> can be water stabilized with hydrophobic coatings
So when they make takeout containers out of this it's going to be coated with... something. I am suspicious of all these coatings they're slapping on compostable food containers these days.
Well, even vegetable oil is hydrophobic, so "something" needn't be too horrible. (Oil would obviously wipe off too easily.)
Though not for hot foods. It'll only work up to 50°C.
Borosilicate glass, metal, wood/bamboo/paper, ... there are many existing choices without looking for or inventing an impractical "flying car" option.
Downsides to using glass and wood for takeout should be obvious and please don't put my soup in a paper takeout container.
>Downsides to using ... wood for takeout should be obvious
I don't understand why our civilization has still not replaced almost everything with bamboo (though technically the bamboo is grass, not wood). It grows fast (and an order of magnitude better sink for CO2 than trees) and seems to be very usable as bamboo utensils demonstrate for example.
Bamboo requires a lot of processing to make anything useful out of it. It's not as eco-friendly as the manufacturers of bamboo products, especially fabrics, like to make out.
It’s more expensive and more of a hassle to deal with than plastic or plastic/wax coated paper.
A local chain here ships soup in some sort of biodegradable coated-cardboard-bucket-thingies. They still put a plastic lid on it, but I wouldn't dismiss cardboard/paper.
They're good enough for transport, though they do degrade pretty fast (they'll get leaky after a day or so).
Most of the time, these are actually done with PFAS ‘wax’ regardless of how it is labeled.
Just like them labeling a container with a plastic lid as ‘biodegradable’.
These are the personal lifestyle choices which enable major worldwide pollution. Maybe we need to take a step back and reevaluate which parts of our lifestyles are truly sustainable. I'm not speaking from a soapbox, I need to do this as well.
If we could unify enough to make collective demands about food packaging, and push for aggressive banning of most plastics in the food and retail industry, something might actually change.
Until then we can expect for things to get irreparably worse, as we trade immediate convenience for posterus generational suffering.
You have to become immune to all kinds of pathogens to stop companies from using plastics for food packaging and encourage takeouts. That's why restaurants don't allow brought-in takeout containers and why supermarkets vacuum bags everything made of nuclear grade lining materials.
Chances are that you or your surviving family members WILL successfully sue Walmart after you've gotten getting E. coli from deli section. They can either be brave and take your poorly sanitized glass bioreactors, or just give you bleached and prepackaged salad in transparent dinosaur juice and forget about all what I'm saying. The latter is arguably the better option for basically everybody.
I've worked in food service in just about every position but sous chef. I understand the regulations and pathogenic dangers.
I've also worked on organic neighborhood farm, where people would come to our location, grab vegetables with their hands and place them into their own cloth bags. We used plastic for items that went on store shelves, but everything else we tried to avoid them. We delivered vegetables to restaurants in cardboard boxes (which probably had thin plastic linings on them).
Steps can be taken to massively reduce waste in food service; the problem is no one wants to change their lifestyle. They'd rather get takeout 3-10 times a week than visit a local organic farm or start/find a cooking co-op.
> Chances are that you or your surviving family members WILL successfully sue Walmart after you've gotten getting E. coli from deli section
I don't eat meat and my only real risk of E. coli is from storebought greens. It's a non-zero risk, and I would prefer to get my greens from a farm, but they are hard to find in my state. Our own organic farm was the constant target of police and DEA raids, as they were convinced we were drug-producing hippies. The state DEA agent spit on the driveway once and bragged about how confiscating and selling the farm would pay his salary for years. So there is a real challenge here, it's not just on us. It's also on our government officials.
Besides, we can make hemp plastics, biodegradable plastics, etc. But there's no money in that as long as cheap single-use plastic is pervasive in the industry. What I can say with certainty is our current way of doing things is irresponsibly unsustainable, and we are failing in our duties to consider posterity. I'm watching my generation turn into an even more entitled bunch than the baby boomers when it comes to convenience at the sake of posterity.
> my soup in a paper takeout container.
There is an increasing use of paper takeout containers. Awful.
What about the downside of takeout?
Okay so now your solution involves banning takeout.
Also leftovers are a thing.
> Also leftovers are a thing.
