> consumers assume recycling works as a kind of magical "Get out of Pollution Free" card.

Consumers were told that by the local authorities who put these recycling programs in place. They were not told that behind the scenes it all goes to the landfill anyway. If they knew the truth they might actually make more effort to reduce the amount of stuff they throw out and be more aware of wasteful packaging.

I really see this as a problem further up the chain - why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves? Why is there so much crap to throw out? Why was it legal to wrap a product in another 25% of its weight in useless, non-recyclable packaging? I'm not sure why I as an individual am forced to bear the brunt of colossally wasteful pipelines and processes that I had no say in. I can do a bit and reuse bags, buy stuff with minimal packaging (or avoid buying new stuff etc.), but broadly, I have no choice most of the time.

I've started to give bad reviews to products with wasteful packaging that I couldn't see before purchase. If there's multiple cubic feet of styrofoam, I will leave a bad review mentioning only the packaging complaint so that future purchasers will know too.

> why is wasteful packaging even on the shelves?

Shrinkage. It's to the point where you need a screwdriver to get a kid's toy car out of the box.

100% agreed, this is exactly the problem. Just take a pack of yoghurt, we had good paper packaging and now they've glued a useless plastic port to it. Boom, no longer recyclable. Same with cheese and other bread toppings, all used to be packaged in perfectly recyclable paper and now it's sold in see-through plastic.

See through plastic can be both recycleable and biodegradable and might even use less ressources to produce, and improve the shelf life so that less food is wasted. Details are very important in these matters, which is why it's a bad idea to put the burden of figuring this all out on consumers.

Food-soiled paper was never recyclable.

Maybe OP had meant compostable?

Probably shouldn't compost dairy, unless it's industrially composted with chemical treatment

The solution is to standardise packaging so that it can be re-used by multiple brands and companies, with just a clean out and new set of logos glued on.

This might not be suitable for a Pringles can, but at least suitable for glass containers and bottles.

Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles, which would be trucked back to the bottling plant, sanitized, and reused. But that was too inconvenient, I guess. First came thin glass disposables, and then plastic took over. At least aluminum cans (and steel, for that matter) are readily recyclable.

Coca-Cola bottles had their originating bottling plant stamped into the bottom.

The energy and water costs of cleaning and sanitizing reusable containers can be very substantial. It seems nicer to "reuse" a bottle, but it may genuinely be the case that it's less impactful to just make a new one (preferably out of recycled materials).

isn't that just because the externalized costs of plastic disposables are passed along to society and the environment rather then paid by the manufacturer/consumer?

It depends greatly on how you estimate those externalized costs.

A plastic soft-drink bottle https://www.polisanhellas.com/products-pet-preform.html is about 30 grams of extremely chemically inert material, produced for a tiny energy cost from about 30 grams of crude oil, that goes to a landfill and stays there for, probably, millennia. So a single barrel of oil makes about 5,000 plastic bottles. Each bottle embodies about 1200 kJ of energy from oil that would otherwise have been burned. So whatever the externalized costs of drilling, refining, and shipping a barrel of oil are, it's about a five-thousandth of that. If you incinerate the bottle in the end, you get that saved-up energy back, at the risk of producing pollution from other things in the furnace.

Of course, blow-molding the bottle takes energy; you have to heat those 30 g of plastic up to 125°, but that only takes about another 4.5 kJ per bottle. Another similar amount was spent to injection-mold the preform. The actual work of blowing is even less, under 0.1 kJ. Similarly for shipping, molding machine operation, machine maintenance, catalysts, and so on.

(A potential hole in this analysis is that I don't really know the energy costs of the whole terephthalic acid synthesis and polymerization process. They can't be enormously higher than the cost of molding, but they might be a lot lower or a little higher.)

Contrast that with washing a glass bottle. You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.

(I think in actual fact the energy to reuse a glass bottle is about an order of magnitude higher than this.)

You also have to take into account the energy to make the glass bottle: you're heating 500 grams of raw materials (or maybe cullet) up past, typically, 1200°, which takes maybe 700 kJ, depending on the materials' specific heats and enthalpies of fusion. This gets amortized over the number of reuses of the bottle.

What about disposal? Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship) but in any case there is no shortage of landfill space, and neither type of bottle occupies an appreciable percentage of existing landfills. Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach. Chemically, both materials are very inert and nontoxic. (Microplastics are almost entirely from washing synthetic fibers, not from plastic bottles.)

So, making a plastic bottle takes on the order of 10 kJ of energy, while washing a glass bottle for reuse takes more like 150 kJ, and similarly shipping glass around externalizes 15× as much of each cost. Neither one has significant disposal externalities, except in the rare case of improper disposal, in which case broken glass is dangerous.

