If I made branded disposable products which ended up thrown around all over town, the police would become interested in me very quickly.
Enrages me how huge corporations churning out consumer slop aren't held to any standards.
Would love to see ringfenced taxes on domestic revenue for such companies, which go into cleaning up the streets of their shite, research into more sustainable materials, recycling and bottle collection schemes, etc.
Quite incredible the amount of guilt and societal pressure the little man has in 'saving the planet', when companies with nation state resources seem to be devoid of any responsibility.
To everyone blaming consumers: I encourage you to take a solution driven mindset here. Consumers won't change. There's far too many people, some of which don't care about the environment.
Tight regulations and additional tax on single use plastics can reduce plastic waste.
Why would a tariff on plastic bottling and packaging not help to reduce this? I understand that prices will be passed on to consumers, but money from the tariff can be used to fund state municipal recycling programs. Similar to the national highway trust fund.
I do not see congress ever agreeing to limit plastic due to the outsized influence of the industries and companies involved. Regulatory action has been almost non-existent, regardless of which administration was in power. No federal agency has the legal authority to limit the flow of plastic into America, and as stated, it is unlikely congress will ever give them that authority; not to mention a decade of litigation ahead.
The only thing that can be done to have some impact is a high tariff on plastics, including packaging and as a percentage of the product. At the same time, there should be no tariff on replacements for plastics such as aluminum and glass bottling.
Short of a strong tariff, I do not see the government ever having meaningful impact on plastic waste.
I've always thought the bottled water industry was insane. Why pay a dollar for a bottle of water, when you can get it out of the tap for a fraction of a cent? If you don't like the tap water taste, get a filter (they're cheap) and you're still way way ahead on cost.
And if you buy water in plastic bottles, doesn't the plastic leach into the water? Why drink that?
I grew up in Arizona, where you drink a couple of gallons of water a day. Nobody drank water from bottles. There were water fountains everywhere, every store had one. When hiking, you just bought a canteen and filled it from the tap.
so I could imagine going, grabbing, one of the actual people responsible for the mess on the beach at my place, drag them there, and make them clean up there mess It sure feels personal from here, is what I am saying, and lo, it is I have 1400' of ocean front,where there is always plastic garbage washing up. And have seen spots where the plastic snarls would fill a train car. Bolt cutterrs,hand saws, buckets, and shovles, work them in shifts round the clock. Funny thing is that there is so much plastic,or every kind, that the ocean is doing its thing, and there are surprises, toys and other personal items, broken, but then worn smooth and fine, with a hermit crab living in it.And I stick the larger weierder stuff into crooks in the trees at the high tide line, and keep the still useable things, 5 gallon buckets, hats a real lot of nice hats,gas jugs(with gas), If I go for a day walk somewhere ,and my hands and pockets fill up with more organic treasures, it us now inevitable that I find some sturdy plastic receptical or kit bag,something,on the beach to put it all in. This was not the case 20 years ago. There are 5000 miles of coast in nova scotia, and at the high tide line, where the berm of debrits, sea weed, drift wood and sand is, you dont have to look close to see the bits and pieces of plastic ,mixed in,from little coulorfull grains up to big stuff, that would take several people to move.
Classic Power Law or Pareto distribution.
What would be the environmentally AND commercially aware desiderata for food and beverage containers?
Reusable: strong, durable but also easy to clean, both for hydrophillic and hydrophobic goods. Can synthetic corundum or diamond ever become a viable alternative? A standardized symbol could indicate that the box is intended for hydrophobic or hydrophillic goods. Is UV-C transparency a desiderata for easy sterilization after cleaning?
Transparent: so people can see the food they are buying, transparent and reusable seems to imply scratch and minimal corrosion resistance as well.
Storable & transportable: a 3D equivalent to the paper sizes used in Europe: 2 A5-sheets side by side are the same dimension as an A4 sheet, 2 A4-sheets side by side are the same dimensions as an A3 poster size paper. Can a similar scheme be made for 3D boxes instead of 2D sheets? For 2D Ax system: the long side has a constant ratio to the short side, so perhaps side lengths L x W x H such that L / W = W / H = cube root 2 ?
There will always be a cost to cleaning containers, and while we can optimize the properties of the boxes for cleaning, there will always be some cost to cleaning, and a cleaning facility will feel financial pressure to clean less thoroughly but also a financial / legal / reputational pressure to clean more thoroughly. Having unique QR codes for individual boxes means any spoilt product brought back by consumers can be traced to its last cleaning, and the previous meal it contained, so a cleaning facility can then adjust the cleaning parameters for the type of previous meal, previous sale date, return date etc to understand if it would benefit from longer soaking, more percusive water jetting etc...
Plastic and glass bottle and can recycling is pretty common in most of Europe. You pay a deposit when you buy a can or bottle. And you get it back when you return it. If you leave your empty bottle on the street, some homeless person will return it for you. This is actually a pretty common form of charity in Berlin and it's not considered littering to leave your empty bottle for someone to collect it.