Are you familiar with glass? Leftovers are a solved problem.
Or plastic, or whatever else. Leftovers are not an issue, unless I order from a place and they happen to use paper (or cardboard) containers as I cannot store them for too long.
You're bringing glass containers with you to restaurants for your leftovers?
Is that an insane proposition? Are we now shaming and ridiculing people for not prioritizing convenience over long-term sustainability?
This is exactly what a lifestyle change looks like. I'm sorry, but there are exceedingly few such necessary changes which will introduce more convenience into your life. Most of them will be at an inconvenience.
Our problem was letting ourselves get conditioned into normalizing unsustainable habits. A large amount of plastic waste needs to be eliminated, and if you can't be bothered to bring your own leftover containers to a restaurant, maybe you should be getting smaller portions.
It is kinda insane yes. I'd rather just eat less takeout than carry glassware with me all the time on the off chance I decide to go out to eat.
It's too much work to keep some in the trunk? You can buy plexiglass with external silicone support structures which are much more practical and less noisy to have in a moving vehicle.
But yeah less takeout is an okay choice too. Like, I love the taste and texture of meat, I'm designed to, but I abstain from eating it because of the environmental and ethical impact of the global meat industry. It's a sacrifice, one I'm often ridiculed for down here in the Southern US as well.
what is the wood finished with?
Or hot climates that reach >50 C
Or simple locked car on a sunny day (maybe not during winter), with dark interior. This can reach >90C over an hour or two.
No car interior has ever reached 90C. Did you mean 90 F?
Overall temperature isn’t 90C but your lunch could be in contact with those temperatures:
“In a locked vehicle, a dark dashboard, steering wheel or seat can often reach temperature ranges of 180 - 200 degrees F, which then warms the air trapped inside a vehicle.” 194F is 90C.
And that’s Florida, other parts of the globe have higher outdoor temperatures which result in higher internal temperatures.
Objects left on the dash of a black vehicle with gray interior get into the 180s (F obviously). I measured because it's where I cure small painted objects in the summer. I live at at a medium northerly latitude.
90C seems completely believable for hot climates.
Maybe not far off from 90, given you can fry eggs in open air in the sun and for that you need 65.
Ever seen a car on fire caused by heating from the sun? Well maybe not. But I have seen an egg get cooked on the roof of a car as a demonstration.
"London skyscraper can melt cars and set buildings on fire" (Sept. 3, 2013)
London isn't famous for hot weather, but that may change soon, and not because of global warming: The design of a new skyscraper in the city is melting cars and setting buildings on fire....
Only one of several examples. Also the Vdara hotel in the somewhat more probable location of Las Vegas, NV, the Nasher Sculpture Center and Museum Tower, both in Dallas, TX:
Have you ever been inside a hot car? Metal surfaces can easily exceed 100C.
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There's no reason you'd ever worry about that; no one can use any object in such a climate, because they'd die.
People definitely live in places where it gets that hot. (And note that's the air temperature in the shade, not even surface temperatures in sunlight which can get much hotter).
People survive because it's not 50°C all the time in those hot places. And the wet bulb temperature is lower, so sweating works (just about) to regulate body temperature. Mostly air conditioning and shelter, though.
Those links aren't shy about explaining that people exposed to that level of heat die. Here's the first one:
> According to a study recently published in Nature Medicine, more than 60 000 people died because of last year’s summer heatwaves across Europe.
It's not necessary for your home food storage to be able to survive temperatures that you can't. If it happens to the food in your home, it will happen to you too.
People die with less heat. But clearly not everyone, and it is not true that:
> no one can use any object in such a climate, because they'd die.
By the way, I know you can survive that heat because I did. No air conditioner. It was excruciating and I don’t wish it upon anyone. Well, maybe on climate change deniers, it would probably do them some good to suffer through it to believe the science. They probably wouldn’t but at least they wouldn’t be able to move to make it worse, either.
> More than 1,300 people died during this year's Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom
There's also shellac.
Soluble in alkali environments. No thanks.
They specifically mention a coating in the abstract, parylene C.
I am suspicious of the food in the takeout containers.
Yeah that was my first thought too, "Oh great, they'll just coat it with PFAS".