The crucial question, then, is how you weight the raw-material extraction externalities for the plastic bottle, and whether you incinerate it; because if drilling, refining, and shipping oil is the most significant externality (oil spills, bribing Nigerian officials, arresting Native American protestors asserting a sovereign right to block the Keystone pipeline, US invasions of Iraq), then the plastic bottle is about 7× worse. Unless you incinerate it instead of burying it in a landfill, in which case suddenly its oil consumption drops to zero, making it much better again. On the other hand, if the most significant externality is something related to burning oil or other fuels, like global warming, washing the glass bottle is 15× worse than throwing it out and replacing it with a plastic bottle. Unless your hot-water heater is solar or geothermal. Then again, you can run a blow-molding plant on solar energy, too.

(There are other questions of pollution; both glassmaking and PET-making can produce pollution, but it's not intrinsic to either process, so which process produces more pollution is largely a matter of how mismanaged it is. However, by virtue of dealing with 15× larger quantities of material, glassmaking is at a disadvantage here.)

> You can't really wash a 500-mℓ glass bottle with less than about a liter of water, and to sterilize it you need that water to be at least 60°, preferably more like 90°. Heating water from 25° to 60° takes 35 calories per gram; at 4.2 J/cal, that's 150 kJ.

A tiny nitpick. I'm quite sure you can use that same liter of hot water to wash multiple bottles. And even then any facility that washes bottles at scale would use the leftover heat from waste water to heat the fresh water.

I think you're right—and, unless you wash the bottle by hand before sending it to the recycling center, that's not a "tiny nitpick," it demolishes my whole thesis. But maybe the "thesis" was already so full of caveats as to be fairly demolished in the first place, unless you reduce it to "it depends".

Recycling waste water is a whole science, this goes for car washes, dishwashers (which now use less water than doing the same thing by hand) and industrial washing of all kinds of materials. The times when water was used just once are long gone, and that's before we get into thermal recycling to ensure that the maximum amount of energy is extracted from whatever waste remains.

Do you have a handle on how efficient these systems are and how much energy it really costs to reuse a glass bottle? Or how to find out?

I really enjoyed the analysis (as another commenter mentioned).

One quibble: > Proper disposal of a 500-gram glass bottle uses 15 times as much landfill space as a 30-gram plastic bottle (just as it costs 15 times as much to ship)

It only costs 15x as much to ship if weight is the driving factor in shipping. For a lot of surface shipping methods, dimensional measures govern the shipping prices either entirely or substantially. (No one is flying empty bottles as part of their supply chain.) It might be 2x as much, but it’s not going to be 15x if both pallets of bottles take up the same space.

You're right about that, although for the same reason plastic bottles are usually blow-molded from preforms in or near the bottling plant, to avoid shipping bulky empty bottles around.

Also glass is denser than PET, so 15 times as much mass is really only like 6 times as much volume in the landfill.

> Improper disposal for glass bottles is much worse, as you know if you've ever stepped on a broken glass bottle underwater at the beach.

Is it? After a short time the glass is smoothed by the sand/sea/rock and is fairly low impact.

Only at the beach, unless by "a short time" you mean centuries to millennia. In any other context (in the forest, by the side of the highway, in a river, in the desert, buried in your backyard) the glass can remain dangerously sharp for at least millennia and in some cases billions of years.

Of course there are natural sharp rocks, too, just like there's natural asbestos and natural hydrogen sulfide.

Oh man, I love this analysis.

Reusing glass uses a similar amount of water and about 30-40% of the energy as recycling:

https://pdf.sciencedirectassets.com/282173/1-s2.0-S221282711...

So my point stands, we could see significant environmental improvements if we mandated standard glass bottle and container sizes.

Something like: Food, Carbonated Liquid, Beer, Wine.

Sizes: 150ml, 300ml, 500ml, 750ml, 1L, 1.5L, 2L.

If that is the case, then sure, do so. But no effort is being made. And in the case of disposables, they can be made to have less impact on the environment, in both production and decomposition stages.

>Fifty years ago, soda was generally sold in returnable glass bottles

It still is in India (at least sometimes). I suspect rising labour costs killed this industry, though. Why take on a logistical challenge you don't have to?

https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-... Doesn’t seem like cynicism when that was explicitly the point of recycling marketing.

In Japan, consumers are responsible for disassembling their waste when recycling. Something like that could work for the USA, though I'm not sure if Japan's more involved system actually gets better results than other countries. For example, https://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/articles/entry.... indicates that much of the recycling is oriented around energy production than actual material reuse.

Obviously we should expect energy/material loss when recycling (meaning, each time something is recycled it should require inputs), but perhaps we can get those numbers down more and more as time goes on.

Don't less the elaborate consumer sorting fool you. Japan burns everything except for PET, glass and metals.

They make you separate plastics because in some areas they burn the plastics separately in ways that attempt to reduce the pollution from burning it.

