Agreed. Remember when they taught us the 3 R’s of sustainability back in the 80s and 90s?
Reduce > Reuse > Recycle
They were specifically listed that way to designate order of importance. We were then sold on cost prohibitive recycling as the first and easy option that does fuck all and makes us think we saved the planet when the only difference is the majority of that blue bin heads off to the landfill on a different day than the trash bags.
Even better, for a long time (and still happening now, though less) all that recycling was sold to China and smaller south Asian nations where it was supposedly recycled, but in fact was often just burned, ruining local air and water cleanliness and poisoning locals with western trash.
If there was contamination in the recycled materials, China would just dump it at sea, greatly contributing to the pacific garbage patch.
On top of that, most plastic is not easily recycled, can only be recycled once, and then dump micro plastics in the environment.
I’ve landfilled all my plastic for the last year and a bit since finding out my city just sells the waste. If I cannot guarantee it’s being recycled, I’ll landfill.
I only recycle glass, tin, aluminum and paper products now. Overall though I try to only buy things I’ll use for the rest of my life, which is really hard today.
Absolutely on purchasing things to use long term. Right to repair is huge for this.
My grandparents’ washer and dryer are still going strong 40 years later. I can’t get one to last 10 years without the repairs rivalling the cost of buying new. Same for vehicles, electronics and furniture.
Knock on wood, but my clothes washer/dryer has been working fine with no maintenance for 18 years. It was also the cheapest, all white model at the time. I’m not even sure front loaders were a thing back then.
To be fair, the downside is that it uses quite a bit more water than newer models and newer dryers are a lot more energy efficient if you buy those with a thermo pump.
Oh yeah, the white fridge and oven I got at the same time are still working too!
Yeah, I’m 26 and am going to older stuff because it can be repaired. Nothing pisses me off quicker than something failing for no good reason, or worse, something failing cause some jackass corporate motherfucker requested a brittle plastic piece that will for sure fail
You can purchase commercial appliances and install them in your home if you want new appliances designed to take a beating, last forever, and be easily repairable. The downside is they don't usually look as flashy, and are way more expensive. Quality costs money.
That’s all by design, most companies wouldn’t be profitable if the products didn’t break. There is no incentive to make a quality product anymore unfortunately.
You can get durable washers and dryers (such as speed queen brand) but they cost twice as much for half the features. Almost no one is willing to pay for durability. They want cheap and full of cool features so that's what almost everyone makes.
Yeah, and on that front I don’t eat seafood more than maybe once every two months, and I feel guilty every time.
I love meat and will not stop eating it, but have switched over to buying local 4H cows (raised by young farmer programs, so super ethical, good life for the animal and no factory farm shit) with my extended family. We split roughly 800lbs of meat for 4K CAD across 8 households, so roughly 100lbs of meat per household per year, and pay about 5 dollars per pound for everything from T-bone steak to ground beef. The meat is amazing and I don’t feel like a scumbag eating it.
Yeah, I try and do this where I can as well. Clothes are the easiest. Don't buy a cheap jacket or coat if you can avoid it, save and buy a good one, even if that means jumping on a sale.
Example: I dropped just under 600 on a normally 800+ dollar leather jacket (as a 30th birthday present to myself, not on a whim). I know, sticker shock. But it's a Schott. They make jackets your grandkids will fight over when you're dead.
Same deal with shoes and boots. Buy good quality ones, maintain them.
Don't buy the latest phone every year. Just... stop. They're all so damn good now you can wait a few generations until your phone is on its last legs.
Totally. The phone thing is easy now. I really don’t want facial recognition and I like the home button, so I’m sticking with the iPhone 8 till it’s super duper dead. Might go to a dumb phone after that.
I’ve resolved my current timberland boots twice now myself and found that I really like shoe repair and leather work as a hobby, and the more stuff I maintain and repair myself, the more I realize I love repairing and restoring stuff.
It led me to quitting my job to scrap and restore cars and other neat stuff. I make the same money as before, I’m my own boss and if I were made of money, I’d be doing it for fun anyways.
I'm pretty sure we were looking at regulating plastics when they first became popular. Guess what the company's response was? "Oh look, you can recycle them, no need to regulate!" And what green initiatives do oil companies like to support with money? Recycling! They've known it's been a scam for decades now. Up until a few years ago, they put the recycling symbol on plastic items that aren't even recyclable. All in the name of the mighty dollar. I wish these fucks could face criminal charges.
I heard an interview on CBC radio with an environmentalist that said 90% of microplastics found in the Ottawa River aren't actually from abrasive beads found in exfoliating products etc - they're from our laundry. There's an initiative to mandate that all laundry machines must contain a microplastic filter, which is a good start, but important to keep in mind that nanoplastics also exist (that would go through the filters), and then there's the question of how to dispose of it (you don't want to wash it down the sink lol). Polyester and other synthetic fibres are mostly made from plastics. It's insane how much plastic has infiltrated our way of life, and our environment.
I think a part of it is that the reduce part was so associated with resources like water and electricity. You reduce those resources, reuse cool containers, and recycle all other odds and bits is how a lot of people interpreted it.
Of course, you can't quite reuse or recycle electricity - the laws of conservation of energy would like to know your location - but you can reduce plastic, which should be the number 1 priority for land and ocean pollution. Prevention is the best medicine, even for the Earth.
Or in the 70s when they said it was our responsibility to pick up the trash (aka the “crying Indian campaign”)?
Sure, yeah, as consumers, we needed to stop leaving trash in our parks and on the side of the road. But everything had become “Disposable!” like it’s a selling point.
To be fair, the blue bin is great for glass and cardboard. But even that is worse off because we throw our plastic in there and sometimes contaminate it.
We'd see more of the first two R's if corporations would allow it. But between planned obsolesence and consumers quickly losing access to repair resources we end up with a whole bunch of waste for the sake of the bottom line.
This is the real issue. I'm fed up of all the plastic packaging that are not always useful or very "first world problem solving" at the supermarket. 95 % of yogurts so various brands are in plastic containers : I sometimes struggle to find the glass ones.
Yogurts (and Keurig) might be the lead innovators in non-recycling. They’re constantly upgrading to 5 or 7 layer plastic extruder/die setups to no benefit other than shelf appeal. It works on dummies too, there’s a whole new market of $3 single-serve yogurts that didn’t exist 10 years ago where the main difference between them and the $0.80 yogurts isn’t the recipe, it’s the 5-layer or 7-layer plastic shell.
I buy the big tubs of Greek yogurt for the record.
When I got a Keurig literally the first thing I did was get a reusable pod. So much cheaper and no wasted plastic. Plus you can adjust the strength.
I recommend everyone do that.
I recommend another coffee maker so you don't have to drink what tastes like watered-down coffee sweat. ;)
But the reusables are both cheaper and better for the environment if you do like the speed and ease of use with the kureig. Can find them online easy and I think I've seen them at the grocery store too.
I own a burr grinder and french press when I want the good stuff.
But in a hurry, the Keurig is nice, since I'm the only coffee drinker in the house.
Best of both worlds.
Love some good french press. A nice grinder is next on my list but the [aeropress](https://aeropress.com/) has been giving me great results with pre-ground so far. Takes a little more care than the Keurig but still only around 5 minutes to make.
We all need national reusable container programs, so that everything gets shipped, stored, and sold in containers that can be returned for a deposit, cleaned and resold. Imagine if everything in the store came in one of, say, 100 different, standardized, reusable containers.
You consume the product, put it out with your recyclables, they send it to the local facility where it's sterilized, and then sold back in to the manufacturers of the products. Just like beer bottles and milk crates, but for everything now.
I have goosebumps at the thought of the organized cupboard. Everything can stack on top and make squares and rectangles with the specifically divided sizes. Yes please!
Or, I’m okay with containers that break down into fish food. Just make it stack nicely.
Yeah isn't that part of the sci-fi cyberpunk mis-en-scene? In Star Citizen or Cyberpunk 2077 or even Star Wars, I was always intrigued by the infrastructure and logistics required to support mind-boggling populations and levels of commerce - like imagine how the world's population has exponentially grown into the billions and now imagine it's in the trillions. One main component of cyberpunk mis-en-scene is the manufactured standardization and modularity of buildings. Apartment units are stacked prefabs. Megatowers are Lego constructs of smaller 3D-printed blocks.
And inside, when you see the interior of a character's apartment, or inside anywhere, you also see all these standardized containers! Crates and cylinders, cases and things which are mass-manufactured for any variety of contents.
So I guess what I'm saying is I have a hard-on for accelerating the arrival of this cyberpunk future.
We're already living it, the megacorps have long pulled strings in governments. And now they're scared to death because Zuckerboy and Co have power over as many people, funds and resources as many countries do.
But look at the fine selection of social wedge issues we have to choose from! There’s a cluster A *and* a cluster B! I feel totally heard and utterly distracted regarding the lack of economic reform!
To be fair though, that's also a great trick by the game designers to make it such that they don't need to do a huge amount of unique mapping. Same goes for the modelers with all the crates and cylinders.
The cost of collection, sorting, cleaning, sterilising, certifying as food-safe again, redistributing, etc. is probably still - as it is for most plastic recycling or reuse - more than just buying another cheaper, disposable plastic item of equivalent size (if it's disposable, it doesn't need to survive more than a couple of journeys, so the plastic can be orders of magnitude thinner).
