Good god, that has to be some kind of crime.

I think it's the difference between compostable and "compostable in an industrial facility".

Fluoridated forever chemicals can’t be composted in any scenario.

There must (?) be some microorganisms that can break down C-F bonds, because there are organisms that naturally create C-F bonds.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dichapetalum_cymosum

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B97801...

It’s not because that’s how all paper products are waterproofed.

No, often a PLA lining is used e.g. https://www.vegware.com/uk-en/catalogue/single_wall_cups/

I give it another 20 years before people rediscover the milkman model

I'd be fine with plastics, separated from the trash stream and sent to a big petrochemical plant to be thermally decomposed into a petrochemical feedstock. It would make a lot more sense than pretended plastic bottles can be directly turned into more bottles.

When oil stops being a thing and carbon becomes scarce for making stuff I think this will make sense to do. Until then, let's just make piles of the old plastic so they can conveniently mine it then.

Love your thinking. Rather than comingle the plastics with waste, let's keep them separate at the landfill for use when future humans figure out what to do with it.

By mixing it all together we just make it much more difficult for ourselves later.

> when future humans figure out what to do with it

I'm not keen on models that include: "Let our grandchildren solve the problem". I have grandchildren.

But sometimes just waiting and letting someone else deal with it is the right solution. For example: spent nuclear fuel.

I don't agree with you. Or rather, I agree with "just waiting" - we don't have any choice about that. I don't agree with "letting someone else deal with it".

The spent waste we've already produced needs to be stored in a way that puts it beyond the possibility of access within 200,000 years. And we need to stop producing new nuclear waste. Note that modern humans have been walking the Earth for just 200,000 years; we can't hope to be able to label it with readable danger warnings. The oldest languages we can read are only a few thousand years old. And we can't just pop it into orbit - there are many thousands of tons of it, sitting around in cooling ponds.

Well, unless we become immortal, waiting long enough means letting someone else deal with problems.

Right now, the obviously (and I do mean that) best way to deal with spent nuclear fuel is (after some cooling) to stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there. It's much cheaper than the alternatives, it's quite safe, and it doesn't preclude any other solution.

But (you might say) we're leaving the cost of dealing with it to our descendants. I respond: we leave the consequences of all our actions to our descendants. For example, if we spend resources of doing something to nuclear waste, we do not do something else with those resources that might have been better for our descendants. Economics is all about tradeoffs; you can't just look at anything in isolation.

Delaying dealing with a problem also means that those who ultimately solve it can choose the solution they prefer, rather than one we impose on them. Maybe they'll want to extract plutonium. Maybe they'll want to bury the fuel unchanged. Maybe they'll want to shoot it into space. They will know better which solution is best for them.

This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made (except if you're trying to use the waste issue as a bludgeon to force the other issue.) I get the distinct impression the waste problem is being greatly overstated for rhetorical reasons.

> stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there.

Well, yes. We have to stick it in something, and then let it sit somewhere. I'm not sure that on the surface, anywhere it can be reached by weather, anywhere close to the ocean, is a good place to let it sit.

> They will know better which solution is best for them.

Sure. So we shouldn't close off their options. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem now, that we need to solve.

[Edit] Actually, I'm not at all sure that "they will know better". It could well be that human interest in fundamental physics fades away completely in the next 5,000 years. That would leave our descendants without the tools to even understand the problem, let alone fix it, or try to exploit it.

> This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made

I don't agree. We have a problem now, of how to deal with the waste (and devastated land) we've already created; we don't have a way of dealing with it. We shouldn't make more waste until the problem is solved.

> bludgeon to force the other issue

> for rhetorical reasons

Hey, I'm taking you seriously, there's no need to suggest bad faith. Your other remarks have been pretty straight-arrow; I'm not sure why you're switching to ad-hominem now.

Finland is doing it. It's a smaller country but it's possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repo...

That model has made a comeback several years back. I have friends who get vegetables delivered in wooden crates every week and return the crate at the next pickup. At a supermarket where my parents live, you can't get meat and cheese wrapped in plastic but have to get a container (admittedly a plastic one) that you then can bring every time.

A plastic container that you use more than once already halves your plastic consumption.

Depends on how thick the plastic is and how many times you reuse it. I’m guessing you have to reuse a Tupperware a good 100 times before you’ve saved vs Saran Wrap

(Of course the Tupperware has other advantages)

Interesting you're getting downvoted for something that is absolutely true. Thin film plastics are exceedingly efficient. When you add in secondary energy effects like adding soap and water for cleaning the reused packaging, and 3rd order effects like food borne illness when you fail to do so properly, the plastic wins the energy game every time.

