Its cheaper and easier to ensure sanitary products.
We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be recycled is better or worse than a plastic container.
Should plastic containers shedding millions of nano particles be considered sanitary?
The only reason it’s used is that the externalities aren’t properly taxed (or not banned IMO).
Maybe we should not use things that are “easier” when they’re contributing to a massive amount of pollution. I mean there was an article posted here about finding microplastics in a human fetus.
Yet we still continue to use it.
Unfortunately your kind of argument is what often comes up in ecological debates. I am not denying the impact of microplastics but raising the point that it is a complicated equation. Banning plastics is just a silly comment. What about tires, medical devices, plastic jugs to get water to people with no access to clean water. It is an easy argument to make if you might be in a place of privilege and you can hand wave most of those problems away. My posistion is that yes microplastics pose a possible issue on a go forward basis, I don't know the totality and I believe that humans are still better off than we were before plastics.
Banning micro-plastic sources from consumer purposes isn't so silly if it contributes to dementia and other neurological issues long term.
They're finding they stuff embedded in utero lining; your argument strikes me as the same old rebuttal to the things we can't political agree to study. You can't deny there is a lot of business momentum to keep plastics in production, no? And yet the more we learn the more checkmarks in the minus column for petro-chemicals accumulate.
Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it.
We most definitely need to fully study the impacts of plastics on the human body. We don’t know the full extent of what it’s doing and it’s important we figure it out.
It’s a complicated equation that we do not fully understand. It’s easy to say just ban it but there is are a lot of other negative consequences that will come out of that decision. That’s my point, none of us know the exact outcome either way so it’s silly and all too easy to just make proclamations like yours and then sprinkle in some dementia with it. I am certain you can pull out a study that has a link between the two but I suspect we still don’t know the true origins of dementia and we do not know the full impacts of plastics on human health.
I bet you don’t even know the source of microplastics fully. I sure don’t. For all I know it is from car tires that makes it into the water ways and we eventually drink it or consume meat that has drunk it.
We don’t know the equation enough to know what concerns we should weight heavier on a global/population scale.
> Not sure why you are bringing politics up. This has nothing to do with it.
Politics is the struggle to gain, retain, and use power. The use of plastics creates a huge amount of wealth and power for many, by definition anything that could affect this is political.
But we should keep producing more year on year until it's studied properly?
Studied by whom? Petrochemical companies have studies on their stuff back for decades. They'd never endanger the public to improve their bottom line. Plastics are fine, dontchaknow?
I think this has taken too much of an emotional turn instead of logical. You will not be able to get plastics banned until there is conclusive evidence that a significant portion of the population is dead from it. Ignoring corporations, I do not believe you can get any large enough portion of population to ban it or even limit it in any meaningful amount.
I personally am excited for the coming years and hopefully us having a better idea how we can use plastic more efficiently. In the near term we should be able to get a better idea of major contributors to microplastics and maybe be able to reduce those.
I'm not talking about just banning plastics (it should be banned involving anything food related IMO) but actually taxing these materials as the hazardous materials they surely are.
Why would you ever expect a bottling plant to move away from plastic when there is no incentive? Why would anyone move to better materials or continue researching when there are cheaper alternatives that aren't rightfully taxed against their externalities?
Why are we as a society, one which has banned lead from gasoline (resulting in lower crime rates across the world) or banning CFCs to repair the ozone layer, feel so helpless trying to hold these corporations accountable for not polluting our world around us today?
I don't think I generally agree with a plastic tax but lets imagine there was one. I am honestly not even sure how you would set the price, my whole point is the externalities are hard to measure. I also suspect the cost of the implementation will be on the shoulders of the consumer. We can hand wave it away and say we can create more rules to prevent it but at the end of the day that is most likely what will happen.
There's no reason the tax needs to directly reflect the environmental impact. We figure out an amount that is enough to change corporate behavior without bankrupting them, maybe with some kind of sliding scale to put more responsibility on larger businesses who would otherwise benefit from regulatory capture, throw in some exceptions for the aforementioned medical devices, etc. "Pricing the externalities in" is a nice political justification but in reality this kind of thing happens because we've already decided that plastics are significantly worse than the alternative and we want to incentivize change.
Regarding consumers shouldering the cost - well, yeah, regulation drives prices up; even my liberal self agrees that that's broadly true. Those same consumers will be shouldering the cost of an environment permeated by toxic microplastics, which we are increasingly being driven to believe will be a greater impact than that of more expensive consumer goods.
and when they jack up prices, we use the tax revenue to subsidize the poor so only the well off pay that assholery, we can do this for carbon in all forms.
For someone so skeptical, why buy the 'cost increases will be passed on to the consumer' BS? Clearly that's not true.
First, price increases depend on elasticity. I'm guessing that ketchup demand is pretty elastic; it's not diabetes medication or higher education.
