You're on the right track; if you don't want to dispose of it, don't buy it.

I feel like this is just one aspect of environmental awareness that has degraded since the 90s. Packaging has become more wasteful, and there's more of it too, because everything is individually shipped in a box in a truck now (from Amazon etc.) Cars have become bigger and more wasteful than ever (the SUV trend). All the new architecture is full of huge glass windows & curtain walls... one of the most energy-permeable and wasteful barriers (to the extent that a wall is supposed to be a barrier) you could possibly design. But it looks great! As does that hermetically sealed pre-packaged salad in the plastic clamshell. I dunno, we seem to be responding to the problem by pretending all the more ferociously that it doesn't exist.

In this way, recycling has been one of the most catastrophic environmental efforts ever. If we had stuck with just "reduce and re-use" the world would look drastically different. But no, recycle got included and we got the 3 Rs, so now I can purchase that salad in a single-use clamshell plastic container and feel zero guilt because, hey, recycle!

I mean maybe it is, but then comes the problem: Plastics are used because they're cheap, they're not worth recycling because they're so cheap but you can't just do away with the packaging material entirely because that just leads to, in the case of food, spoiled goods and foods which can't be stored or transported for so long which can cause its own environmental issue.

It doesn't make economic sense to use a different material which is more recyclable because, by the definition of this problem, they're much more expensive.

Perhaps the answer is re-usable plastic containers - maybe some system where you can post them back to the manufacturer for cleaning and re-use.

It might just be that once oil drilling for energy goes away, so does some of this problem - at least in that plastics would cease to be so cheap.

You're right... There are some powerful heuristics in environmentalism-- disposable is generally worse, plastics are bad, recycling is better for the environment...

But these will break in some special cases. We should avoid treating them as dogmas and be open minded when examining the entire lifecycle of products.

For example, styrofoam is so much less energy intensive than firing ceramics. Given the hot water used in rewashing, you can get some unexpected consequences where disposables are the better option.

https://sustainability.tufts.edu/wp-content/uploads/Comparat...

(That analysis is sensitive to how energy efficient your dishwasher is, and how durable the ceramic is.)

So imagine if even after we stop using petroleum, Texas finds a giant pool of easy oil next to abundant landfill space... Could be Texans should probably just use plastics and toss them in that situation.

New Yorkers might have a different calculus, because the cost of trash hauling and processing is more significant there.

It all depends.

Disposables are only the better option when you move some part of the entire planet outside the system you are measuring.

Is your worry that we'll convert every inch to landfill?

Rest assured, at the rate we create landfills, the tectonic plates will push our landfills below the surface of the Earth and create new untouched landmasses before we run out of space.

There are unintuitive results in this domain. Highly recommend you check out some of the lit, like Hocking mentioned above.

Have a talk to any marine biologist about how effective landfill is as a means of disposal. Single use plastics are a hair behind AGW when it comes to existential threats to humanity as a whole.

We’ll poison the oceans long before landfill becomes an issue.

> in the case of food, spoiled goods and foods which can't be stored or transported for so long which can cause its own environmental issue

How do local supermarkets compete with TJs? Seriously, I love me some TJs but if the plastics are truly non-recyclable I will need to consider - we need go back to using a more sustainable method.

Also paper, glass and wood are all much more easily recycled. Re-Use should be king.

Because TJ's is essentially 1/4 of a grocery store. There are many many things you can't make from ingredients at TJs that you could from even the worst stocked super market in the blandest food areas.

TJ's in many ways is a way over stocked 7-11 full of prepped foods and the most common of things.

> you can only make it work with a really low cost of labor.

Yet, isn’t that what automation provides? It has been two decades since supermarkets in the Nordic countries have whizbang bottle-return machines that take back plastic, aluminium, and glass bottles as long as the barcode is still legible. Is there really no way to make a machine that scans the barcode of various other forms of plastic packaging (like yoghurt containers, ketchup bottles, etc.) and then directs the item to the appropriate container? Since the machine will know the exact categorization of the packaging on the basis of the barcode, then consumers would not be required to correctly sort plastic rubbish themselves.

Oh man, the Nordic nations. I remember studying abroad and being the industrious-borderline-alchoholic I am, taking the empties from any classmate I could, so I could re-up the beer supply for free.

Here in salt lake, however, we actually have to pay extra to have a glass collection bin at home. There are a dozen or so sites in the city that one could dump the glass, if they were so inclined, or into the general trash bin it goes. We certainly don't get paid for our our glass.

It's extra disappointing because local...legal strangeness, has been encouraging a bit of a local brewery boom. I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse, but that's not an option here.

All that said, there's a ton of plastic that goes into single stream recycling that isn't barcoded...

>I'd love to return the glass to the brewery for cleaning and reuse

This is one of the few cases where glass "recycling" makes sense. Unfortunately, glass is stupid cheap in terms of base material and production process so the only way to make recycling glass products worthwhile is to put the used product right back into service in its whole form (after cleaning of course). I'll try to find the study I'm thinking of but from what I recall, glass recycling isn't just uneconomical to recycle, it often winds up requiring more energy to recycle than it does to obtain the base materials and create a new container. Contamination knocks down the efficiency and the logistics of collecting and sorting glass are far less efficient than the bulk mining and transport of silica into a centralized production plant.