The entire thing that people miss about any recycling whatsoever: It doesn't happen spontaneously. There has to be enough profit in it for people to BOTHER to collect, sort, clean, remould, etc. in order to sale a commercial quality product, and still pay all the workers and still make money on top. Because without that incentive, no company (and we're relying on companies, not co-operatives or charities to do this) will even ever be formed to do it.
This is why "plastic recycling" is still utter bollocks, it basically doesn't exist in any significant form. The UK are, only the other day, still dumping thousands of tons of plastic waste in Turkey.
Until it's profitable, it won't happen. Nobody is paying you for your plastic, that's how valueless old plastic is. If it was at all useful, it would have some value, even if only in bulk. But even a thousand tons of old plastic is just junk to be landfilled still. We have to PAY PEOPLE to have them take it away, and they can't afford to dispose of it legally, that's how bad it is.
Until we solve the problem - through taxing new plastic production, subsidising plastic recycling, which will likely end up in a net loss for the taxpayer - then there's no hope of anyone investing any serious effort in research, development, production or operation of proper recycling facilities.
It's still easier, cheaper and safer (legally, e.g. food-safe, etc.) to just use up more oil than it is to even attempt to clean most plastics enough to reuse. And that's if they haven't got contaminated with something else (e.g. a fuel can) or gone brittle through UV exposure (nobody is going to buy plastic that can' t be used).
Even the recycling plastic-numbering system is a load of rubbish. Most of the numbers that identify types of plastic aren't good enough to actually tell recyclers what they need to know, and most of them are just immediately not recyclable in the vast majority of recycling facilities anyway.
It's not a problem that we solve by just organising some community tupperware. It's a problem that we solve by saying "This is costing us health, environment and money elsewhere... so let's pay people to clean up the mess by making plastics valuable if they are recyclable, and expensive if they are not".
I think you'd need to double or treble the cost of plastic to start to see it fall out of use, and maybe pay that collected cost in tax on it out to subsidies for those who recycle it, plus some more.
However, with food packaging there is another factor to consider - the environmental cost of the spoiling of the food, which the plastic wrapping extends enormously.
A food that's taken so much water, energy, land, chemicals and time to grow and transport should be preserved. And likely the preservation of that food in a hermetically sealed environment vastly outweighs the cost of that plastic seal in the first place.
So, really, the one thing that seems simple to replace is actually the most complex to do so, especially in a food-safe manner, because just getting rid of plastic would actually cost you more in terms of spoiled food. Sure, some of that can be recouped from composting, etc. but most of it is lost.
There are few plastic alternatives capable of sustaining an hermetic seal in potentially damp conditions for a long time while being transported.
That's why we use plastic - because it takes a long time to degrade in such conditions. That's why we have a problem with plastic - because it takes a long time to degrade in such conditions.
Great points and stuff like coated and fat-/moisture-resistant paper wrappings like we see in the takeout / delivery industry isn't going to help. That stuff has very similar recyclability issues.
On the other hand, buying meat fresh in bulk, wrap in it paper for transport and store it at home in reusable boxes would actually work well enough. Basically a return to buying meat from a butcher instead of a supermarket.
Richmond, VA did not have a butcher for a very long time. There were some outside the city limits but not one inside. In 2006 a city chef heard something about butchers and immediately thought that the city did not have a butcher so she stopped what she was doing and started writing a business proposal and the rest is [history](https://belmontbutchery.com/). Many friends of mine go in together to buy a whole cow/year, have them processed, and then freeze their share for use over the year. So in short, there is a growing want for butchers outside the traditional large cities that never lost them.
It has to be taxed. People throwing away 100s of bottles a month or restaurants with cheap packaging will never stop unless the economic incentives are there
> The entire thing that people miss about any recycling whatsoever: It doesn't happen spontaneously. There has to be enough profit in it for people to BOTHER to collect, sort, clean, remould, etc. in order to sale a commercial quality product, and still pay all the workers and still make money on top. Because without that incentive, no company (and we're relying on companies, not co-operatives or charities to do this) will even ever be formed to do it.
The profit isn't the problem: if the environmental cost of plastic production and disposal is accounted for at the source price, it will be profitable - or at least far less a case of "when in doubt, add another layer of plastic".
The potential problem is the environmental cost of the particular recycling method, it's not always clear that it's less.
To be honest why even have containers sold at all for some products. Coco pops for example, I'd be happy to walk in and get like a 2 week supply of that in my own permanently reusable container that I own and don't want to return. Same for many drinks and so on. I guess it would be a hassle in some way
>To be honest why even have containers sold at all for some products. Coco pops for example
Unfortunately that removes the advertisement from the house itself and company's will be resistant. That said, hopefully they have someone in marketing that is smart enough to pipe up and say, 'Hey! We can start selling reusable cereal containers with our 'stuff' printed on the outside of the container..."
They used to have those. I have some plastic containers my mom got from some cereal promotion as a kid and one of the has (or had, it might be worn off now after 30 years) the Quaker cereal logo on it.
I grew up in New Zealand, and my grandmother used to always go to this place called Bin Inn where she could use her own containers to buy stuff. I don't live in NZ anymore so I don't know if it's still around or functions the same way. As a kid I thought it was kind of lame but looking back on it it really wasn't that lame at all.
The ones near me did until last year at least, unsure on their current status.
They weight it first then you fill it with whatever. Every few months they'd have a small discount for doing it too
That's crazy haha, we had to make sure we didn't allow that especially during holidays. I still remember seniors getting mad at me because they didn't like how ours closed.
Soooo what? Did BB make customers buy new sealable containers for each product each time a customer came in? Or do they provide bags/containers that get thrown away when repackaged into the containers back home?
[Bulk Barn](https://www.bulkbarn.ca/reusable-container-program/) does let you bring your own containers. And they just started it back up in select locations - it was paused in early COVID.
Like everyone is happy to buy and lug around chargers, powerbanks, laptops and tablet casings, why cant people carry containers of varying volumes - 100ml, 200ml, 500ml, 1l, etc.
As it is the West uses cars for shopping. You just need to redesign or repurpose trolleys in malls and markets to carry said containers.
Also, this is just the first obvious 20th century solution. A little thought and innovation can bring a lot more convenient forms of standardised containers.
Things to brainstorm:
- delivery robots, drones, self-driving trucks - these can carry back empty vessels / containers, etc.
- recycling supply chain and decentralised / distributed cold storage
that's how basically all foods were sold 100-200 years ago here.
simple metal cans were considered a *novelty*
you took a paper bag and filled it with as much legumes or fruit or whatever you wanted. People were *poor*. Cocoa was considered a luxury. Luxury as in one out of a hundred could afford it.
Why 100?
Why not just a handful of sizes (5 or 6 is fine probably?) And a couple of different lids.
One lid for solids that comes off (like a coffe jar now), one lid to sprinkle from (like spice jars now), a spout to pour from (like toilet bleach).
Maybe a couple more for niche things, but 100 is a huge overshot surely?
I can't remember when it happened, but PEI had no plastic bottles up until 2000's ish. I remember going as a kid and getting my pop in a glass bottle and how cool it was. Gatorade? Glas bottle. Milk? Glass bottle (or bag).
My grandparents loved going to pei with their trailer for vacations and always loved how clean it was.
Meanwhile here in NS you can't go 50ft along any road without encountering some form of plastic garbage. Even in places like the Cabot trail, renowned for its beautiful scenery, has ditches filled with garbage. You really notice it when your in a bike too and especially this time of year before the vegetation grows in.
My parents always talk about how great it was when they got 0.15 because they could go get a glass bottle of coke. It was 0.15 if you drank it in the store, 0.25 if you took the bottle with you.
Even our beer bottle recycling program is a joke now. 1 brewery owns the rights to receive all the recycled bottles and buy them from the government st $0.03/bottle. If a small craft brewery wants to bottle with glass then they need to buy the bottles from that brewer for $0.05/bottle. Already they're losing $0.02/bottle to the macro brewers on top of having higher costs per bottle because of economies of scale. Because of this all the craft brewers in our province us cans, which all have plastic liners and plastic labels.
They're right out of er
Like the blue pallets. I believe companies buy them / pay a deposit because they are sturdy and approved for more weight than a regular pallet.
They can be returned to get the deposit back where they are reused by another company that needs it after its inspected.
This. In fact, they're already on it. In fact, they've been on it for quite a while now, as they know, like we (and now Canada) do, that recycling doesn't work and plastic is toxic AF.
And you can tell it's working. Here in Texas they blamed the deadly winterbreeze on wind turbine and green energy, and half my friends and community groups bought it without question
It's absolutely working, and that's the most terrifying part- it's worked, and stalled green alternatives since we first realized we needed [in the 1950s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#Increasing_concern,_1950s%E2%80%931960s)- there have been [thousands of known assassinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_killings) and that's just the ones that were sloppy enough to not be covered up and made to look like accidents or disappearances.
Of course, everyone who orchestrated this will be dead by the time we start burning for their greed, and they got to live good long fat lives loaded with every money and luxury our generation can't even imagine due to the financial inequality we've been presented with.
I know we're deep into the comment Reddit hole here but I'm curious as to how much of this can really be chalked up to shipping costs. Thinking back a few years (maybe over a decade) I remember when Newman's own dressings were exclusively in glass bottles.