Perhaps some sort of food-grade wax? Although then you've got to worry about hot foods...
My aunt got me a big wooden bowl in college and I was poor so I ate popcorn out of it. I noticed the popcorn tasted weird for quite some time. I finally put two and two together when the coating had all come off the bottom. The hot popcorn and oil had been removing the God knows what shiny finish and I had been eating it. :(
We’ve all eaten teflon coating at some point in our lives.
Some of us, on purpose!
Hopefully just food grade mineral oil and beeswax if it was a wooden bowl.
It was one of those you might get at Pier 1 or Kohl’s back then and had a really plasticky coating. Not my best moment.
Unfortunately mineral oil is derived from petroleum. I don’t care if someone says it’s food grade, I wouldn’t want to eat it.
Paraffin wax (chocolate), polyethylene glycol (toothpaste), vanillin (vanilla flavoring), benzaldehyde (almond flavoring), and the plastic coating on medicine pills are all derived from petroleum.
You've likely been eating or using food grade petroleum products your whole life.
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Interesting that this is a thermoplastic - my first question is how it performs as a 3D printer filament?
The researchers are wondering, too. Last sentence in the abstract:
> This approach can be extended to polysaccharide-based supramolecular plastics that are applicable for three-dimensional printing.
(So, they haven't done it yet, but are thinking about it.)
second question - does it/will it cost like $500 per 1kg spool?
these plastics that will break down are designed to fix the problems of plastics... which problems are that plastics break down. We only need for plastics to break down more because they've already broken down, into microplastics and god knows what else.
I want to go in the other direction, plastics that simply don't break down, ever. Plastic laundry baskets with handles that keep being handles. Slick looking rubbery objects that don't turn into a sticky mess. We never thought of plastics as a pollutant because we thought plastics wouldn't break down. Make it so.
The sooner the cost of plastics actually reflect their true cost to society (which is basically infinite if they cause genetic damage), the sooner we get viable replacements.
> Plastics that can metabolize in oceans are highly sought for a sustainable future.
Really? I think that putting more nutrients in the water is almost as bad as having plastics floating around. The Baltic sea for example, have dead zones caused by agricultural runoff.
Surely, the best would be to not put more stuff in the water?
Plastics are mostly carbon and hydrogen atoms, neither of which are even remotely limiting factors because autotrophs at the bottom of the food chain produce plenty of both from water and carbon dioxide.
Agricultural runoff is mostly nitrogen and phosphorus, which are limiting factors (hence why we have to supplement them in agriculture).
> Plastics are mostly carbon and hydrogen atoms
In general, this particular stuff is significantly different.
The article mentions sodium hexametaphosphate [0] and guanidinium sulfate [1], which have phosphorous and nitrogen respectively. Those are both common in fertilizers and are implicated in algal blooms.
it is certainly good to not put more stuff in the water. i would suggest it is even better not to make stuff that shouldn't go in the water. but apparently a lot has already been made and there's constantly more of it in the water, and it looks like nobody is stopping
so if some major fraction of present production of that shit that shouldn't go in the water can be eliminated, and satisfied by an alternative that is not a persistent accumulating poison, i'll take it
Seems like a pretty easy problem to solve if you ask me:
Someone should send this link to Trump and Elon Musk so America and the EU can slap some actual serious and economy-breaking tariffs on those countries. I know that sounds snarky and drastic and funny and off-topic, but we seriously need actual serious politicians that just get shit done. We've tried the "reasonable politicians" approach so far, maybe it's time to bring in people that are unpalatable but actually willing to break shit and blockade some actual evil people and countries around the world in order to make positive change.
There seems to be a high correlation with people who are enthusiastic about breaking things to enable "simple" solutions, being legislative blockaders (instead of negotiators) of forming good policy from/with others, and not caring about external costs to the point of making that a vocal policy point.
A lot of damage is done in the name of real problems, associated with high frustration, leveraged politically.
If you mean this particular thing because it involves compounds [0][1] with nitrogen and phosphorous, then I agree it's a valid concern to look at.
However for existing plastics in general--mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen--it's less of an issue. Just because a material can be metabolized doesn't necessarily mean it's a rich source of energy, or that the chemicals in it will unlock some limiting-factor that was holding back a population-boom.
