I had a similar experience the last time I was at CES and was deep into the "South Hall" where there's kiosk after display booth after kiosk of just completely pointless crap of every shape and size. Thousands of practically identical cheap cell phone cases. Thousands of cheap bags and backpacks adorned with battery packs and/or Bluetooth speakers. Each and every booth staffed with multiple people who have to stand there and try to convince you that their big mountain of garbage is somehow special. At the same time as it's astonishingly wasteful and kind of insane when you think about it, it's also completely existentially debasing to the people involved.
If we have a global addiction to anything that seems like it needs fixing, it seems like we're addicted to producing stuff we don't need for problems we don't have just for the sake of doing something.
Everybody's got aged-out baby crap taking up space in their house, if you can get them before they get off their ass to throw it out they're usually overjoyed for it to disappear
Second-hand stuff is easy to get when you know you need something (or will need it soon), but you're not pressed for time. At any given time, if you look for a second-hand $foo, you may not find it in your area, but there's a good chance you'll find it within a month or two. It's particularly easy with kid stuff - you have ~8 months of advance warning, and most kid items are only used for couple of months, so there's a steady stream of used stuff you can pick from, and a year later, start contributing to, as your kid grows out of their stuff.
What makes second-hand (especially free second-hand) so easy these days is Internet. To start, you want to find and follow three boards for your area: a) Craigslist/Gumtree/equivalent, b) a local giveaway/exchange group, and c) a local "spotted by the side of a trashcan" group. Put stuff you don't need on them, take stuff you need from them, and you're now part of the "reduce, reuse" flow - which is strictly better than "recycle". It doesn't take much time either; following b) and c) is something you do by scrolling through a feed for a minute.
Unless people are willing to earn a little less, buttons used is not a solution for an individual’s environmental footprint.
I don't know that we'd get a potty used, but we did get used infant bathtubs, which is about the same from a hygienic perspective.
Into the garbage it went, sadly.
> The findings confirm the results of a Guardian investigation last year, which revealed that numerous types of plastics are being sent straight to landfill in the wake of China’s crackdown on US recycling exports. Greenpeace’s findings also suggest that numerous products labeled as recyclable in fact have virtually no market as new products.
> She emphasized that bottles and jugs are indeed worth recycling, but said “our findings show that many items commonly found in beach cleanups – cups, bags, trays, plates and cutlery – are not recyclable. In America’s municipal recycling system, they are contaminants.”
> The US recycling economy was upended in 2018 when China enacted bans on imports of most US recycling, leaving recycling companies at a loose end. The report chronicled how dozens of cities – stretching from Erie, Pennsylvania, to San Carlos, California, – have either stopped taking mixed plastics or are sending them to landfill.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/18/americas-rec...
People are not being informed about it clearly enough. Not that it would change much, except discouraging most people from sorting trash.
Beyond being a significant burden, having individuals washing their trash is just ridiculously inefficient and wasteful in terms of water and energy use, plus it would more than double the amount of detergent unloaded into the return leg of water supply loop. It kind of already defeats the point of recycling.
And that's without even getting to the whole "recycling things other than metal and maybe glass is a scam" thing.
If we want to recycle pizza boxes as a society, there needs to be a grease absorbing layer that’s clearly marked for the trash, and a recyclable layer with clear instructions. A great example of this is Siggi’s single serving yogurt cups. The paper label is easily separated from the plastic body, with clear instructions that they’re meant to be separated for recycling into separate streams. In my case my municipality doesn’t recycle the plastic they use (#5 IIRC), but at least the paper and metal foil get recycled.
Expecting end consumers to stay up to date on this stuff is just a way for companies to avoid the responsibility of making better packaging.
> If we want to recycle pizza boxes as a society, there needs to be a grease absorbing layer that’s clearly marked for the trash, and a recyclable layer with clear instructions.
Agreed. And this needs to be built into the packaging, and not be a flimsy piece of paper the restaurant inserts so that the pizza itself doesn't stick to the box.
> A great example of this is Siggi’s single serving yogurt cups. The paper label is easily separated from the plastic body, with clear instructions that they’re meant to be separated for recycling into separate streams.
I've seen this trend and I like it. Paper label being separable also makes it easier to clean and reuse the cup itself. Containers from the yogurt brand we buy can survive a trip through a dishwasher, which helps. Unfortunately, most recyclable plastic containers are not like that.
> Expecting end consumers to stay up to date on this stuff is just a way for companies to avoid the responsibility of making better packaging.
Exactly. Plus, in this case, it's extremely wasteful.
I also blame the packaging problem on advertising/marketing being the cancer of modern society. Notice how professional equipment tends to come in simple cardboard boxes. None of the triple-layered plastic/paper/plastic + paint non-recyclable bullshit. Just straight cardboard and some anti-shock padding.