The discussion goes in to debates over energy use versus litter at that point.

I normally use my Tupperware about 100 times or so. And while I completely agree, I not sure if lots of thin is better or worse than one thick even if it ended up being used relatively the same compared to thickness.

Or the pfand model which Germany still uses today.

Still have a milkman. Takes the empty glass bottles off the front steps and replaces them with full ones. Even had an electric "milk float" up until a few years ago.

Its like he reimagined and modernised Hello Fresh or Just Eat.

Supermarkets were buying back empty glass bottles in Italy in the 70s so people didn't send them to a landfill anymore. My parents handed bottles to a clerk at a desk, got some coins, then we started shopping.

Then plastic bottles took over the world.

Still works for beer (at least in Poland), as people don't want to drink beer out of plastic or even metal containers.

In the UK I sometimes see mention of this scheme on the backs of bottles, but it's denominated in cence (which we don't have) and is for Australia & New Zealand only.

We can recycle them at home of course (though I was surprised to learn not everywhere! It's up to the council! Wandsworth borough of London has no recycling for many flats, unless the landlord cares to provide something) - but not in a supermarket or anywhere for cash incentive.

A grocer near me (California) still operates this way for certain items. My wife and I go there for cream and milk from a nearby dairy and there's a $1 (I don't remember the exact value, it may be $2 or even $3) deposit on the bottle. Bring the (clean) bottle back and you can swap it for a new bottle or get your deposit back.

I'm sure there's a local milkman you could sign up to, but you'd probably find it's 'just' delivery of 'normal' plastic bottles. (Perhaps with a more expensive glass option, or a premium option that happens to be in glass.)

Our local milkman (UK) still uses glass bottles

Or just plastic, metal and glass bottles/cans deposit like in Lithuania.

You pay 10 euro cents extra when buying, and get it back after depositing the bottles/cans at local taromat.

If someone is trashy and throws bottle to dumpsters, at least they already paid for their damage.

I’m lucky - we have a milkman. It’s great and our milk comes from a local farm. The cost is about 40% more, but it magically shows up in the milk box every Monday and Thursday.

Ontario's beer bottle model is basically this. And it works really well.

I’ve just installed a reverse osmosis system and full-house filter after discovering fairly high levels PFAs, Bromodichloromethane, and chloroform in my water after a test. I didn’t realize moving here how bad it was, but the testing company said it probably wasn’t safe to bathe in lol.

All these chemicals leech into the water from various factories and farms. I imagine dumps have a similar issue. In terms of the environment I’m far FAR more concerned about this than climate change. It’s an imminent risk.

I personally switched to glass containers for storage of food and water. I also use cast iron for my food, non-stick has a lot of chemicals.

It’s slightly less convenient, but easy enough. I also get satisfaction from the cast iron and regularly bake steak and what not.

The only problem I’ve heard about reverse osmosis is you end up lacking in trace minerals. It sounds like straight filtration is the way to go and you can also buy special filters to greatly reduce other industrial waste such as fluoride.

I find the trace minerals claim dubious. Trace minerals are easily obtained from diet; the drinking water shouldn't make any difference.

I have heard of a case of a well drilled through unfortunate mineralization and yielding water with so much arsenic the home's residents developed symptoms.

Yeah, I don’t really see much support that it’s an issue. The trace minerals likely have very little impact and if you eat food you’ll have plenty.

You can also get drops to add minerals, add a very tiny pinch of Himalayan salt, add a remineralizing filter, etc

There's also the water waste factor, you send a few gallons down the drain for every gallon dispensed.

That is definitely true... on the other hand, if you were thinking of buying bottled water that is worse.

Wow, I would have expected the opposite ratio.

But you can use that water if you set your system up for it.

Where I live there is no shortage of water. Opposite problems really…

That said, if you drink 10 gallons a week, you’re talking 10-30 gallons of waste water depending on the system (mine is 1.5 waste for every 1 gallon). The average bath is 35-50 gallons. It doesn’t seem like a huge impact.

Many reverse osmosis systems sold at home improvement stores include an optional filter that replenishes trace minerals to correct taste

I challenge you to find sound scientific evidence that drinking mineral free water is harmful to human health. Not opinions, but actual studies. They don't exist, by the way, but feel free to confirm it yourself.

