Recyclers are downstream from consumers. They can’t stop consumers from throwing away their pringles cans, and until Kellogg’s starts bulk-selling Pringles in bags… people will throw cans away, there’s noly do many cans you can find a use for.
I can’t find any specific production numbers but the internet tells me Kellogg’s sells for billions in snacks and pringles are a significant fraction of that. A Pringle can is a buck or two, meaning 6 figures Pringle cans being sold every year, if not 7.
The same packaging for less should be a crime with bankrupting fines.
(A play on Universal Paperclips [1], which was featured on here earlier this week)
There’s no way they’ll sell Pringles in bags though; they’re way too delicate for anything but a purpose-built rigid container.
The first R is already not an option, people who buy pringles want pringles, otherwise they wouldn’t be buying that. Short of making pringles illegal you’re not going to change this.
> There’s no way they’ll sell Pringles in bags though; they’re way too delicate for anything but a purpose-built rigid container.
Pringles were literally invented because potato chips were too fragile at a time when shipping bags of chips and having them survive the transit was basically a bad bet. Chips remain sold in bags to this day.
Chips which are much thicker than Pringles.
So about six cans of Pringles per lifetime?
Why not Al cans?
I am sick and tired of this being the solution to every problem!
Anytime there's a legacy business model in need of polishing, they plate it in Al and call it something new.
Al doesn't work that way. There's many uses it excels at, but it's not a panacea.
Nowadays, we have Al toasters, Al refrigerators, even Al watches. Yet no one stopped to ask if these were devices that needed Al.
Hell, I even heard about a company that's building Al homes. Interface with your car and everything.
Personally, I can't wait for the next Al winter.
/1950s sarcasm
Good fonts let you know the difference between a lowercase l (ell) and an uppercase I (eye).
Now, I doubt an aluminum Pringles can would need 1mm wall thickness for sufficient strength to deal with the usual rigors of being handled by a minimum wage shipping or shelf-stocking employee. However, I will concede that something with say, the typical .01-.02 wall thickness of a soda/beer can may be harder to produce with a workflow of cutting can-lengths from a large piece of extruded stock. Depending on how the stock was cut, you risk crushing it. At that thickness, you'd do better to stamp the final can size & shape from crude blanks. Now, at high enough volume, it could be worth it to in-house the can-stamping operation; beer companies are an example. I could see Pringles having enough volume to justify in-house production of their cans.
But I don't think a .01-.02 wall thickness would be enough for a Pringles can. Yes, soda cans are strong enough to endure shipping and handling, but most of that strength comes from the fact that their contents are under pressure; significantly moreso than a pringles can, I'd bet. Witness how easy it becomes to crush a soda can once it is opened, even when it is still partially full. So .01-02mm wouldn't do. I'd guess .1-2mm would, however. But at a 10x wall thickness you're using 10x the material if my math is right, so an all-aluminum Pringles can with a .1mm wall thickness would cost at least 10x to produce as a soda can of equal length.
So yeah, manufacturing cost issue is probably at least one factor. But I'm willing to be wrong about that.
Either way, that brings up an interesting (to me, anyway) question: Would it be cheaper for Pringles to simply stamp their cans with thicker walls, or engineer their production line to allow the cans to be sealed at an even higher pressure?
Pringles have nothing on Doritos.
The article states "three million cans are made across Europe every day". That's 10 figures annually in Europe alone.
It's probably 3,000,000, which is 6 or 7 figures.
Normally I don't buy Pringles at all, not in decades. Because, honestly, they're the consistency of pasteboard and taste of mostly salt. The bottom rung on the snack ladder. I snack on nothing instead of Pringles if that's the only option.
But the can! That seems worthwhile now that you call out its many uses.
Not so if I store them in a Pringles can. They stay fresh for way longer due to the confined space and decent-sealing lid.
That's because companies don't want us to reduce or in many cases reuse, but recycle makes everyone feel good inside (even though in many cases even that doesn't happen, but we as consumers don't care).
Thank you for saying this. It's crucial that we recognize how consent is manufactured by corporate propaganda that goes way beyond the simplistic "buy our product!" messaging that folks normally think of.
Our reality is dictated by private companies to suit their bottom lines. We've got to be very careful to make sure we know what's good for us, what we want, and how to get it. Corporate propaganda inserts memetic man-in-the-middle attacks at every step in that line of reasoning.
I wonder if it would make sense to require these items to be more substantial and then make reuse financially unavoidable. So the only way to buy bottled water would be in a reusable container. You would either return it for a deposit or reuse it yourself.
This is one of the big problems I have with recycling. When I was a kid in school (throughout the 90’s), we learned the 3 R’s: reduce, reuse, recycle. Notice that recycle is last on the list.
The list is in order of increasing waste for a very good reason. We should first strive to reduce the amount of wasteful stuff we purchase, barring that we should try to reuse things around the house (plastic bags, containers, etc), and finally if we can’t do either we should recycle the stuff to try and recover the materials.
Nowadays I don’t hear about the 3 R’s anymore. It’s become all about people dumping everything in a box and making it somebody else’s problem, just as trash was in the first place.