This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at The Conversation.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1464141
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://talkingpointsmemo.com/?p=1464141
Bring your own coffee mug to the coffee shop.
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Or go to a coffee shop that serves the coffee in mugs!
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Bring reusable bags when you shop. If you love your Keurig, get one of the pod inserts that you can use regular ground coffee to brew. Buy glass, paper, and metal packaging as much as possible to reduce your plastic consumption. Consider using bar soap instead of liquid soap for hands/face/body. Use powder detergent if your washing machine will take it - it usually comes in cardboard packaging rather than a big plastic jug. Same for dishwasher detergent (check the phosphates though - that is often used in powder dishwasher detergent and it’s not good to get too much into the water supply/lakes/streams/etc). If you buy pasta in a cardboard box but don’t like storing it that way, buy reusable airtight containers for it instead of purchasing pasta that comes in plastic.
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OK…so now that we have educated people on why recycling is important let’s move on to phase 2 where we educate on how to correctly recycle and add incentives for business to do something with the recycled objects. Is that so hard?
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I’ve never understood the attraction of pods …
… since Jacques-Victor Delforge and Henri-Otto Mayer pretty much solved the “convenience issue” back in 1852.
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Instead of lining cups with plastic, what about some biodegradable wax or other coating (could it be from corn husks?)?
100% of every single thing coming from any fast food place or restaurant (straws, napkins, wrappers, boxes, etc.) must be composable.
Probably the same from grocery stores as well.
That way, no one has to “think.” Every single thing goes right into compost bins.
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I think the big sticking point is in the packaging and preservation of food. We can make cardboard-type material out of tons of different fast growing/renewable plant sources besides trees. But it’s hard to think of a way to keep bread fresh at the supermarket without plastic, or potato chips, or whatever so that it’s transported without grime.
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It affects a minority of people, but I have heard of people who run into issues with allergies with some of these biodegradable solutions. If something is made from soy or corn (or whatever organic material), you have to clearly mark it as such so that people who have allergies know it’s in there. Then, the question becomes how do you accommodate those people in an eco-friendly manner? How many different varieties of biodegradable utensils/containers do you need to have?
Not specifically relevant to recycling, but I knew someone with a corn allergy, so they had to specially order pizzas because they are commonly baked with corn meal on the bottom to keep them from sticking to the pan. I wouldn’t have thought about corn being a problem with pizzas until I met them. Because of edge cases like these, this will never have a simple, straightforward solution that is equitable to everyone. It’s always going to be messy until/unless we can figure out how to control allergies and the like.
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To add to the mess with plastic recycling, many items do not have the recycling number on the bottom. Most people don’t know that plastics with numbers 5 &6 cannot be recycled and contaminate the plastics that are collected. Same thing with greasy pizza boxes - they contaminate the recyclable paper. And let’s not get into how much trash gets put in the recycling boxes and trash cans.
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I certainly want to do the right thing with the materials I purchase, but it’s definitely absurd that it’s on the backs of consumers to “figure it out” for some things. I try to prefer glass and metal containers, but I’ve run into issues where they have plastic caps/heads that are about impossible to remove and one thing I’ve read frequently is that to properly allow things to be recycled, you need to separate plastic bits from glass or metal containers.
But some of these things seem to require a special tool to be able to remove them. You can’t just unscrew it or “pop” it off. In part because they aren’t intended to be removed so they can’t be tampered with in a store. So you have to contend with sometimes conflicting priorities. Keeping food “safe” for consumption can often impede efforts to make the containers “easy” to reuse or recycle.
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The recycling numbers have to be standardized so that consumers can rely on them as a guide to what can be recycled. That was the idea but there is no enforcement. In my city, pizza boxes can be put in the yard waste.
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I would think wax paper and butcher paper could help.
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I thought about that too. Perfect for local stuff - but lots of things (like bread) get trucked hundreds of miles, wax paper won’t keep it fresh or prevent bugs from getting to it.