Companies need to start paying up front for end-of-life management of their products and packaging. It's the most market-friendly way to align incentives on the topic.
Most of our baby stuff comes (and goes) that way. We rarely bought baby stuff at all except for consumables (and even those we gave away when we didn't use them all up, like diapers).
The big issue is that it requires a social circle of people also having kids that are slightly older and younger, and for a lot of people in bigger cities, it's hard for them to build those circles.
There are online forums that help (non-sarcistic Thanks Facebook!) but it's a lot easier if you have a wide social circle already.
We do have some friends who were asking “is this newish?” when gifting some item, so not everyone is on zero waste bandwagon.
And by the way, govs should promote zero waste movement way more. Probably starting adopting it themselves.
I have another friend that would never buy a used car. He's convinced all used cars were totaled and are a scam, despite the fact it is all I've ever owned and they've been fine.
Something about being "used" really freaks some people out. It's this weird purity thing, I dunno.
However, Americans in general just don't take good care of stuff. Combined with products being designed from the cheapest possible materials, the quality of second hand goods isn't great. People avoid it if they can afford to buy new.
If you know "oh, we will need larger cloths and a potty and some toys soon and that bed will be to small in a bit" you can monitor relevant sites on the side and see when the opportunity comes up.
Not to mention the social circle with parents a bit older and a bit younger. "Hey, we don't need this anymore. Do you?" - "oh it's a bit early, but I take it already thanks!"
The hidden lede is that Germans are not as rich as some would believe, with fairly low salaries, high home prices and high taxes, and a low level of wealth compared to GDP. Much of the German wealth is held by heirs of big dinosaur companies.
Wow, the privilege wrapped up in that statement. Do you think it’s existentially fulfilling to clean public toilets? To drive a bus? To bottle alcohol?
I am old enough to remember when there was practically no plastic in food packaging. Twinkies and its ilk were more or less the exception (and fine examples they were of that exception!).
No doubt many remember glass ketchup bottles, glass mustard jars, glass peanut butter jars, glass mayonnaise jars... I swore to continue to buy only glass condiment jars but they no longer exist. I think the exception now is jams and jellies still come in glass jars. Honey too if you look for it.
Cereal? No plastic bag liner, it was wax paper or that weird paper foil stuff that Super Sugar Crisp came in.
I'd love to go back to glass, wax paper, but there just isn't any options any longer.
With plastic there is trash to deal with, but glass is heavier thus will take more energy to deal with logistically. Recycling is not energy free either, and there is plenty of loss to deal with there. Plastic is very cheap to manufacture partly because its manufacture is so easy.
And right now it seems like energy consumption is a far larger worry than trash at the ecological level.
If you have local production and re-use of glass it can be more energy efficient to use the more heavy glass. The further the transport, the worse it becomes.
But there is a second factor to it, besides energy use: microplastics are a problem and most plastics can only be used for "energetic usage" - being burned in a power plant, which causes probelmatic gases needing filtering and then disposal of those filters ... re-use of broken glass is elementary in glass production and even if not recycled less of a problem for the environment.
My family has been using the same set of glasses for canning for decades.
When we were using glass jars for everything, it's not like glass jars were not actively being produced. I don't think these are unanswerable questions but i highly doubt it's as simple as "replace plastic with glass". Aluminum may be a better solution, one that doesn't use up a lot of sand, for example.
Well, I lived in a socialist country; as a consequence, DIY was the default for obtaining stuff. So quite average I guess.
But I'm just guessing.
The problem is having the space in some place where neither flora nor fauna will be affected.
Landfills are "holes in the ground", I won't deny it. But a lot is happening in these holes, will all sorts of microorganisms breaking down stuff. Well managed landfills try to minimise impact to the environment with that knowledge.
In an oversimplified way, our landfills are putting oil back where it came from. Recycling and incineration are good too, but so are well managed landfills. It all depends on the situation/materials/...
The average American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day at an average one third of a gram per cubic centimeter. Assuming that holds steady, and we use a normal landfill depth of 400 feet, and the US population doubles over the next century, we need a landfill area of 250 square miles to cover us for the next hundred years.
Compared to available land that's tiny.
- 1589g of trash per day!
- 4767 cm3 to store it (3cm3/gram)
- 130 m3 per lifetime (75yr)
- 300,000,000 lifetimes.
- 78 km3 storage allocated
- 39 km3 required
~~We're gonna need a bigger boat.~~
Neat!
I think something went very wrong there!
4767 x 75 x 365 = I get 130,500,000 cm³/person/lifetime. You got 130,000,000,000,000,000.
There are 10¹⁵ cubic centimetres in a cubic kilometre, not 10⁶. I think all your numbers are for m³, not km³, a factor of a billion out, so your final figure should be 39 km³.
