it yet another PR campaign where we shift the blame from companies to consumers?
>If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic.
Ceramic and glass containers are quite available in my area, i just think that's really big waste.
It they were reusable it would be one thing but we are talking about 4g of plastic vs 100g of glass...
Yogurt is fun and easy to make at home. And pickles. And beer. And bread. The only drawback is it takes time.
Eggs are such an interesting example to me. I'll speak mostly to the US here, but a good chunk of the population could absolutely raise their own chickens for eggs I'd they really were interested in an easy way to reduce impact. A flock of 6-8 hens don't require too much space, and ideally you can use them as bug control and fertilizer replacement in their lawn.
I live in an area with quite a few commercial chicken houses. Its an absolutely disgusting industry today, from how the animals are treated to the nasty conditions workers have to deal with. Getting rid of plastic and styrofoam packaging would be a nice win, getting rid of at least a portion of the market for industrial bird operations would be the real win in my book.
For yogurt, milk and so on there is glass - no need for plastics.