Also, we can assume Heinz, being sophisticated, has already priced it for the highest possible marginal return; there's not necessarily room for increasing the price without reducing return (by driving down sales).
We're seriously going to say that a substance that was very recently introduced to human society is as risky as food poisoning? How often do the commoners have to suffer through businesses ill-attempt to save money while poisoning us?
Leaded gasoline, chlorofluorocarbons, asbestos, pet food laced with poisons and filler, baby food laced with heavy metals, opioids, cigarettes, campaigns about seat belts being unsafe, round up, fracking that poisons the ground water, etc.
Excuse me if I doubt the corporations, that continue to poison the the world around us unless literally forced by nation states not to, are being honest when they safe "oh it's not harmful" and not the reality of the situation. Wanting to save a buck, repercussions be damned.
Why are you saying "clearly" as if it's 100% guaranteed? We have no idea the repercussions of introducing a new substance that has literally infiltrated all organic life on earth. This is completely new territory and acting like it's all "solved science" is extremely disingenuous.
you don't actually know that. if, imagine, the increase in dementia or cancer or any major illness is increased at all by microplastics, and we will find this out before long, and it will indict Big Plastic and Big Oil, we will learn it's killed far more of us that you whoring for Big Oil and Big Plastic suggests.
These subthreads from my comments are absolutely bonkers, people are willing to give companies that routinely lie to us again and again sometimes lying for literal generations to us!
and people STILL give them the benefit of the doubt.
People willing to allow others to poison us so they can earn money.
Fair point, but I don’t store very much of my food in a tire and I rarely, if ever put food in a shirt before I microwave it.
In the other hand, I probably have about a pound of Tupperware in my body. I guess my point is that you’re right about micro plastics in the environment, but I’m more concerned about the ones in me.
I don’t know the exact sources and that’s what we should be studying. For all we know it’s tires to roadways to rain runoff that makes it into ground water or bodies of water that we eventually treat for drinking.
That’s a fair point reusable containers are a great candidate for replacement with glass. You are right overall though we definitely seem to be polluting our environment with plastics that will never go away.
Use the same rule for tupperware that you apply to shirts! I store and buy food in plastic containers often, but I always move it onto a ceramic dish before I microwave it.
I don’t believe anyone has defended anything of that sort. Simply pointing out what are more bigger issue but we also don’t know how to solve those issues yet.
You along with others have no issue saying plastic is evil, we should ban it, we should tax it, but have done no critical thinking on how to make that actually work.
> Should plastic containers shedding millions of nano particles be considered sanitary?
It's not really on the scale of sanitariness. It's a pollutant and a problem. You can even say it's not worth the tradeoff. But no, plastics are not unsanitary because they can produce microsplastics.
Glass is recycled infinitely more easily and more widely. Pasabahce sells upcycled and recycled products here, and mark them clearly. Also, we have glass collection bins which has different compartments for clear and colored glass. These are periodically emptied.
Even if they are not recycled, a glass jar is used for more than five years in an household, only by replacing the caps in the process. If we don't need the jars, we give them away to people who need them, adding more usable glass to sneakernet of jars.
Glass is finicky in some forms, and expensive to make it durable during production and transport, but rarely, if ever, ends up in a trash bin.
It's well-known the total environmental impact is much less for plastic than glass. Just the weight alone should allow you to understand this [0] [1] [2].
Glass is not recyclable widely. It is a contaminant in single-stream recycling because broken glass is a hazard for sorting, and even if you are able to recycle it, the transport costs are extremely high [3].
I don't think anyone is completely ignoring it. I think it is an extermely complicated equation. Factoring in PFAS and microplastics gets even more difficult. I don't have research in front of me but it would be interesting to look at regions like Japan that have very tight loops on plastics. How many microplastics get out in the wild. The other problem there is the microplastics from tires, huge issue since those could get in the drinking water eventually. Its a difficult problem.
That works in some parts of the world but I still don't believe the total environmental cost is as easy to calculate even in your scenario. The total cradle-to-grave environmental cost of a product has many variables and its not always as clear. Those variables can also have different weightings depending on the user (maybe microplastics is a greater concern that total environmental cost).
In the past, even when accounting for recycling of the glass, plastic bottles for example had a lower environmental impact that glass.
edit: And I enjoy using glass myself, especially for items I am storing longer term but I also try to think about the total environmental cost of the item. I know in the US people often do things that feel good, like buying reusable shopping bags instead of plastic bags given my the store. The problem is the number of times that reusable bags needs to be used to be better for the environment is often many more times than they often get used.
What's the definition of environmental impact you're working with?
I think microplastic pollution is horrible. It's arguably worth putting extra carbon in the atmosphere to avoid plastic pollution. I'm not actually sure.
Up until most recent history the equation has been something about net energy cost or co2 cost. There is indeed a new variable which is microplastics. Something that needs to be researched more. For all we know that ketchup bottle has little to no impact on your health but it’s plastics further upstream in processing or the farm itself.