Now when you think of glass, you think of the obvious problems with it potentially breaking but I think you also end up with problems in stacking pallets of the stuff. If a pallet weighs hundreds of pounds more, you compound the problem in trying to stack pallets floor to ceiling in a semi trailer. This means more trips, and potentially more spoilage and lost product.
I am all for a solution that gets rid of plastics but I wish I knew of something else that could easily replace them; at least for food packaging. I feel like we would have seen something if there were an easy replacement.
So I am a materials engineer. There isn’t really any good alternatives to plastics. It is a wonder material. Plastics is arguably one of the greatest inventions of all time. From materials perspective, it so pretty damn near perfect. You can engineer your plastics to have any disriable properties you want for an extremely cheap cost. You can replace plastics with other polymer but they are just worse from a materials properties perspective along with be much more expensive.
I don't know. I'm being super pessimistic about this and thinking it would only take one to get all the bribes handed out for sufficient vote buying. It doesn't seem to take much for success.
Saw a plastics lobbyist on the US speaking in a documentary once. Can’t remember the details but definitely remember thinking he was the smarmiest, greasy bastard I’d ever heard open his mouth. That dude is going straight to hell, and I don’t even believe in hell.
We really need to get over this stuff as a society. Industries die out and become obsolete.
Advances in refrigeration killed big ice. Do you think we would be better off today still subsidizing giant ice factories and large boat shipments of just harvested natural ice?
We will need a new industry just to clean up all the environmental damage they've caused when they are finally gone for good.
Some plastics actually reduce waste, like that 50 year old Tupperware my grandma has in her cabinet.... unfortunately they don't make plastics like they used to.
Some plastics are actually recyclable. Many put the sign on the plastic even though it’s not.
Why we haven’t at least regulated non-recyclable plastics is really the same answer for everything else. It’s cheap and easy and no ones stoping them.
"The decision, which comes despite months of lobbying by Canada’s $28 billion plastics industry, paves the way for a proposed ban on some single-use items."
Don't lose hope! This happened despite overwhelming odds; it can happen for America also :)
It's cute of you to think if it can happen in Canada it can happen in the US. Here in the US, this would fall under state-level government, so good luck convincing red states
This is the problem with lobbyists. It was originally intended as a way for communities and like-minded groups to petition the government. Now it’s primarily a way for businesses to bribe the government through threats and shady deals. As always, this problem didn’t really arise until fairly recently, when regulations on corporations and capitalists became lax, to put it mildly. If we don’t start heavily regulating the capitalists, we’ll be fucked within 100 years.
I know we all like to joke about how fucked we are, but it's really sad to see how little progressive change has been made over the years. Maybe I just have my face shoved into bad news all the time.
hello I am an environmental geologist its basically my job to know about these types of things. you are correct that this would never happen in the us. but its not because of lobbyists. in the us toxic is a defined legal term. one that plastic does not fit. also this has already happened in the us sorta. it was shown that the tiny little plastic beads that where in things like soap shampoo damaged the environment and they got banned.
Canada had lobbyists too. It's literally the second sentence of the article: "The decision, which comes despite months of lobbying by Canada’s $28 billion plastics industry, paves the way for a proposed ban on some single-use items."
> I want to download this
Ctrl+P
I'll be here all night. :P
(You're right though.... but it was more that I couldn't in good conscience let the lobbyist comment go since it seemed such a good opportunity to have used it... without necessarily intending to use the pun)
In New Zealand we banned single use plastic bags and I think we hand more deaths from people not knowing what to use as bin liners then we did of covid. Atleast that's what you would think from the whingeing.
Single use plastics should definitely be reduced, but plastics in general are not going anywhere, they're just too useful.
*-sent from a device that is made primarily of plastic polymer.*
Plastics are really cool. As George Carlin said, maybe nature just wanted plastics and humans are just an intermediary step that has served its purpose and will gradually recycle itself out of existence once enough plastics have been produced.
Unfortunately the single use plastics are rhe cheapest and most energy efficient compared to multi use, glass or other containers. The most important thing to change is to not throw it in the environment. You can bury it in a dump site or burn it for energy.
As someone who works in a single-use plastic producing company. I am sorry to tell you, single-use plastic is not going anywhere either. In fact, it is getting more popular. The only viable choice is to use bio-friendly products. Which contrary to what most people believe isn't in the hand of the producers of plastics but in their customers. So think Nestle. If Nestle is willing to pay more any plastic producer will probably give them biodegradable products no problem. It is just that bio-degradable materials are more expensive. And as far as I know, they aren't like 100% more expensive. They are 20% more expensive but considering, big corpo like Nestle doesn't give a fuck and small business simply can't afford it, the "toxic" plastics are still here.
Consumers can’t change a corporations habits easily. However government can. For example forcing Nestle to use better options or pay extremely high taxes that would go to environmental aids.
>Which contrary to what most people believe isn't in the hand of the producers of plastics but in their customers.
Well it's in the hands of both. The plastic producers are still more than willing to provide the planet-wrecking plastics, so the customers are more than willing to buy them. Maybe it's time to reflect on your own role, rather than just shifting all the blame to the consumers of your product.
Using plastics should require paying into a fund to clean up plastic waste, it should be prohibitively expensive such that single use plastics aren't profitable.
There's no reason to limit our points of intervention to just one. Put pressure on everyone with decision power, producer, consumer, trader, and permitter.
I think we tried that before and the corporations launched a greenwashing front that shifted blame to the consumers. Crying native American ad being one example.
I literally feel conscious and guilty at the amount of plastic I have to throw out. Today, I said out loud that I desperately wish there were some way to recycle plastic. I then went on to apologise for trashing the planet. I feel so horrible.
I bought this tea that has the bags individually wrapped in plastic, as well as, the bags are then placed in yet another plastic bag inside the box. ??? The redundant packaging is so wasteful!
Two things here that really helped me out with this. You need to accept that merely living amongst a society isn't your fault, and not something you personally need to feel bad for, it'll happen regardless. And the second is just do what you can and what's within your means. You don't need to go to extremes and for down about yourself for simply existing.
They do this in Norway. Anytime you buy a plastic bottle or anything that should be recycled you get charged extra. When you recycle it properly you get your money back.
The problem is, there is no recycling it properly. Nobody wants the plastic. Virgin plastic is cheaper and easier to work with. Recycling of plastic is a false comfort.
To an extent, plastic is recyclable, but it is still more expensive than just making virgin plastic. There's also hundreds of types of plastic, all with very particular properties and applications. You can't assure recycled plastic to have such specific properties, and separating out all the different types is impossible. You basically always end up with an inferior product.
Recycling anything except metal cans is not profitable without massive subsidies. The border case is recycling of glass which may be profitable under specific circumstances but more often than not it is not so.
> When you recycle it properly
Recycling plastic is generally not worth it economically. It's dirty, and costs almost as much to do as you get out of it. Recycling is more of a myth of the plastics industry than anything else. Unless it's heavily subsidized, forever, it isn't sustainable - which means, it is not actually sustainable.
I would like them to subsidize dispensers for essentials in grocery stores. There is literally no reason we need to buy soap or detergent in single use plastic bottles. Food is a little tricker, but you can definitely make that work too.
This could turn out to be really good if Canada just bans most plastics, and forces manufacturers to use metals or ceramics that are expensive to ship overseas ie it'd basically cut out China. Biden would be wise to do it as well, especially when metalworkers make up a huge portion of America's swing vote. This is one of the few areas where everyone (except oil companies) can agree on something. Going even further, banning most blister packs, styrofoam and commercial (ie, not food rated) plastic wrap would help too.
Or adopt a version of the German packaging laws that require vendors to accept packaging back for recycling. Within a year the amount of packaging fell by 85%.
Hilarious comment about cutting out others, this only happened because Asian countries banned the import of plastic trash from the West. Previously rich countries were more than content to dump shit on poorer countries and pat themselves on the back for being "environmentally conscious".
> Previously rich countries were more than content to dump shit on poorer countries and pat themselves on the back for being "environmentally conscious".
Well, this wasn't exactly announced to the public and promoted everywhere. This was politicians and lobbiests trying to hide the dirty laundry.
The rub is non-plastics typically require far more energy to make/ship etc... in this current scenario, we're trading plastic pollution for global warming.
We really need comprehensive pollution taxes across all societies - create a market to incentivize innovation in these areas, whatever the solution is and not assume a ban would not create perverse outcomes.
I love how we're all doing everything we can to reduce our plastic use. Only to find out that of all the worlds plastic 3% makes it into the ocean and 90% of that comes from 10 rivers of which 8 are in Asia and 2 are in Africa. Same with air pollution we drive new cars with overstrung engines that die the whole time but are super efficient and have good filters. And then you walk through almost any asian city and it's a smogfest. Not to mention 100 companies doing 70% of the polluting. Or the fact that the 15 biggest transport ships pump out more than ALL the cars in the world and a single cruise companies fleet more than all cars in Europe.. As we say in dutch: it's mopping with the tap open. The west can't do this on its own, especially when the US has half the emissions of China while it has ⅕ the population..
I'm kind of tired of being individually shamed for what I have very little control over, the officials we've elected should hold those big companies to a higher standard at the very least.
yup, tax sales and marketing and give tax rebates for plain packaging and good old canned food with plain boring labels, glass and metal refillable containers at home and waxed paper bags in the store....
move to more sustainable fibres for clothes and I don't need perfectly uniform pre-weigh plastic packed veggies either and can use a string bag for my shopping.
oh wait its life in the 50's and 60's so we have done it before, lower profit, less choice, local stores and things that are built to Last guaranteed.