> discovering fairly high levels PFAs, Bromodichloromethane, and chloroform in my water after a test

Out of curiosity, how did you have these tested?

There are lots of companies that’ll test water for you. I picked two, one test was on Amazon (was like $300 for all the trace chemicals). Then I selected another test I found online. Both came to the same basic conclusion so I trusted the results.

Hmm, some group needs to come together to crowdfund a series of tests by these companies versus a laboratory test to ensure we don't have a 'Everybody hosts on AWS' problem where all these tests actually go back to one or two labs across the entire nation.

The way it works is that the NSF (and other groups) certifies labs then you can go to them. Mine had the results of two different labs. I’m sure they could be cheating in some way, but seemed legit enough

It's at the point where it's in the rainwater.

Cast iron is pretty awesome, and they're plenty "non stick" if you use plenty of butter. The argument for coated pans kinda goes out the window if you're not trying to cut out fat, other than that cast iron is heavy.

I also love keeping glass jars. I use them to drink out of, containing food, distilling, etc. They're way tougher than actual drinking glasses too. Eventually I might toss some in recycling if I've got too many, but I don't buy all that much canned food in the first place so it kinda works out.

In terms of water, I still need to get an RO filter, but in the meantime I've been using a regular water filter and also distilling my own water. Don't believe the hype around distilled water being bad for you, because it's not. RO water is pretty close to distilled anyway, but nobody handwaves about it eating your bones or other such nonsense.

Yep, cast iron is great. For something lighter weight, there's also carbon steel. Both of these need some amount of simple maintenance, but they last generations when taken care of properly.

Similarly I was very dissapointed to find paper coffee cups are almost always lined with plastic. In hindsight it's obvious that paper is not going to hold boiling water, but I dunno, I'm not a paper cup engineer, I guess I thought someone figured it out. Of course I've been tossing the paper cup in the recycling this whole time, which is fine, since it all ends up in the landfill anyway.

What about wax linings?

That is the issue, all of this always comes down to cost and volume... and convenience.

Beeswax is perfectly acceptable but it costs more and I don't have the numbers but there is probably not enough bees in the world for all those starbucks cups.

The unpleasant truth that nobody wants to hear is that the only way to solve this is to ban all these disposables and use ceramic cups in the cafe or bring your own flask.

Everybody is an environmentalist until the environmental policy bothers their sense of convenience.

I think people are willing to hear it, and they probably know it already. It’s rather that companies aren’t willing to admit it because let’s be honest, if everyone had to bring their own cup to Starbucks, their sales would plummet.

We really need to stop blaming individual people for not doing their part and start blaming the system for having the wrong incentives.

> We really need to stop blaming individual people for not doing their part and start blaming the system for having the wrong incentives.

Why not both?

Yes, we definitely should fix the incentives wherever possible, because many people are just going to blindly follow the incentives. Those who don't will often get outcompeted by those who do.

On the other hand, if ethics does not mean "do not always blindly follow your incentives", I wonder what else it might possibly mean.

Yeah I sort of agree but badgering people for flying or buying a new car or something is I thin just a bit counterproductive because people probably won’t like it very much. It would be more productive to badger representatives to make better legislation.

It used to be that conspicuous consumption was frowned upon, I think that was probably a good thing.

There was a brief push for "keep cups" that seemed to have growning momentum ~2019, but that came to a halt with COVID and it seems isn't coming back any time soon.

I think the fundamental problem is plastic is cheap and companies have zero need to factor in the environmental costs. It's pointless to blame the consumer for buying something that they can afford, these products that do terrible damage to the environment need to be made unaffordable through taxes on the companies producing them.

Indeed perhaps my wording wasn't explicit but by "ban these disposables" I meant ban/regulate them out of the market through governmental policy.

Consumer sentiment alone will never make a significant impact.

You still get a discount for bringing your own cups to coffee shops, in the UK at least!

In the U.S. it's a per-store basis, and often they won't give you a discount unless you're using their own brand of bowl/mug/whatever which itself is often plastic and probably leeching chemicals into the food every time they refill it.

Leaching, technically, not leeching.

That and the Boogeyman of food safety liability.

God forbid you get a drop of spit on another thing, in the coffee shop where everyone spews drops of spit everywhere when they order anything at all

Subsidize it, let there be enough incentive to have more and more bees. I don't care about the cups, just want more bees.

