Not to defend the shipping or business use of plastic, especially not Amazon packing practice, just to get this out of way fisrt.
In general, consumer plastic waste are almost not recyclable. It cost prohibitive to clean the plastic from consumer waste in to useable state, a lot of recycle stuff you put into the blue bin eventually goes to landfills. So cutting consumer end reduce overall wastes going to landfill/burnt, by a pretty big percentage. (Like stop buying individually packed cookies or candies) Believe it or not industrial use of plastic stuff isn’t that much and they are cleaner/easier to recycle. (Ie, the pallet wraps someone mentioned are much cleaner than your bubble tea cup/coffee cup caps. I do not know if there are similar strength/durable retention materials that can replace the pallet wrap, that’s a different issue.)
Plastics are not “evil”, they are flexible, durable, light weight, and above all, cheap to manufacture and alter. (Imagine all you containers become stainless/glass, and carry them for picnics or travel) many products are reusable as well. So targeting single use is a good start, that include shipping fillers. Things like air port luggage wrap or pallet wrap can have designated area for recycling the material, or tracking the waste by weight to make sure they aren’t just throw to random dumpster. 20kg wrap on to the shipping cargo, 20kg of wrap needs to be collected at destination. I know not all pallets goes to the same warehouse, but the idea sticks. If we can track stuff like individually packed micro SD cards, we can track pallet wraps.
Or how about putting strict regulations on all plastics to the point where the economy only produces three or four types of interchangeable plastics that are compatible with one recycler, manufacturer or processor to another. Make them so similar with one another that they can be harvested after use regularly, recycled and reused over and over again.
I’ve thought the same about containers in general (plastic, glass, metal): standardize sizes and sell goods in reusable containers. Buy your Oreos in a standard reusable container same as any other cookie, eat em, bring it back to the store for a deposit. Companies will hate the reduced branding potential of a cardboard sleeve around a standardized container, but… tough.
Yeah I thought the same … I keep buying the same peanut butter brand with the same clear hardened plastic container all the time. After a few years, my entire garage shop is now filled with clear plastic containers with lids that I use for anything and everything. They come in great for holding nails and screws and small parts but also for managing all kinds of liquids and oils.
If they did the same for all containers, people would be using all this stuff over and over again before trashing them.
Starting in December, single-use items such as plastic shopping bags, disposable food service accessories, oxo-degradable plastics and food service packaging made of polystyrene foam, PVC, PVDC, compostable or biodegradable plastics will no longer be allowed to be sold in B.C.
This is needed both in the short and long term. I’ll be curious to see what solutions pop up to replace what we’ve become used to.
The hospital I work at has already adopted wooden cutlery. The fork and spoon are fine, but the knife is absolutely terrible. I hope we can figure something better out for that one.
There are metal utensils in the building. The wooden ones are in these premade to go meal boxes that are used evening/overnight when the kitchen is closed.
Using metal utensils isn’t a terrible idea. A lot of hospitals used to have tons of metal medical equipment that they would autoclave on-site. Much of that got replaced with “discard-able” plastic equivalents, because it was cheaper and easier. Now, some hospitals don’t even have autoclaves; they use a third-party service for the stuff that still needs it.
And there’s nothing stopping them from putting metal utensils in the boxes and leaving some bins of dirty utensils for the morning staff.
A lot of biodegradable plastics are only biodegradable in industrial composting facilities, so while better than non-biodegradable plastic, it’s not a good solution.
it’s so hard to actually compost [and] very little[ ]of it will ever be.
I’m not seeing the difficulty angle on the composting, but I’m learning the labeling on them is both confusing and not-really-regulated (that I’ve yet seen); and not really validated either way, it seems. Bloody big tip-off that it’s shite greenwashing. Argh.
The results showed there was no specification that was reliably home compostable
bah. Zero fun.
So to make terms like ‘biodegradable’ or ‘compostable’ even remotely valuable as terms for packaging, we need inspectors and testers confirming them. Having gone through a series of halfwit governments run by ‘small government’ platforms (the ‘small’ is when they shed oversight and safety inspectors, naturally, so their lobbyists can further victimize people for profit), I think we’re a long way off.
I’m learning, and I’m correcting my opinions as we go. Thanks for catalyzing that.
I’m mean, they are better than the non-degradable plastics, but it’s not like they breakdown remotely fast. Those products are more greenwash, [airquotes] biodegradable
Okay, I’m hitting the (qualified) opinion pieces and I’m seeing the issues like the microplastic intermediate stage and the low ‘success’ rate of plastic breaking down after a 6 month period (which I’m assuming isn’t arbitrary).
You’ve forced me to learn, dammit. Thanks (Thanks; I hate it?)
Add comment