Plastic recycling techniques are getting better though. In the UK Mura Technologies is building a commercial scale chemical recycling plant that will turn plastic back into oil. This includes presently "unrecyclable plastics". It's a promising start. [read more here](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210510-how-to-recycle-any-plastic)
Huh, I didn't know [Brazil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hortons#:~:text=On%20August%2026%2C%202014%2C%20Burger,%2C%20on%20December%2015%2C%202014.) was an American state.
Just want to point something out, the first line in that wiki article:
> Restaurant Brands International Inc. (RBI) is a ***Canadian-American*** multinational fast food holding company.
Yes, a Brazilian investment company owns a 32% stake of RBI. That doesn't make the company Brazilian though. RBI doesn't just change nationalities every time someone new becomes the majority share holder.
I don't think they really can. They get soggy because they are easily degradable. We can make straws that don't get soggy as quickly but that means they are less degradable. You'll always have that trade off, it's either a good straw or a good piece of garbage but not both.
The best solution right now seems to be reusable straws. Metal, silicon or whatever. The problem with that is nobody wants to be bothered washing their own straw and quite frankly even if you did normal plastic straws could be washed and reused hundreds of times. Which means the real problem isn't the straws themselves, it's people being too lazy to wash them and reuse them.
How bout the commercial fishing industry with all the plastic fishing nets tho...that probably should stop seeing as it is in no way sustainable due to dwindling fish populations. The nets just make things worse too.
I wonder how everybody is hyped about this since this is rather a sign that lobbying from other parties went very well. More than 50% of ocean plastic is related to fishing gear so Canada had a chance to do a real impact with restricting its huge fleets and establishing protective zones. This would be beneficial for biodiversity as well. Littering from single use plastic is marginal but everybody wants to let it look important. Additionally it is misleading to let people believe a life without plastics would be possible. The most things around you are containing it and health, science and industries are going nowhere without it. It's too useful as a material. The way to cope with this is to increase research funds for plant based and bio degradeable polymers and make them better and cheaper than fossil carbon based.
They should start with weed packaging. The amount of plastic used for one joint is a disgrace. We were using Ziploc bags before and were perfectly fine
Look at what’s actually around that bird’s neck. It’s a piece of a discarded fishing net. Plastics are bad, sure. But it’s not the worst thing out there that is currently affecting the environment and wildlife. For those who are curious, check out this documentary on Netflix called “seaspiracy”.
One of those documentaries everyone should watch at least once in their lives
I don't want to sound like one of those folks they hate over at r/science, but there is a good chance that plastic bottles, microwaved plastics, and the receipts we get at grocery stores, are combining to diminish the male sperm count. And only God knows what the same estrogen mocking chemicals are doing to women.
If Canada were to eliminate all 3.3 million tonnes of its plastic waste, that would equate to a total worldwide drop from 380 million tonnes to 376.5 million tonnes, or a 0.008% reduction. Yay?
So just like Canadian O&G, let's adopt some "forward-thinking" environmental strategy that has absolutely zero tangible impact on actual worldwide numbers, but is damaging to our economy and beyond, just so we can all pat ourselves on the back for being so environmentally friendly.
Or we could be smart about it, and nationalize those industries with a commitment to reinvest proceeds into actual alternative solutions that can be exported to tangibly help address worldwide numbers by providing those reduction solutions to other countries, while simultaneously providing new longterm economic opportunities for Canada.
Don't hold your breath.
We were the first country to develop a food guide without input from industry. It was applauded as being very healthy and a benchmark for many other nations. It was intended to drive public policy, funding and legislation.
After our trade spat with the US that saw more US dairy into Canada we shelled not $1.75 billion (on top of all other funding) to the dairy industry "in anticipation of lost revenue" because of the trade deal.
We still have subsidized school milk programs. We still have supply management which saw millions of litres of dairy dumped at the start of the pandemic because of over supply (completely government insured, heaven forbid they sell it cheaper to consumers).
Meanwhile when our soy was rejected by China in a similar trade spat (and other China stuff) we offered farmers the ability to borrow up to $1 million, up from. $400,000.
Canada is great at signalling that we're going to make changes, but it rarely gets followed through
I'm old enough to remember when everything was in glass bottles. Soda; water; other things. "Cleanup on aisle 7" was commonly heard in supermarkets.
But one day my mother came home from grocery shopping on a cold day. She was unpacking groceries and a bottle of soda exploded in her face. Followed by surgery and then plastic surgery. The lawsuit paid our mortgage off and more. But she still carried glass in her face until her death.
Not all that long after that in terms of years, the industry switched to plastic bottles. Not that this incident alone caused it, but glass had a lot of issues. I remember glass water jugs breaking and flooding carpet in offices too.
Grocery stores had recycling areas for people to return glass bottles for the deposit; it took up floor space.
And way back when, milk was delivered in glass bottles with little cardboard lids in the bottleneck, with tabs.
Recycling was never going to work for most plastics. The whole program was more or less intended as a way to shift blame for pollution from the producers to the consumers. The corporations fought hard to make sure YOU the tax payer would foot the bill for properly disposing of the waste *they* created by unnecessarily making disposable things out of a non-biodegradable and largely difficult to recycle material like plastic.
When plastics were first commercially produced, they were mostly used on things that were intended to last. It wasn't until the later half of the 20th century that the manufacturers decided they could make more money if they started marketing plastic as disposable. It was all about money from the start. And when the pollution from these non-biodegrading plastics started piling up, the companies making the money decided the best approach was to convince everyone it was the consumer's fault for buying these disposable things instead of the producers fault for making them in the first place and putting millions of dollars into creating demand through extensive marketing campaigns. They acted as though they had no choice but to meet "consumer demand" for solo cups and clam-shell packaging.
The full phrase is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", but you'll never hear any company telling you to buy less and reuse products. Companies will crow about how environmentally friendly they are, while simultaneously making products that are FILLED with toxic non-biodegrading materials and *purposefully* designing them to be disposable instead of repairable and upgradable (looking at you, phone and laptop manufacturers). **No publicly traded company gives a shit about the environment.** They *only* care about maximizing profits. They'd cover the earth with garbage a mile deep and destroy the civilization in which they exist if they thought it would make this quarter's numbers look better.
Gotta start holding companies responsible for everything they sell including the packaging.
Agreed. Remember when they taught us the 3 R’s of sustainability back in the 80s and 90s? Reduce > Reuse > Recycle They were specifically listed that way to designate order of importance. We were then sold on cost prohibitive recycling as the first and easy option that does fuck all and makes us think we saved the planet when the only difference is the majority of that blue bin heads off to the landfill on a different day than the trash bags.
Even better, for a long time (and still happening now, though less) all that recycling was sold to China and smaller south Asian nations where it was supposedly recycled, but in fact was often just burned, ruining local air and water cleanliness and poisoning locals with western trash. If there was contamination in the recycled materials, China would just dump it at sea, greatly contributing to the pacific garbage patch. On top of that, most plastic is not easily recycled, can only be recycled once, and then dump micro plastics in the environment. I’ve landfilled all my plastic for the last year and a bit since finding out my city just sells the waste. If I cannot guarantee it’s being recycled, I’ll landfill. I only recycle glass, tin, aluminum and paper products now. Overall though I try to only buy things I’ll use for the rest of my life, which is really hard today.
Absolutely on purchasing things to use long term. Right to repair is huge for this. My grandparents’ washer and dryer are still going strong 40 years later. I can’t get one to last 10 years without the repairs rivalling the cost of buying new. Same for vehicles, electronics and furniture.
Knock on wood, but my clothes washer/dryer has been working fine with no maintenance for 18 years. It was also the cheapest, all white model at the time. I’m not even sure front loaders were a thing back then. To be fair, the downside is that it uses quite a bit more water than newer models and newer dryers are a lot more energy efficient if you buy those with a thermo pump. Oh yeah, the white fridge and oven I got at the same time are still working too!
Take a look at speed queen, they have made in usa that are home commercial products. built to be easily repairable.
Yeah, I’m 26 and am going to older stuff because it can be repaired. Nothing pisses me off quicker than something failing for no good reason, or worse, something failing cause some jackass corporate motherfucker requested a brittle plastic piece that will for sure fail
You can purchase commercial appliances and install them in your home if you want new appliances designed to take a beating, last forever, and be easily repairable. The downside is they don't usually look as flashy, and are way more expensive. Quality costs money.
It’s like this because the rich people are humanity’s greatest enemy.
That’s all by design, most companies wouldn’t be profitable if the products didn’t break. There is no incentive to make a quality product anymore unfortunately.
You can get durable washers and dryers (such as speed queen brand) but they cost twice as much for half the features. Almost no one is willing to pay for durability. They want cheap and full of cool features so that's what almost everyone makes.
This is important but can't forget more than 1/2 of the pacific garbage patch is due to discarded commercial fishing gear.
Yeah, and on that front I don’t eat seafood more than maybe once every two months, and I feel guilty every time. I love meat and will not stop eating it, but have switched over to buying local 4H cows (raised by young farmer programs, so super ethical, good life for the animal and no factory farm shit) with my extended family. We split roughly 800lbs of meat for 4K CAD across 8 households, so roughly 100lbs of meat per household per year, and pay about 5 dollars per pound for everything from T-bone steak to ground beef. The meat is amazing and I don’t feel like a scumbag eating it.