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In San Francisco:
Recyle bins since ?? mid-eighties?
Compost! The Green Bin! ANYTHING “not plastic or glass” (or clean paper) goes in, including bones, (meat), food service paper products, used paper towels. PLUS yard waste. Basically, anything vegetable or animal.
ETA: Recology (the waste service company) composts the green bin contents under high heat and sells(?) it – pretty sure the City uses it in parks, etc… Maybe @littlegirlblue has more info.
Several years ago, grocery stores (and other retailers) were forbidden to pack goods in plastic sacks, AND they were required to charge ten cents for a paper bag. (So, ten reusable paper bags for a dollar - I gladly paid that.)
Take out food - NO STYROFOAM, and stores were prohibited from selling Styrofoam stuff.
I’m not sure about a city-wide plastic utensils ban, but the school cafeteria distributed compostable eating utensils. They tried using washable metal forks, etc., but too many were being tossed in the compost bins along with the food/paper plates.
Here in the South Bend area, only a recycle bin besides the garbage bin, and from what I see in the overflowing garbage bins on pickup day, loads of people don’t bother with recycling.
At least Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods pack paper bags. You can ask for paper at Martin’s, but they don’t know how to pack them properly and they don’t have handles. I don’t shop there.
At least, Culvers (midwest version of In ‘N’ Out) packs most take out in paper.
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At the end of the day, plastics recycling has always been a marketing scam. Very little less-expensive (for packaging) plastic is recyclable at the community level (collected, sorted, sold to the actual recyclers) and both the plastics manufacturers and those who use it as packaging have always known that.
Its a broken system that has never really worked except in a very few cities or states that require it. Even then it’s just a drop in the bucket. The plastics manufacturers trained us to believe that we can use what we want and it will all be okay. That will be nigh on impossible for American society to unlearn.
As an added bonus, all the plastics used in textiles eventually make it back into our water supply via the washing machine. Micro and macro plastics are shed with every wash cycle and often aren’t effectively removed by our water processing facilities. Recycled soda bottles or not, our eco-fleece isn’t exactly good for us either…
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You probably know even though you haven’t lived here in a while we have black, green and blue bins. I rarely use the black bin, I’m as conscientious as I can be and turn as much as I possibly can into the other two. There’s so much everyday waste that is compostable, it’s not hard not to do.
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Part of the problem of the ‘recycling vs. reuse’ issue is that there are companies that make disposable cups and straws and diapers and containers. They want to make money, above all else.
Back in the 70’s almost everything in the grocery store still came in glass or cardboard or “tins”, which were simple to recycle, but also prone to breakage (thus loss of profit). Hershey’s chocolate bars were in a combination of foil and paper up into the 90’s. Now it’s work to find any food product not in plastic. Is the little plastic nozzle they put on cardboard milk cartons really necessary? You can easily just use one of those clamp-style paper clips to keep it closed and mostly airtight.
The plastics industry is not going to just roll over and stop making plastics without some kind of powerful influence or incentive. We need a massive retooling effort to switch back to glass/cardboard/metal containers. For biodegradable plastics we’d need to begin farming more crops like hemp. We’d need government subsidies to encourage companies to use glass instead of plastic where applicable. This is exactly the kind of thing the federal government is for. But it’s big industry that controls the federal government. . . .
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The Graduate: “One Word: Plastics”")
Goes through my head often, these days…
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All three were around for several years before I left. The first “blue bins” were just open totes the size of a small laundry basket.
When I first moved into the City ('78), we were still using metal garbage cans. On collection day, the truck came around with two or three guys picking up the cans and tossing the garbage into the dumper. (One time, they knocked on my door because I forgot to put the can out…)
The team was always cheerful, whistling and exchanging banter, sometimes singing. They were my alarm clock on Thursday mornings until the plastic (ironic, no?) bins came along. The workers wheeled them out to the truck where the mechanical apparatus picked them up an dumped them. Very noisy! No more cheerful voices.
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