If something isn't obviously recyclable (like, pure aluminum, pure glass, or regular paper) I throw it into the trash. I'd rather it end up in a landfill here, where there is at least a pretense of environmental regulation, than have it shipped overseas after being rejected from a recycling process.

I also watched that video, it's just so depressing. The amount of externalized costs we incur is simply staggering.

When I see someone throw something away, or when I throw something away myself, I just think: "Everything you've ever thrown away is somewhere."

One way could be to tax based on recyclability. There's a lot of ways to implement this, but packaging that's 100% plain cardboard should be cheaper than something made of plastics, and anything where two different materials are glued together should just be stupidly expensive. That squishy (non-recyclable) foam glued to the inside of cardboard boxes is really frustrating.

The recycling process for a pringles can sounds somewhat simple conceptually.

Coarse shred

(duration???) Submerge within an artificial swamp rich in bacteria to digest the biological components; ideally capture the outputs from this loop for fuel or other bio processes.

When completed a rich 'ore' of mixed metal shavings should be the result, and easier to recycle.

First off, you don't have a custom process for every random bit of packaging out there, even those that occur as frequently as pringles cans. Second, even if you did, you'd have a massive sorting problem on your hand and those custom lines to deal with each and every products packaging would require an awful lot of space, energy and other resources to cope with.

So as nice as this idea sounds it is not really workable in practice.

The way it does work is indeed, shredding, then float tanks to separate the lighter materials from the heavier ones, then some more stepwise improvements (for instance: to separate out the steel from other metals) and finally compaction and what comes out the other end gets passed on to companies willing to pay for it, and if there is no market, which get paid to deal with the resulting sludge/scraps/goo.

Recycling is not nearly as orderly a process as manufacturing is, and there will always be a residue that simply can not be dealt with economically. Properly designed packaging takes that into account at the time of manufacture to ensure that the residue is as small a fraction as possible.

This is a hard problem, and in the longer term, next to climate change one of the hardest ones that we will need to tackle. The good news is that we could start today.

The resulting sludge is in many cases much richer in valuable (but dangerous) heavy metals than the ores we mine the heavy metals from, as well as a few lighter elements like lithium. Maybe the way to handle this is to split it up into one-tonne or ten-tonne chunks, seal each one in a few millimeters of polypropylene, and bury them in carefully recorded secret locations: in abandoned underground mines, quarries, wilderness areas, on the sea floor. Then, you can sell the coordinates of these secret locations to would-be miners—maybe not in 02021 but in 02061 or 02121. Seeking investors with long time horizons!

More realistically, there isn't really any risk of running out of landfill space for product packaging at anything similar to current consumption levels. If a person ate a 50-gram can of Pringles and a 30-gram bottle of Coke every day, they'd have 29 kg of packaging at the end of the year, or 29 liters, which compact down to a 40-cm-diameter sphere.

I used to periodically visit an ecovillage that handled their (much smaller than normal) packaging waste in this way: they would tamp it into two-liter Coke bottles with a piece of rebar as a tamper, and when the bottle was full, they would cap it, plaster it over with adobe, and use it as a construction brick. A 6 m × 18 m house with 300-mm-thick walls 3 m tall contains 43 m³ of wall volume which can be mostly filled with this kind of stuff: 150 person-junk-food-years of packaging.

8 billion people doing this would produce 23 million cubic meters of packaging per year, which sounds like a lot, but it's an 800-meter-diameter sphere. Lake Superior is 12000000 million cubic meters, so it would take those 8 billion people half a million years to fill it up with this packaging, if carefully weighted to keep it from floating, of course.

So, I don't think recycling packaging is a particularly bad problem. If by "in the longer term" you mean over the next hundred million years, I do agree that we'll need to solve it. But I don't think it's a particularly difficult problem at that timescale. For the next few million years, we have plenty of space to just store the stuff until recycling it is profitable.

It is indeed a hard problem. It's also why manufacturers are the only ones who can realistically deal with the problem. Let the Pringles company collect all the used Pringles cans from the same supermarkets they deliver Pringles to. They have the scale to justify building a dedicated facility for recycling Pringles cans.

Think you're making a lot of leaps here, unless you're very knowledgeable of how recycling works in practice...

Or just don't buy Pringles.

> The paper companies don't want the cans because they don't want to somehow deglue the cardboard from the aluminum (time and cost expensive to process), and ditto for the aluminum people.

I'd have expected that simply melting down the stuff would burn off all the organic contaminants (paper/plastic/glue and food residue), leaving the aluminium and sludge that can be scooped off.

Probably would still be an issue with contaminating the aluminum with carbon and possibly other impurities. You'd probably need some other process to purify the aluminum afterwards, which likely makes it too expensive.

But that process by itself is always going to be more energy efficient than winning the aluminum from bauxite ore.

Of course you need a purification step after dealing with scrap, but aluminum scrap, even when contaminated is quite valuable, basically the price is a function of how pure it already is.