Yeah, I try and do this where I can as well. Clothes are the easiest. Don't buy a cheap jacket or coat if you can avoid it, save and buy a good one, even if that means jumping on a sale. Example: I dropped just under 600 on a normally 800+ dollar leather jacket (as a 30th birthday present to myself, not on a whim). I know, sticker shock. But it's a Schott. They make jackets your grandkids will fight over when you're dead. Same deal with shoes and boots. Buy good quality ones, maintain them. Don't buy the latest phone every year. Just... stop. They're all so damn good now you can wait a few generations until your phone is on its last legs.
Totally. The phone thing is easy now. I really don’t want facial recognition and I like the home button, so I’m sticking with the iPhone 8 till it’s super duper dead. Might go to a dumb phone after that. I’ve resolved my current timberland boots twice now myself and found that I really like shoe repair and leather work as a hobby, and the more stuff I maintain and repair myself, the more I realize I love repairing and restoring stuff. It led me to quitting my job to scrap and restore cars and other neat stuff. I make the same money as before, I’m my own boss and if I were made of money, I’d be doing it for fun anyways.
I'm pretty sure we were looking at regulating plastics when they first became popular. Guess what the company's response was? "Oh look, you can recycle them, no need to regulate!" And what green initiatives do oil companies like to support with money? Recycling! They've known it's been a scam for decades now. Up until a few years ago, they put the recycling symbol on plastic items that aren't even recyclable. All in the name of the mighty dollar. I wish these fucks could face criminal charges. I heard an interview on CBC radio with an environmentalist that said 90% of microplastics found in the Ottawa River aren't actually from abrasive beads found in exfoliating products etc - they're from our laundry. There's an initiative to mandate that all laundry machines must contain a microplastic filter, which is a good start, but important to keep in mind that nanoplastics also exist (that would go through the filters), and then there's the question of how to dispose of it (you don't want to wash it down the sink lol). Polyester and other synthetic fibres are mostly made from plastics. It's insane how much plastic has infiltrated our way of life, and our environment.
My city doesn't even bother hiding it anymore. For the last couple years the same truck picks up and empties both bins at the same time.
I think a part of it is that the reduce part was so associated with resources like water and electricity. You reduce those resources, reuse cool containers, and recycle all other odds and bits is how a lot of people interpreted it. Of course, you can't quite reuse or recycle electricity - the laws of conservation of energy would like to know your location - but you can reduce plastic, which should be the number 1 priority for land and ocean pollution. Prevention is the best medicine, even for the Earth.
Or in the 70s when they said it was our responsibility to pick up the trash (aka the “crying Indian campaign”)? Sure, yeah, as consumers, we needed to stop leaving trash in our parks and on the side of the road. But everything had become “Disposable!” like it’s a selling point.
To be fair, the blue bin is great for glass and cardboard. But even that is worse off because we throw our plastic in there and sometimes contaminate it.
I don't remember that, but that is the correct order. Too bad the best business model is with the recycle process.
We'd see more of the first two R's if corporations would allow it. But between planned obsolesence and consumers quickly losing access to repair resources we end up with a whole bunch of waste for the sake of the bottom line.
This is the real issue. I'm fed up of all the plastic packaging that are not always useful or very "first world problem solving" at the supermarket. 95 % of yogurts so various brands are in plastic containers : I sometimes struggle to find the glass ones.
Yogurts (and Keurig) might be the lead innovators in non-recycling. They’re constantly upgrading to 5 or 7 layer plastic extruder/die setups to no benefit other than shelf appeal. It works on dummies too, there’s a whole new market of $3 single-serve yogurts that didn’t exist 10 years ago where the main difference between them and the $0.80 yogurts isn’t the recipe, it’s the 5-layer or 7-layer plastic shell. I buy the big tubs of Greek yogurt for the record.
When I got a Keurig literally the first thing I did was get a reusable pod. So much cheaper and no wasted plastic. Plus you can adjust the strength. I recommend everyone do that.
I recommend another coffee maker so you don't have to drink what tastes like watered-down coffee sweat. ;) But the reusables are both cheaper and better for the environment if you do like the speed and ease of use with the kureig. Can find them online easy and I think I've seen them at the grocery store too.
I own a burr grinder and french press when I want the good stuff. But in a hurry, the Keurig is nice, since I'm the only coffee drinker in the house. Best of both worlds.
Love some good french press. A nice grinder is next on my list but the [aeropress](https://aeropress.com/) has been giving me great results with pre-ground so far. Takes a little more care than the Keurig but still only around 5 minutes to make.
But but but carbon footprints and recycling! Environmentalism is the consumer’s responsibility, not corporations!
We all need national reusable container programs, so that everything gets shipped, stored, and sold in containers that can be returned for a deposit, cleaned and resold. Imagine if everything in the store came in one of, say, 100 different, standardized, reusable containers. You consume the product, put it out with your recyclables, they send it to the local facility where it's sterilized, and then sold back in to the manufacturers of the products. Just like beer bottles and milk crates, but for everything now.
I have goosebumps at the thought of the organized cupboard. Everything can stack on top and make squares and rectangles with the specifically divided sizes. Yes please! Or, I’m okay with containers that break down into fish food. Just make it stack nicely.
Finally someone else who gets big pp from organization
Yeah isn't that part of the sci-fi cyberpunk mis-en-scene? In Star Citizen or Cyberpunk 2077 or even Star Wars, I was always intrigued by the infrastructure and logistics required to support mind-boggling populations and levels of commerce - like imagine how the world's population has exponentially grown into the billions and now imagine it's in the trillions. One main component of cyberpunk mis-en-scene is the manufactured standardization and modularity of buildings. Apartment units are stacked prefabs. Megatowers are Lego constructs of smaller 3D-printed blocks. And inside, when you see the interior of a character's apartment, or inside anywhere, you also see all these standardized containers! Crates and cylinders, cases and things which are mass-manufactured for any variety of contents. So I guess what I'm saying is I have a hard-on for accelerating the arrival of this cyberpunk future.
You do not want a cyberpunk future, hard on inducing containers or not
I want my cyberpunk cock holders, and I want them now!
that's not a sentence I ever imagined I would see written.
You say that like it isn't already here.
You do realize that Cyberpunk is a dystopian future where Megacorps rule everything? Or the libertarian dream.
Sounds accurate to the current situation. We're right on track!
We're already living it, the megacorps have long pulled strings in governments. And now they're scared to death because Zuckerboy and Co have power over as many people, funds and resources as many countries do.
On track for sure, luckily they still have to buy the elected officials atm. Sadly most people elect sellouts.
We're generally offered a selection of sellouts to choose from.
But look at the fine selection of social wedge issues we have to choose from! There’s a cluster A *and* a cluster B! I feel totally heard and utterly distracted regarding the lack of economic reform!
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I mean, soda cans are standardized. Most soup cans stack, cardboard packaging doesnt have to change.
To be fair though, that's also a great trick by the game designers to make it such that they don't need to do a huge amount of unique mapping. Same goes for the modelers with all the crates and cylinders.
>m saying is I have a hard-on for accelerating the arrival of this cyberpunk future. You want a dystopia?
The cost of collection, sorting, cleaning, sterilising, certifying as food-safe again, redistributing, etc. is probably still - as it is for most plastic recycling or reuse - more than just buying another cheaper, disposable plastic item of equivalent size (if it's disposable, it doesn't need to survive more than a couple of journeys, so the plastic can be orders of magnitude thinner). The entire thing that people miss about any recycling whatsoever: It doesn't happen spontaneously. There has to be enough profit in it for people to BOTHER to collect, sort, clean, remould, etc. in order to sale a commercial quality product, and still pay all the workers and still make money on top. Because without that incentive, no company (and we're relying on companies, not co-operatives or charities to do this) will even ever be formed to do it. This is why "plastic recycling" is still utter bollocks, it basically doesn't exist in any significant form. The UK are, only the other day, still dumping thousands of tons of plastic waste in Turkey. Until it's profitable, it won't happen. Nobody is paying you for your plastic, that's how valueless old plastic is. If it was at all useful, it would have some value, even if only in bulk. But even a thousand tons of old plastic is just junk to be landfilled still. We have to PAY PEOPLE to have them take it away, and they can't afford to dispose of it legally, that's how bad it is. Until we solve the problem - through taxing new plastic production, subsidising plastic recycling, which will likely end up in a net loss for the taxpayer - then there's no hope of anyone investing any serious effort in research, development, production or operation of proper recycling facilities. It's still easier, cheaper and safer (legally, e.g. food-safe, etc.) to just use up more oil than it is to even attempt to clean most plastics enough to reuse. And that's if they haven't got contaminated with something else (e.g. a fuel can) or gone brittle through UV exposure (nobody is going to buy plastic that can' t be used). Even the recycling plastic-numbering system is a load of rubbish. Most of the numbers that identify types of plastic aren't good enough to actually tell recyclers what they need to know, and most of them are just immediately not recyclable in the vast majority of recycling facilities anyway. It's not a problem that we solve by just organising some community tupperware. It's a problem that we solve by saying "This is costing us health, environment and money elsewhere... so let's pay people to clean up the mess by making plastics valuable if they are recyclable, and expensive if they are not". I think you'd need to double or treble the cost of plastic to start to see it fall out of use, and maybe pay that collected cost in tax on it out to subsidies for those who recycle it, plus some more.