Just because you can’t see it, just because it doesn’t have value to property developers, does not make it junk.
I mean, by this logic, we should just dump our trash in the “junk water” which covers much of the planet.
Is there any data that single use stuff (of any kind) creates less carbon emissions? I would expect it to be the other way around, except for some edge cases.
this is what i do, and if they were banned i'd be using some sort of bag and then purchasing trash bags separately using maybe twice the resources?
I get paper bags at the grocery and throw them out immediately after a single use, and now I have to also buy plastic garbage bags for under the sink, which I never used to do.
But that’s a one-time reuse for something that’s not going to biodegrade when it ends up in the ocean or landfill
EDIT: quick Google search has many sources listing paper degrading in 2-6 weeks in landfills. Plastic in the ocean… I think you need to b by broaden your horizons if you think that doesn’t happen
And I'm not saying decomposition doesn't happen at all in landfills; it very clearly does, but the sort of decomposition that takes place is incomplete and slow, because landfills aren't ideal places for decomposition to occur. But that doesn't matter. Once it's buried, who cares if it takes 300 years to decompose?
I think that enough people don't give a shit about where their waste goes, that any coastal community will lose a fraction of its waste to the drink. That isn't where most of the plastic in the ocean comes from, but the difference between "should" and "inevitably won't" is vast.
Some landfills are known to generate huge amounts of methane, and ooze black sludge at the surface. This famously occured after the 1989 San Francisco earthquake.
In contrast, landfills in arid places can preserve trash like a museum:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-07-17-mn-14066-...
https://www2.mst.dk/Udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...
You're probably not going to do that.
p. 18: 'Conversely, for composite and cotton the very high number of reuse times is given by the ozone depletion impact alone. Without considering ozone depletion, the number of reuse times ranges from 50 to 1400 for conventional cotton, from 150 to 3800 for organic cotton, and from 0 to 740 for the composite material bag. The highest number is due to the use of water resource, but also to freshwater and terrestrial eutrophication'.
And as I have commented elsewhere: I have cotton bags that I have easily used 500 times. If I had used an old T-shirt for the bag or later use the old bag for cleaning purposes, the 7,100 becomes very relative.
Just take a trip along any river or stream near a town and you’ll find them swimming by like lifeless jellyfish
Otherwise you poison the land and water that flows through the land.
I'm down for recycling or burial in landfills, but CO2 seems like something we need to minimize this century.
In any case, it'd be compounding the problem here, and rather bad economics at the same time. Plastics aren't that hard to collect/separate, especially if it's ok to be mixed with paper. They burn readily and, given high temperatures, cleanly, allowing the recuperation of a significant fraction of its energy content.
Then, there's recycling, of course. Not always possible, but not entirely impossible, either.
“In 2018, 24% of all municipal waste generated in the EU was landfilled.” That said, incineration is a similar option that drastically lowers volume of waste, but still produced ash that ends up buried and vast amounts of CO2.
The goal in the EU is to reduce it to 10% in 15 years.
The USA landfill was of 50% in 2018. Some more legislation is needed. https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...
“One nation now grappling with the legacy of its long embrace of incineration is Denmark. The country, one of Europe’s biggest waste producers, built so many incinerators that by 2018 it was importing a million tons of trash.”
https://e360.yale.edu/features/in-europe-a-backlash-is-growi...
Absolutely not true, glad you maybe live in a country where landfills are disappearing, but they will always exist in some form - even with burning where do you think the slag goes to? That's right, a normal landfill. Not everything can be burnt, and not everything can be recycled.
And definitely not "all" EU countries - Poland has normal landfills that take everything still, very few operational waste incenerators, and recycling is still unknown to a lot of people.
I'd say it's a positive, we use oil to produce plastics, if that oil is used to produce energy after its plastic form is no longer needed....that's a plus in my book. But maybe on the other hand it's better if it stays in the landfill instead of being burnt and releasing the bound carbon into the atmosphere.
Ash is, by definition, inert. It is the remaining mass that does not chemically react even under extreme heat. It therefore also does not interact with, for example, the human body. Plastics are all carbon/hydrogen/nitrogen/oxygen, and, to a first approximation, do not leave any ash. In reality they do, but it's extremely little and harmless.
(Physical harms can survive an incinerator, such as material giving off radiation, but those should never be in the trash)
You're correct that sufficient incineration temperatures ensure the complete destruction of organic intermediaries, such as dioxins.
The problem is food packaging. Even if you use paper here, it often is coated with plastic anyway, any diary product for example.
And even if one company cares enough to do something, they will change their tune when they have to start charing more.
The only way this will get better is if the external costs of single use plastic are borne by the companies that make them and consumers are subsidized to absorb the extra cost.