A possible solution to this, IMO, is to force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes, colors/opaqueness, and closure type. This could also work hand in hand with a ban on plastic bottles for common products like juice, soda, etc. Marketing departments would hate it but the centralized redistribution of reusable containers that are useful to every bottling operation would finally make glass recycling a rational concept.

This is what a local milk company does in Illinois (Oberweis). You get $1.50 for returning the jug to the store.

https://patch.com/img/cdn/users/37924/2013/01/T800x600/3722a...

> force bottling operations to standardize on a handful of containers in different sizes

And voila, that's exactly the case in Denmark

(I live in silly valley now and it makes me nauseated to have to deal with all the waste here - I refuse all the packaging I can but rarely plan well enough to bring a stainless steel container)

No one gets paid for returning bottles in Nordic countries. They get the deposit back that was paid during purchase.

If you return other people’s bottles because they are willing to forego the deposit, then you do make some money. One of the ways that I survived my time as a skint foreign student in a Nordic country was picking up bottles in the city center on a Friday or Saturday night when everyone was drinking in the street and couldn’t be arsed to hold on to their bottles and take them back for the deposit. (I hear that now students find it harder to make money like this, because Roma immigrants have cornered this line of work.) Even later when I wasn’t so poor, there is pleasure in hosting a BYOB party and then being able to get the deposit for all the bottles and cans your guests brought.

Here’s one from my student days:

We define the derivative of a party as the amount of alcohol that can be purchased by returning the empty bottles left after the party. A good party is a party such that the second derivative of the party is positive.

A new giant type of automated recycling station has been installed around Sweden during the past couple of years, called the "Pantamera Express". I like this thing. You dump your stuff, it processes all kinds of things at a quite decent rate (~100/minute) and in the end you get a value check that can be redeemed in a grocery store.

Here's a cheesy video demoing it (turn down the volume):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWtJdB3-bwg

It's pretty big:

https://pantamera.nu/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/BFR_storpant...

The bigness is a good thing, most of it consists of storage space for (compressed) returned packaging. One of the more frustrating issues with the common variety of bottle/can recycling machines is that I nearly always get confronted by the 'machine full - call store clerk' message while feeding it. This takes up my time, the store clerk's time and that of the person waiting behind me with a bag of bottles/cans.

Exactly. That's been one of the core problems with the 80s-style in-store "chewers".

It isn't about products it's about opaque lids mixed with clear bottles. Films mixed with stiff boxes. Plastic mixed with food residue and stuck on labels. A tiny contamination can massively lower the value of the batch by making it difficult to work with/have limited usefulness.

Nobody is going to do that without a deposit, and that is hard to push through.

IMO use tax policy to drive it. Put a $5 tax on plastic clamshells and they’ll be gone in six months.

And replaced with “reusable” clamshells that somehow don’t count as plastic and they’ll be five times as thick and use way more resources to produce. :-/

Props to amazon for their frustration-free (and shipping cost friendly) packaging effort.

I have seen a marked reduction/elimination of clamshells the past decade of buying from them.

I'd love to complain to retailers nearby: "see this, I'm returning it and buying it from Amazon right now because of your consumer-unfriendly packaging"

Or cardboard boxes.

And there is the liability with "clamshells"

https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2017/03/04/clamshell-pa...

> It doesn't seem like retailers have quite caught on that it's becoming more difficult to recycle.

They have, they just don't care. It's not directly their problem that you can't recycle their waste until people stop buying there or start returning their waste to them.

That's why plastic should just be "recycled" in a waste to energy plant.

That would raise an entirely different set of issues in Salt Lake City.

Plastic is fine, as long as you get lots of uses out of it.

We have knit plastic bags that we can put veggies in. Super light (no tare needed) and can hold a lot... Yet we've used them hundreds of times.

Now think of that crappy flimsy plastic bag, or plastic wrapping. It's used once, and "thrown away" (please: define where away is..). That's the problem - single use and nearly impossible to use for anything else.

I hassled decor (home plastic container company) about BPA and they said their food grade containers had never had BPA.

Oddly they saw no need to market on this.

It’s a risk area because the risks of BPA likely exist in whatever they are using.

I always assume there’s something nasty under the surface with plastic drink and serving ware — like 6 months after the first BPA studies hit the press, GE sold its plastic and silicone divisions.

Producing high-purity plastics that don't contain any of the many usually toxic ingredients is quite difficult and requires finely tuned and monitored processes. There is a huge price differential between plastics used for consumer garbage and e.g. plastics used for industrial piping and fixtures (when they're nominally the same plastic) which is gladly paid for.

We need to code this in law.

Any type of plastic used in consumer products needs to be recyclable easily, otherwise outlaw it.

Any food containers need to be compostable.

I'm willing to pay much higher food and product costs so that the waste we create can be easily recycled. If it makes the product economically unviable then maybe the product isn't that useful.

Industrial-grade plastics are recycled to some degree, but only certain plastics are and they are collected completely separated by type and coloring (usually just natural or black). Only a tiny number of companies are able to do this.

The oil industry is interested in the maximum amount of use of plastics. The less reusable glass and other materials we use, the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates.

>the higher the profits for the big oil and chemicals conglomerates

is that relevant if plastic is still the cheapest option? should we pay more just to spite them?

Yes. Doing the right thing is often less convenient and more expensive than doing the lazy and easy thing. So we have to stop being so lazy and cheap.

Yep, seems the solution is to get rid of it or make plastic producers pay part of the share of recycling it.

The plastic wrap should be recyclable along with plastic bags. Your local supermarket may take them.