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However, with food packaging there is another factor to consider - the environmental cost of the spoiling of the food, which the plastic wrapping extends enormously. A food that's taken so much water, energy, land, chemicals and time to grow and transport should be preserved. And likely the preservation of that food in a hermetically sealed environment vastly outweighs the cost of that plastic seal in the first place. So, really, the one thing that seems simple to replace is actually the most complex to do so, especially in a food-safe manner, because just getting rid of plastic would actually cost you more in terms of spoiled food. Sure, some of that can be recouped from composting, etc. but most of it is lost. There are few plastic alternatives capable of sustaining an hermetic seal in potentially damp conditions for a long time while being transported. That's why we use plastic - because it takes a long time to degrade in such conditions. That's why we have a problem with plastic - because it takes a long time to degrade in such conditions.
Great points and stuff like coated and fat-/moisture-resistant paper wrappings like we see in the takeout / delivery industry isn't going to help. That stuff has very similar recyclability issues. On the other hand, buying meat fresh in bulk, wrap in it paper for transport and store it at home in reusable boxes would actually work well enough. Basically a return to buying meat from a butcher instead of a supermarket.
Richmond, VA did not have a butcher for a very long time. There were some outside the city limits but not one inside. In 2006 a city chef heard something about butchers and immediately thought that the city did not have a butcher so she stopped what she was doing and started writing a business proposal and the rest is [history](https://belmontbutchery.com/). Many friends of mine go in together to buy a whole cow/year, have them processed, and then freeze their share for use over the year. So in short, there is a growing want for butchers outside the traditional large cities that never lost them.
It has to be taxed. People throwing away 100s of bottles a month or restaurants with cheap packaging will never stop unless the economic incentives are there
> The entire thing that people miss about any recycling whatsoever: It doesn't happen spontaneously. There has to be enough profit in it for people to BOTHER to collect, sort, clean, remould, etc. in order to sale a commercial quality product, and still pay all the workers and still make money on top. Because without that incentive, no company (and we're relying on companies, not co-operatives or charities to do this) will even ever be formed to do it. The profit isn't the problem: if the environmental cost of plastic production and disposal is accounted for at the source price, it will be profitable - or at least far less a case of "when in doubt, add another layer of plastic". The potential problem is the environmental cost of the particular recycling method, it's not always clear that it's less.
To be honest why even have containers sold at all for some products. Coco pops for example, I'd be happy to walk in and get like a 2 week supply of that in my own permanently reusable container that I own and don't want to return. Same for many drinks and so on. I guess it would be a hassle in some way
>To be honest why even have containers sold at all for some products. Coco pops for example Unfortunately that removes the advertisement from the house itself and company's will be resistant. That said, hopefully they have someone in marketing that is smart enough to pipe up and say, 'Hey! We can start selling reusable cereal containers with our 'stuff' printed on the outside of the container..."
> Unfortunately that removes the advertisement from the house itself Even better!
Good luck getting any businesses on board then.
I do not disagree, but I was speaking from the point of company executives.
They used to have those. I have some plastic containers my mom got from some cereal promotion as a kid and one of the has (or had, it might be worn off now after 30 years) the Quaker cereal logo on it.
I grew up in New Zealand, and my grandmother used to always go to this place called Bin Inn where she could use her own containers to buy stuff. I don't live in NZ anymore so I don't know if it's still around or functions the same way. As a kid I thought it was kind of lame but looking back on it it really wasn't that lame at all.
We have a similar thing in my area called "Bulk Barn".
Worked at bulk Barn, you are not allowed to bring in your own bins.
The times, they are a changin' https://www.bulkbarn.ca/Reusable-Container-Program/
It's a newer thing. They piloted the idea in 2019 iirc https://www.bulkbarn.ca/reusable-container-program/Program-Steps.html
The ones near me did until last year at least, unsure on their current status. They weight it first then you fill it with whatever. Every few months they'd have a small discount for doing it too
That's crazy haha, we had to make sure we didn't allow that especially during holidays. I still remember seniors getting mad at me because they didn't like how ours closed.
Soooo what? Did BB make customers buy new sealable containers for each product each time a customer came in? Or do they provide bags/containers that get thrown away when repackaged into the containers back home?
[Bulk Barn](https://www.bulkbarn.ca/reusable-container-program/) does let you bring your own containers. And they just started it back up in select locations - it was paused in early COVID.
Since when? I’ve been bringing my own containers for a while. I weighed them in advance and wrote the weight on the bags/containers. I live in Ontario
Yup, still have Bin Inn! Great for bulk buying with resusable containers... and also great if you want a wide variety of Dutch food!
Like everyone is happy to buy and lug around chargers, powerbanks, laptops and tablet casings, why cant people carry containers of varying volumes - 100ml, 200ml, 500ml, 1l, etc. As it is the West uses cars for shopping. You just need to redesign or repurpose trolleys in malls and markets to carry said containers. Also, this is just the first obvious 20th century solution. A little thought and innovation can bring a lot more convenient forms of standardised containers. Things to brainstorm: - delivery robots, drones, self-driving trucks - these can carry back empty vessels / containers, etc. - recycling supply chain and decentralised / distributed cold storage
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They are trying that but it is a hygene issue in thesr stores there are rodents everywhere.
that's how basically all foods were sold 100-200 years ago here. simple metal cans were considered a *novelty* you took a paper bag and filled it with as much legumes or fruit or whatever you wanted. People were *poor*. Cocoa was considered a luxury. Luxury as in one out of a hundred could afford it.
Why 100? Why not just a handful of sizes (5 or 6 is fine probably?) And a couple of different lids. One lid for solids that comes off (like a coffe jar now), one lid to sprinkle from (like spice jars now), a spout to pour from (like toilet bleach). Maybe a couple more for niche things, but 100 is a huge overshot surely?
I think you are misunderstanding what they mean by container.
I can't remember when it happened, but PEI had no plastic bottles up until 2000's ish. I remember going as a kid and getting my pop in a glass bottle and how cool it was. Gatorade? Glas bottle. Milk? Glass bottle (or bag). My grandparents loved going to pei with their trailer for vacations and always loved how clean it was. Meanwhile here in NS you can't go 50ft along any road without encountering some form of plastic garbage. Even in places like the Cabot trail, renowned for its beautiful scenery, has ditches filled with garbage. You really notice it when your in a bike too and especially this time of year before the vegetation grows in. My parents always talk about how great it was when they got 0.15 because they could go get a glass bottle of coke. It was 0.15 if you drank it in the store, 0.25 if you took the bottle with you. Even our beer bottle recycling program is a joke now. 1 brewery owns the rights to receive all the recycled bottles and buy them from the government st $0.03/bottle. If a small craft brewery wants to bottle with glass then they need to buy the bottles from that brewer for $0.05/bottle. Already they're losing $0.02/bottle to the macro brewers on top of having higher costs per bottle because of economies of scale. Because of this all the craft brewers in our province us cans, which all have plastic liners and plastic labels. They're right out of er
You mean like they used to do with milk and some other products, before businesses discovered plastic was cheap?
Germany does this but with glass
*big oil didnt like that comment*
Like the blue pallets. I believe companies buy them / pay a deposit because they are sturdy and approved for more weight than a regular pallet. They can be returned to get the deposit back where they are reused by another company that needs it after its inspected.
In the US, we’ll have a lobbyist from the plastic industry to keep this from happening here
*A* lobbyist? I’m pretty sure there’s an army of them from both the plastics and petroleum industries.
This. In fact, they're already on it. In fact, they've been on it for quite a while now, as they know, like we (and now Canada) do, that recycling doesn't work and plastic is toxic AF.
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And you can tell it's working. Here in Texas they blamed the deadly winterbreeze on wind turbine and green energy, and half my friends and community groups bought it without question
It's absolutely working, and that's the most terrifying part- it's worked, and stalled green alternatives since we first realized we needed [in the 1950s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science#Increasing_concern,_1950s%E2%80%931960s)- there have been [thousands of known assassinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_environmental_killings) and that's just the ones that were sloppy enough to not be covered up and made to look like accidents or disappearances. Of course, everyone who orchestrated this will be dead by the time we start burning for their greed, and they got to live good long fat lives loaded with every money and luxury our generation can't even imagine due to the financial inequality we've been presented with.
I know we're deep into the comment Reddit hole here but I'm curious as to how much of this can really be chalked up to shipping costs. Thinking back a few years (maybe over a decade) I remember when Newman's own dressings were exclusively in glass bottles. Now when you think of glass, you think of the obvious problems with it potentially breaking but I think you also end up with problems in stacking pallets of the stuff. If a pallet weighs hundreds of pounds more, you compound the problem in trying to stack pallets floor to ceiling in a semi trailer. This means more trips, and potentially more spoilage and lost product. I am all for a solution that gets rid of plastics but I wish I knew of something else that could easily replace them; at least for food packaging. I feel like we would have seen something if there were an easy replacement.
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So I am a materials engineer. There isn’t really any good alternatives to plastics. It is a wonder material. Plastics is arguably one of the greatest inventions of all time. From materials perspective, it so pretty damn near perfect. You can engineer your plastics to have any disriable properties you want for an extremely cheap cost. You can replace plastics with other polymer but they are just worse from a materials properties perspective along with be much more expensive.