It's not a perfect system but most bottles and cans are collected this way and recycled. That would cover most of the bottles produced by the five companies mentioned in the article. You also don't get a plastic bag for free anymore but you can buy one. In most places it's going to be a paper bag. Simple solutions that work pretty well. And once people adjust, it isn't the end of the world.
The real issue is of course people dumping their trash all over the place instead of putting it in a trash can from where most of it would end up in a landfill, incinerator, or even being recycled. Some places have steep fines for littering, which works. IMHO not a bad thing. If you are too lazy to use a trashcan and get caught, there should be a penalty for being a jerk.
Eh, the headline is kind of misleading
>they used data from brand information on plastic litter and found that 24 percent of the waste with an identifiable brand came from just five companies: Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé, Danone, and Altria.
>Over five years, volunteers in 84 countries analyzed over 1,800,000 pieces of plastic that they collected during clean-up events. Just over half the analyzed items had a visible brand.
1) It wasn't 24%, it was 24% of the half that could be identified.
2) It's only of the litter collected during clean-up events, so will be skewed towards waste from products used outside. This will ignore things like industrial plastic waste, fishing nets (which is a big issue in ocean plastics), etc.
That said it still seems like an important study.
There's also the question of what is actually problematic waste, that causes issues for humans or animals. Plastic in landfill isn't "good", but as long as it doesn't contaminate groundwater AFAIK it's harmless.
> Altria, a tobacco company, disagrees with the findings. In an email, a spokesperson said that the study data includes 80 countries, but its cigarette company Philip Morris USA, which owns brands such as Marlboro and Parliament, only operates in the United States, making it impossible for it to be responsible for 2 percent of the world’s branded plastic pollution.
Not sure about the other companies, but Coca-Cola could also try to weasel out of their responsibility this way: it's not widely known, but they operate on a franchise system, the actual regional bottlers operating independently from the Coca-Cola Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coca-Cola_Company#Bottlers).
This is a problem when the product is sealed in plastic that does not allow air to pass through. This is very harmful to the environment, dangerous bacteria multiply in such packaging. It would be better to wrap the product in paper or cardboard, as in previous years. In any case, it is necessary to make holes in the plastic packaging for ventilation. Chinese companies are very fond of sealing products in plastic film, but forget to make holes for ventilation. Such a product is very harmful and can cause mass epidemics. It is very harmful when people drink a drink from a bottle, screw it on and throw it away. Such an empty bottle is very dangerous if it is opened. Do not do this. Bottles should strip the threads when opened so that they cannot be resealed.
The way to deal with plastic waste is by incentives, not punishment. Charge a quarter extra to buy a bottle, get a quarter when you hand it to the recycler.
But the company can't do that. The tax people can. It would be useful thing the government can do instead of regulation and punishment.
I visited a remote island in the Solomon Islands in the Pacific.
A tiny island, I walked all around the island in the water in about two hours.
There were hundreds, probably thousands of plastic drink bottles in the water and on the sand.
Every step brought fresh plastic drink bottles into view.
Humans don't deserve this planet.
I find the headline frustrating. It is a study that seems to have only looked at branded plastic.
It also seems to think that the finding showing a correlation to production numbers is proof that the producers are not taking effective efforts.
I can't and don't say the results are worthless. I do question any study that doesn't mention the fashion industry on plastics. My gut is I pollute more plastic from my drier vent than makes any sense. And yet most people I talk to are unaware that drier lint is plastic.
Waste isn't inherently bad, littering is. It's not Coca Cola's fault that people throw away plastic bottles into the rainforest, oceans or other fragile ecosystems.
Reducing sugar consumption has long term health benefit, reduce medical cost, and might reduce consumption of plastic bottle. Anyone explored regulating/taxing sugar before?
This article is pointless. The issue is what occurs with the waste after it is produced. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93Philippines_was...
Good, but an unavoidably biased method. They could identify about half the waste plastic items, and 11% of those were identified as coming from Coca Cola, which has some of the most distinctive bottle shapes, so is probably more easily identified.
Blaming companies for what their customers do seems like a miscarriage of justice.
While I understand the point, that and the classic "X company produce Y% of carbon emission worldwide!" feel very dishonest. They don't produce the waste for the heck of it. It is directly linked to our consumption. We want less plastic waste ? Then vote for more regulation, and sadly, this doesn't seem like the priority for a lot of people right now (which is understandable since rich country just send their plastic waste to poor country, they don't see the consequences of their action).
I don't actually care at all about plastic waste anymore. Landfill it and we're good: it started off as oil in the ground, it can end up as oil in the ground.
Plastic not going into stable landfill is the real issue : so actually consumer plastic is kind of bad like that, whereas industrial plastic basically fine (i.e. infrastructure plastics like pipes).
Would it be better if 500 companies produced 25% of all plastic waste?
Need to adjust relative to their revenue
The real problem is everyone using plastic bags to haul their purchases (which might be wrapped in five layers of plastic but who cares). That’s what the telly tells me.
Thinking that recycling would address the problem of plastic pollution is wishful thinking. Plastic recycles very poorly.
Companies like plastic because it means thicker margins for them, environment be damned; the proper solution is not to buy into the “consumers should be recycling” narrative but to thin out their margins so that using more sustainable and recyclable materials is financially attractive again.