There's a practical concern there which is really relevant with little ones running around: glass breaks easily. A plastic bottle or cup or whatever vessel can fall from a shelf or counter to the floor and be unharmed and not harm any people. Glass containers, not so much. It's only viable for sensible humans with good coordination, and a lot of fully-grown ones don't even have that!
You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container.
And a lot of products could actually be formulated on site, because most of, say, your cleaning aisle is various combinations of relatively few standard components. The biggest barrier there are certain people's desires to control information and to create the perception of distinctions that don't exist.
While I’m a big fan of being able to buy quantities in bulk, it’s worth remembering we did just go through a 3 year period that should illuminate why “every Tom, Dick and Harry brings their likely barely washed if not fully contaminated packaging from home and uses the community ladle to scoop out of the community bin into their bag” might not be the best default. At least with factory -> sanitized individual wrappings you can spend a lot of effort stopping contamination at specific points in the supply chain. Bulk -> consumer reused packaging is much much harder to prevent contamination.
> You know what's more efficient than glass? Ship the product in bulk and dispense it into the customer's container.
yeah, that would be a great use of everyone's time. line up at the olive oil station, line up at the beer station, line up at the flour station, line up at the coffee station, line up at the ketchup station, ....
and then on top of that, add up the time and expense of everyone getting a different price based on how much their unique container holds.
I'd love if there were just dispensers for the soaps and juices and what not I buy. Just tap my credit card, press a button, and fill a big jug. I agree I probably wouldn't want everything sold as such but loads of staples where I am probably going to go through a lot of it all the time or are already going to have a short shelf life, sure.
And yeah, I actually do go with the "line up at the beer station and get bulk beer", a number of breweries around me have walk-up growler filling stations. It is pretty nice getting fresh beer straight from the source. A few groceries near me fill growlers as well.
I know this will blow your mind, but where I do my shopping (France) this exists in many places and there are no queues.
It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.
Perhaps you prefer the “old” way. Perhaps it is faster. But if we can not make tiny changes like that, how will we explain ourselves in 30 years time to our grandchildren?
“Yea I know sweety we messed up your planet. But I’ll be dead in 5 years and in the mean time it was really convenient. Sucks to be you”
> It takes 1 minute more to fill a bag or bottle. But it prevents a heck of a lot of packaging. And I can take precisely the quantity I want, in the container that I want.
1 minute for each product, vs like 1 second for each product. I think it's a similar efficiency loss as containerized vs break bulk shipping.
We can't have nice things because we don't enforce any standard of conduct. Progressives are more concerned about git branch names than ensuring children actually learn something in school.
Many (most?) nicer grocery stores in the US already do bulk packaging for coffee, to no discernible detrimental effect.
Compared to narrow aisles and decision paralysis from 60 different plastic bottles with the same ingredients but different scents/dyes, I think any inefficiencies in bulk shopping are probably pretty small.
This might be a local thing for you. The only store around me that has bulk coffee is the very bougie food co-op. Even nice stores like whole foods, wegmans, trader joes don't have that.
Wegman's definitely has bulk food sections. The memorable part is the candy but there are other foods. I'm not sure if they have bulk coffee? Their name brand coffee bags have the roast date on them (vs. "best by" BS dates) so I zeroed in on that and didn't look back.
Also Stop'n'Shop, a very much NOT a bougie food store, has bulk coffee with a grinder. At least in some locations.
Possibly. I know for a fact that Whole Foods in NYC has bulk coffee, as well as bulk rice and other grains. It's also the norm in local mid-range chains (Westside Market, Fairway) and greenmarket-style stores.
They’re common, but A) generally make up a tiny portion of floor space (at least in the U.S., apart from rare specialty stores) and B) I would hazard a guess that they are less sanitary and even less fresh on average than comparable packaged foods.
You clearly have no idea about what you are talking about.
I've been buying bulk everything I can for a long time and I don't see any downside to it.
It's smarter in every single point:
- I buy what I need instead of what was decided by the packager.
- I don't buy a package to throw it away and buy a new one next time. What a waste of money on top of the environmental impact.
- It's way more efficient for shopping. When things are organised in bulk it's visually much easier to spot in comparison with packaged stuff with random designs in aisles.
- Never experience "queues at stations" so this is a non problem in my 2 decades experiences of shopping in bulk in various cities/countries
You know what’s actually a waste of my time? Cleaning out my fridge of all the food waste generated because I couldn’t actually buy just 1 carrot, I have to buy 3 pounds wrapped in plastic for some reason.
We love to be romantic about glass but I don't think as easy of a calculation for the total environmental use. Glass is heavier and more expensive to transport. Glass is harder to shape into sizes that make for efficient transportation, for example Costco square milk jugs. I love to use glass when I can but I don't know if using this glass jar which may not even be recycled is better or worse than a plastic container.