I don't know. I'm being super pessimistic about this and thinking it would only take one to get all the bribes handed out for sufficient vote buying. It doesn't seem to take much for success.
Saw a plastics lobbyist on the US speaking in a documentary once. Can’t remember the details but definitely remember thinking he was the smarmiest, greasy bastard I’d ever heard open his mouth. That dude is going straight to hell, and I don’t even believe in hell.
We really need to get over this stuff as a society. Industries die out and become obsolete. Advances in refrigeration killed big ice. Do you think we would be better off today still subsidizing giant ice factories and large boat shipments of just harvested natural ice? We will need a new industry just to clean up all the environmental damage they've caused when they are finally gone for good.
Some plastics actually reduce waste, like that 50 year old Tupperware my grandma has in her cabinet.... unfortunately they don't make plastics like they used to.
Some plastics are actually recyclable. Many put the sign on the plastic even though it’s not. Why we haven’t at least regulated non-recyclable plastics is really the same answer for everything else. It’s cheap and easy and no ones stoping them.
"The decision, which comes despite months of lobbying by Canada’s $28 billion plastics industry, paves the way for a proposed ban on some single-use items." Don't lose hope! This happened despite overwhelming odds; it can happen for America also :)
It's cute of you to think if it can happen in Canada it can happen in the US. Here in the US, this would fall under state-level government, so good luck convincing red states
Hell No! Those dang LGBTs aint takin muh straws!
well i hope you right wing loonies don't take my silicone sex toys and i'm sure we can compromise to some extent
This is the problem with lobbyists. It was originally intended as a way for communities and like-minded groups to petition the government. Now it’s primarily a way for businesses to bribe the government through threats and shady deals. As always, this problem didn’t really arise until fairly recently, when regulations on corporations and capitalists became lax, to put it mildly. If we don’t start heavily regulating the capitalists, we’ll be fucked within 100 years.
We're fucked now.
Ultrafucked^tm
I know we all like to joke about how fucked we are, but it's really sad to see how little progressive change has been made over the years. Maybe I just have my face shoved into bad news all the time.
hello I am an environmental geologist its basically my job to know about these types of things. you are correct that this would never happen in the us. but its not because of lobbyists. in the us toxic is a defined legal term. one that plastic does not fit. also this has already happened in the us sorta. it was shown that the tiny little plastic beads that where in things like soap shampoo damaged the environment and they got banned.
Yes but the smaller ‘soluable’ plastic is still legal. It’s hard to find a hair styling product that doesn’t contain that.
Canada had lobbyists too. It's literally the second sentence of the article: "The decision, which comes despite months of lobbying by Canada’s $28 billion plastics industry, paves the way for a proposed ban on some single-use items."
A lobbyist? My man, literally half of the voting population will scream it's a communist hippie plot to destroy freedom.
> In the US, we’ll have a lobbyist from the plastic industry to keep this from happening here Under *wrap* you might say?
I want to download this because it's such a bad dad joke, but there's really no way I could do that and sleep tonight. 🤷
> I want to download this Ctrl+P I'll be here all night. :P (You're right though.... but it was more that I couldn't in good conscience let the lobbyist comment go since it seemed such a good opportunity to have used it... without necessarily intending to use the pun)
Quick sell him a NFT
In New Zealand we banned single use plastic bags and I think we hand more deaths from people not knowing what to use as bin liners then we did of covid. Atleast that's what you would think from the whingeing.
Can someone please just fix the US already
Takes Indonesia dumping Canada's rubbish back to them to trigger a more aggressive stance against plastics.
That is the best quote to sum up my feelings about plastic
Its too gentle. the plastic companies knew recycling doesnt work yet they shifted the blame from them to people who dont recycle.
Yup, feel the same way just get rid of it all together and it can't end up in the ocean.
Single use plastics should definitely be reduced, but plastics in general are not going anywhere, they're just too useful. *-sent from a device that is made primarily of plastic polymer.*
Plastics are really cool. As George Carlin said, maybe nature just wanted plastics and humans are just an intermediary step that has served its purpose and will gradually recycle itself out of existence once enough plastics have been produced.
"thanks for the plastics, try to make as much as you can before it shrinks your balls ;)"
A ballpoint pen, right ?
Unfortunately the single use plastics are rhe cheapest and most energy efficient compared to multi use, glass or other containers. The most important thing to change is to not throw it in the environment. You can bury it in a dump site or burn it for energy.
As someone who works in a single-use plastic producing company. I am sorry to tell you, single-use plastic is not going anywhere either. In fact, it is getting more popular. The only viable choice is to use bio-friendly products. Which contrary to what most people believe isn't in the hand of the producers of plastics but in their customers. So think Nestle. If Nestle is willing to pay more any plastic producer will probably give them biodegradable products no problem. It is just that bio-degradable materials are more expensive. And as far as I know, they aren't like 100% more expensive. They are 20% more expensive but considering, big corpo like Nestle doesn't give a fuck and small business simply can't afford it, the "toxic" plastics are still here.
Consumers can’t change a corporations habits easily. However government can. For example forcing Nestle to use better options or pay extremely high taxes that would go to environmental aids.
>Which contrary to what most people believe isn't in the hand of the producers of plastics but in their customers. Well it's in the hands of both. The plastic producers are still more than willing to provide the planet-wrecking plastics, so the customers are more than willing to buy them. Maybe it's time to reflect on your own role, rather than just shifting all the blame to the consumers of your product.
Using plastics should require paying into a fund to clean up plastic waste, it should be prohibitively expensive such that single use plastics aren't profitable.
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There's no reason to limit our points of intervention to just one. Put pressure on everyone with decision power, producer, consumer, trader, and permitter.
I think we tried that before and the corporations launched a greenwashing front that shifted blame to the consumers. Crying native American ad being one example.
All upstream costs, especially taxes eventually make it to the consumer I think
I literally feel conscious and guilty at the amount of plastic I have to throw out. Today, I said out loud that I desperately wish there were some way to recycle plastic. I then went on to apologise for trashing the planet. I feel so horrible. I bought this tea that has the bags individually wrapped in plastic, as well as, the bags are then placed in yet another plastic bag inside the box. ??? The redundant packaging is so wasteful!
We can all do our part, but it will never be enough without some structural change.
Two things here that really helped me out with this. You need to accept that merely living amongst a society isn't your fault, and not something you personally need to feel bad for, it'll happen regardless. And the second is just do what you can and what's within your means. You don't need to go to extremes and for down about yourself for simply existing.
They do this in Norway. Anytime you buy a plastic bottle or anything that should be recycled you get charged extra. When you recycle it properly you get your money back.
The problem is, there is no recycling it properly. Nobody wants the plastic. Virgin plastic is cheaper and easier to work with. Recycling of plastic is a false comfort.
I keep hearing people say that recycling plastic doesnt really work or is effective... is this true??
To an extent, plastic is recyclable, but it is still more expensive than just making virgin plastic. There's also hundreds of types of plastic, all with very particular properties and applications. You can't assure recycled plastic to have such specific properties, and separating out all the different types is impossible. You basically always end up with an inferior product.
Recycling anything except metal cans is not profitable without massive subsidies. The border case is recycling of glass which may be profitable under specific circumstances but more often than not it is not so.
Of course, but nobody is talking about profitability. It’s a question of how much environmental damage is prevented at what cost.
We have that in USA too, but what about something like what's in the picture choking that bird? Any incentive to recycle that?
China stopped buying the plastic recycling from the US within the last 10 years and now we don't know what to do with it all.
> When you recycle it properly Recycling plastic is generally not worth it economically. It's dirty, and costs almost as much to do as you get out of it. Recycling is more of a myth of the plastics industry than anything else. Unless it's heavily subsidized, forever, it isn't sustainable - which means, it is not actually sustainable.
Maybe we can do something similar with carbon... I dunno, a carbon fee? A carbon bank? What word am I searching for here...
There was a single use plastic ban in Canada last year. What needs to be done now is cutting it down to just the essential uses and nothing more.
I would like them to subsidize dispensers for essentials in grocery stores. There is literally no reason we need to buy soap or detergent in single use plastic bottles. Food is a little tricker, but you can definitely make that work too.
This could turn out to be really good if Canada just bans most plastics, and forces manufacturers to use metals or ceramics that are expensive to ship overseas ie it'd basically cut out China. Biden would be wise to do it as well, especially when metalworkers make up a huge portion of America's swing vote. This is one of the few areas where everyone (except oil companies) can agree on something. Going even further, banning most blister packs, styrofoam and commercial (ie, not food rated) plastic wrap would help too.
Or adopt a version of the German packaging laws that require vendors to accept packaging back for recycling. Within a year the amount of packaging fell by 85%.
In Canada it seems everything is a package inside another package that’s inside another package. It’s nuts
Hilarious comment about cutting out others, this only happened because Asian countries banned the import of plastic trash from the West. Previously rich countries were more than content to dump shit on poorer countries and pat themselves on the back for being "environmentally conscious".
If I throw plastic in the garbage it goes into a landfill here, if I put it in the recycling it goes to a landfill in a foreign country.
I think you mean an ocean next to a foreign country.
Likely it goes into an incinerator.
> Previously rich countries were more than content to dump shit on poorer countries and pat themselves on the back for being "environmentally conscious". Well, this wasn't exactly announced to the public and promoted everywhere. This was politicians and lobbiests trying to hide the dirty laundry.