Beeswax wouldn't work because it's melting point (around 140°F) is lower than the temperature coffee and tea are usually brewed and served at. It would just melt.

Wax works great for cold liquids, but melts with anything hot.

I tried it once! You start to see pools of wax float to the surface of your coffee.

Often it's PLA, which although not trivial to compost, will compost in the right conditions.

I think they are pretty awesome as long as you are in a place that takes the incineration approach to waste handling. When we burn biomass for energy we might as well insert a step or two between harvest and energy use that solves some other problems in passing. Trace chemicals in the coating will break up and oxidize just fine.

That's why I switched to keep cup I carry around

Same! After something like 12 years I couldn’t imagine not having it around. It makes every coffee taste better.

See also: carrying around your own chopsticks and cutlery.

It was always about reduce, reuse, recycle. You can reduce by using your own cups. It’s just a habit we have to get in to. Once we do it’ll be a status signal like YETI on steroids.

It’s disappointing though that you assume that all of your recycling ends up in the landfill. This pervasive myth is spreading through society to the point where recycling companies are literally running TV ads to dispel the myth. Even if it’s locally true for you that your recycling goes to a landfill, it’s important to add a caveat that it’s likely to only be locally true for you. Otherwise other people will become apathetic too.

Reusing cups often require some level of washing, drying, and/or wiping.

It would be nice if there was more infrastructure for it.

I had to clean my cup, FML!

many places do not have open access to sinks or have it only in bathrooms were they are designed to be hard to use this way.

Please excuse my language but I fucking despise most bathroom sinks. What genius decided to make a super short tap that only extends 4cm from the back wall of the sink. What kind of child must you be to actually wash your hands in sinks like this? Most people are older than 4 and thus have larger hands.

It's nearly impossible for me to wash my hands in most bathroom sinks without punching the sink itself on accident just trying to get my hands in the water stream. I usually have to rinse one hand at a time, sideways just to have the tiniest amount of room

IMO these are because of moron designers who picked the wrong size tap for those kinds of sink.

In a different universe I'd sell stickers for people to buy and stick near any sink like this that's been misdesigned, something like "Warning, the interior designer designing this bathroom was a moron, and choose an inappropriately-sized tap for this sink".

Punching the sink on accident sounds very painful. If it's a recurring accident then you might want to look into improving your hand eye coordination. Try searching on the internet for "improving hand eye coordination", there is a wealth of material.

Best of luck, I hope your hands heal quickly.

Punching was an exaggeration, but the force can vary from a touch to smacking my knuckles against the back depending on how much of a hurry I'm in.

Hand eye coordination doesn't improve the amount of room between the water stream and the sink, but as your comment appears to be in bad faith I'm sure you already know that.

Perhaps your hands are 4cm long so they fit just fine?

For most people i see at work with their mugs that amounts to either 5 seconds in the sink, or no time at all since they will just slosh the new coffee into the dirty cup.

Can confirm. My coffee mugs get washed once every “ok that’s really gross”. I mean, it always holds the same piping hot liquid and only one person ever drinks out of it. So what’s the point of keeping the mug pristinely clean?

Because people are starting to recognize recycling for what it is: A largely performative societal ritual that gives us the illusion we are doing something and nothing else. And on top of that we have TWO garbage collection systems that take it to the same place! How much extra resources do we use - fuel, manpower, etc. - to support this duplicity?

They did have cups like that, in the 50's. They were extremely bad at the task of letting someone "grab a coffee" and return to their car instead of sitting down at the location, hence when styrofoam and coated-paper options came up, they immediately dominated and were a big enabler of that culture, alongside fast food. I still get cups to go on occasion, but I'm a little more wary now of them being a vector for microplastic consumption.

I'm sure we'll find a way to get acceptable price/performance with fully organic, disposable packaging at some point. The demand is definitely there.

If you want to know where your recycling ends up, tape an airtag onto the inside of a paper cup and see where it goes.

> Compost these things and you'll get fluorinated forever chemicals in your garden.

It's already there (https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62391069). It's still not a good idea to compost that stuff and spread it around near you or on your veggies.

Yeah, most stuff that is marked as compostable should be treated with suspicion. I only compost organic food waste, no wrappers or containers, no matter how they are marked. We have decent recycling where I live, so all cardboard, paper, metal, and plastic just goes in the bin.

TBH the biggest benefit from composting food waste (vs throwing away) is that my garbage bin doesn't smell.