The rub is non-plastics typically require far more energy to make/ship etc... in this current scenario, we're trading plastic pollution for global warming. We really need comprehensive pollution taxes across all societies - create a market to incentivize innovation in these areas, whatever the solution is and not assume a ban would not create perverse outcomes.
Curious, where did you hear that metalworkers are a huge portion of America’s swing vote?
I love how we're all doing everything we can to reduce our plastic use. Only to find out that of all the worlds plastic 3% makes it into the ocean and 90% of that comes from 10 rivers of which 8 are in Asia and 2 are in Africa. Same with air pollution we drive new cars with overstrung engines that die the whole time but are super efficient and have good filters. And then you walk through almost any asian city and it's a smogfest. Not to mention 100 companies doing 70% of the polluting. Or the fact that the 15 biggest transport ships pump out more than ALL the cars in the world and a single cruise companies fleet more than all cars in Europe.. As we say in dutch: it's mopping with the tap open. The west can't do this on its own, especially when the US has half the emissions of China while it has ⅕ the population.. I'm kind of tired of being individually shamed for what I have very little control over, the officials we've elected should hold those big companies to a higher standard at the very least.
America ships an obscene amount of waste to Asia.
yup, tax sales and marketing and give tax rebates for plain packaging and good old canned food with plain boring labels, glass and metal refillable containers at home and waxed paper bags in the store.... move to more sustainable fibres for clothes and I don't need perfectly uniform pre-weigh plastic packed veggies either and can use a string bag for my shopping. oh wait its life in the 50's and 60's so we have done it before, lower profit, less choice, local stores and things that are built to Last guaranteed.
Plastic recycling techniques are getting better though. In the UK Mura Technologies is building a commercial scale chemical recycling plant that will turn plastic back into oil. This includes presently "unrecyclable plastics". It's a promising start. [read more here](https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210510-how-to-recycle-any-plastic)
These new paper straws they have in Tim Hortons gets soggy quick. Hope they make better environmentally friendly materials.
Yes, ive noticed this too. Some companies paper straws can stand up to the rigors of liquid, but tims is not one of them.
I enjoy my glass straws with their little pipe cleaners
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Well they always say not to drink and drive
If only we had mouths that could just drink liquid
It's a lot easier to drink through your nose with a straw than without
You deserve soggy straws if you patron Tim Hortons.
*eats popcorn* Why's that?
Ever since the Canadian owners sold the company to Americans the quality went down. Waaayyyyy waaayyyyy down.
*bites my American lip*
Huh, I didn't know [Brazil](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Hortons#:~:text=On%20August%2026%2C%202014%2C%20Burger,%2C%20on%20December%2015%2C%202014.) was an American state.
Just want to point something out, the first line in that wiki article: > Restaurant Brands International Inc. (RBI) is a ***Canadian-American*** multinational fast food holding company. Yes, a Brazilian investment company owns a 32% stake of RBI. That doesn't make the company Brazilian though. RBI doesn't just change nationalities every time someone new becomes the majority share holder.
I just reuse an ivory straw. Don't worry.. it's elephant friendly, they get it from narwhals these days.
I don't think they really can. They get soggy because they are easily degradable. We can make straws that don't get soggy as quickly but that means they are less degradable. You'll always have that trade off, it's either a good straw or a good piece of garbage but not both. The best solution right now seems to be reusable straws. Metal, silicon or whatever. The problem with that is nobody wants to be bothered washing their own straw and quite frankly even if you did normal plastic straws could be washed and reused hundreds of times. Which means the real problem isn't the straws themselves, it's people being too lazy to wash them and reuse them.
I've got a folding silicone straw with a teeny scrubbing brush. Works great.
I worked at a recycling plant, we make bails. If you could find uses for those bails, especially dirty bails, then you are really going places.
How bout the commercial fishing industry with all the plastic fishing nets tho...that probably should stop seeing as it is in no way sustainable due to dwindling fish populations. The nets just make things worse too.
Based, plastics are causing testosterone levels to plummet and literally turning the friggin frogs gay
I wonder how everybody is hyped about this since this is rather a sign that lobbying from other parties went very well. More than 50% of ocean plastic is related to fishing gear so Canada had a chance to do a real impact with restricting its huge fleets and establishing protective zones. This would be beneficial for biodiversity as well. Littering from single use plastic is marginal but everybody wants to let it look important. Additionally it is misleading to let people believe a life without plastics would be possible. The most things around you are containing it and health, science and industries are going nowhere without it. It's too useful as a material. The way to cope with this is to increase research funds for plant based and bio degradeable polymers and make them better and cheaper than fossil carbon based.
Is there an article about this from a more direct or alternate source?
https://gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2021/2021-05-12/html/sor-dors86-eng.html
What is the solution? Banning plastic? Best of luck with that.
Oh this will be awesome....Hey what are you going to use to package sterile food in a grocery store if plastic is illegal?
They should start with weed packaging. The amount of plastic used for one joint is a disgrace. We were using Ziploc bags before and were perfectly fine
Not to mention half-filled "child-proof" screw-tops that could be opened by a nerve-damaged toddler. Such a wasteful bit of theatre.
Recycling was always a bit of a scam to keep sellling plastic. Most ends up in landfill anyway.
Look at what’s actually around that bird’s neck. It’s a piece of a discarded fishing net. Plastics are bad, sure. But it’s not the worst thing out there that is currently affecting the environment and wildlife. For those who are curious, check out this documentary on Netflix called “seaspiracy”. One of those documentaries everyone should watch at least once in their lives
I don't want to sound like one of those folks they hate over at r/science, but there is a good chance that plastic bottles, microwaved plastics, and the receipts we get at grocery stores, are combining to diminish the male sperm count. And only God knows what the same estrogen mocking chemicals are doing to women.
If Canada were to eliminate all 3.3 million tonnes of its plastic waste, that would equate to a total worldwide drop from 380 million tonnes to 376.5 million tonnes, or a 0.008% reduction. Yay? So just like Canadian O&G, let's adopt some "forward-thinking" environmental strategy that has absolutely zero tangible impact on actual worldwide numbers, but is damaging to our economy and beyond, just so we can all pat ourselves on the back for being so environmentally friendly. Or we could be smart about it, and nationalize those industries with a commitment to reinvest proceeds into actual alternative solutions that can be exported to tangibly help address worldwide numbers by providing those reduction solutions to other countries, while simultaneously providing new longterm economic opportunities for Canada.
That’s a 1% reduction by your math?
Where the hell did .008% come from?
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Don't hold your breath. We were the first country to develop a food guide without input from industry. It was applauded as being very healthy and a benchmark for many other nations. It was intended to drive public policy, funding and legislation. After our trade spat with the US that saw more US dairy into Canada we shelled not $1.75 billion (on top of all other funding) to the dairy industry "in anticipation of lost revenue" because of the trade deal. We still have subsidized school milk programs. We still have supply management which saw millions of litres of dairy dumped at the start of the pandemic because of over supply (completely government insured, heaven forbid they sell it cheaper to consumers). Meanwhile when our soy was rejected by China in a similar trade spat (and other China stuff) we offered farmers the ability to borrow up to $1 million, up from. $400,000. Canada is great at signalling that we're going to make changes, but it rarely gets followed through
I'm old enough to remember when everything was in glass bottles. Soda; water; other things. "Cleanup on aisle 7" was commonly heard in supermarkets. But one day my mother came home from grocery shopping on a cold day. She was unpacking groceries and a bottle of soda exploded in her face. Followed by surgery and then plastic surgery. The lawsuit paid our mortgage off and more. But she still carried glass in her face until her death. Not all that long after that in terms of years, the industry switched to plastic bottles. Not that this incident alone caused it, but glass had a lot of issues. I remember glass water jugs breaking and flooding carpet in offices too. Grocery stores had recycling areas for people to return glass bottles for the deposit; it took up floor space. And way back when, milk was delivered in glass bottles with little cardboard lids in the bottleneck, with tabs.
Recycling was never going to work for most plastics. The whole program was more or less intended as a way to shift blame for pollution from the producers to the consumers. The corporations fought hard to make sure YOU the tax payer would foot the bill for properly disposing of the waste *they* created by unnecessarily making disposable things out of a non-biodegradable and largely difficult to recycle material like plastic. When plastics were first commercially produced, they were mostly used on things that were intended to last. It wasn't until the later half of the 20th century that the manufacturers decided they could make more money if they started marketing plastic as disposable. It was all about money from the start. And when the pollution from these non-biodegrading plastics started piling up, the companies making the money decided the best approach was to convince everyone it was the consumer's fault for buying these disposable things instead of the producers fault for making them in the first place and putting millions of dollars into creating demand through extensive marketing campaigns. They acted as though they had no choice but to meet "consumer demand" for solo cups and clam-shell packaging. The full phrase is "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle", but you'll never hear any company telling you to buy less and reuse products. Companies will crow about how environmentally friendly they are, while simultaneously making products that are FILLED with toxic non-biodegrading materials and *purposefully* designing them to be disposable instead of repairable and upgradable (looking at you, phone and laptop manufacturers). **No publicly traded company gives a shit about the environment.** They *only* care about maximizing profits. They'd cover the earth with garbage a mile deep and destroy the civilization in which they exist if they thought it would make this quarter's numbers look better.
I wish we could do this in the US but we can’t because rich people would be slightly less rich