Just to prove it's possible, consider lignin, another C/H/O polymer and the core component of wood. It was ecologically un-digestible for a long time until something (fungi) evolved to dismantle it efficiently. Yet even now, its breakdown is a slow, low-margin process that occurs in the background.
____
Side note: The long delay between the evolution of trees and the evolution of something to eat wood has been suggested as a cause of coal formation, but it is disputed. [2]
The natural input of "nutrients" to the ocean is vast, compared to the natural input of modern artificial plastics.
Depends on what you put in, how much, and where.
I do not think moderate quantities of nutrients are a problem, and very likely has benefits.
What the other commenter is alluding to is that, if this comes into widespread use, it won't just be a moderate amount. We produce mind-boggling amounts of plastic waste and a lot of it would concentrate in rivers and estuaries.
These would not break down into the kinds of nutrients that cause algal blooms and dead zones. That is cause by nitrogen and phosphorus runoff.
That's interesting. I didn't have access to the paper, just the abstract, so didn't know it was different.
It will be a moderate amount compared to the amounts that produce dead zones.
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Well yeah but good luck with that.
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We've heard the "biodegradable" greenwashing scam of plastic technology advances over and over again. Maybe we shouldn't be seeking continued use of toxic petrochemical processes and should instead change our storage and packaging materials to be less hazardous and more reusable, because many other options already exist.
It's very easy to say "why don't we just stop using toxic petrochemicals," but very hard to do in practice. For a sustainability advancement to be considered a success, it has to actually replace something. To replace something, it:
- has to be affordable, or people will refuse to buy it. The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.
- has to be at least as performant as what it's replacing, or people won't want to change. The general public is not going to buy an inferior product in the name of sustainability.
- has to be more environmentally friendly than what preceeded it, or it has no benefit.
If you can find a more environmentally friendly material that is able to replace plastic, achieve its physical properties, at the same cost, then patent it and you will be very wealthy. And will have outplayed the billions (probably a lowball) being dumped into this by governments, universities, and private companies around the world.
Also, the reason most of these articles hype their own work up is because the name of the game in academia is grant money. If a funding agency doesn't think your work is impactful, they'll give it to someone who is. That's why articles rarely describe their incremental work as just being incremental.
It doesn't have to be cheap, It just has to be made cheaper artificially with globally enforced taxes.
The number one economic role of government is mitigating externalities that arise from free trade, often through the restraint of that trade.
globally enforced taxes
Why not just pass a law requiring everyone to be good?
Congrats you just made everyone subject to those taxes artificially worse off. People aren't stupid and can see what you did. You will be voted out of office next term. If you're going to artificially adjust prices it's got to go the other way where you subsidize the behavior you want. It worked with lightbulbs.
Or perhaps everyone is actually better of if negative externalities are taxed.
You made a change which caused consumer prices to go up, folks are already struggling financially it doesn't matter if it's for a good reason.
This is the "I know you're struggling but the economy is actually doing great" but applied to environmentalism.
Or perhaps everyone is worse off because some well connected lobbyist got the government to mandate their more expensive, less effective product.
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I would be interested to know the cost of more sustainable packaging at economies of scale. Almost all plastic-based packaging emerged after 1950, yet even before then, there was a need to package mass consumer goods on a large scale.
I also believe plastic and PFAS coatings are used in packaging largely because they are assumed to be the only suitable materials. However, in earlier times, there were many clever and cost-effective solutions.
Population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion. The population of the world has over tripled. This world put a lot of scaling pressure on everything.
I didn't think plastics are used because they are considered the only submittable suitable material, but they are definitely the cheapest and easiest to use. You cannot injection mold wood to be the exact shape and size with a snug fit for something you are packaging.
The fraction of the world's population regularly consuming manufactured and packaged goods is also increasing. That increases discarded plastics and other materials.
About a decade ago I tracked down the somewhat provocative claim that contemporary New Yorkers (city, not state) produced less refuse, by mass, than those of the 1930s. My first thoughts were that total packaging weight and waste food might account for this, older packaging materials being more ecologically-friendly, but generally more massive: wood, glass, metal, etc., and refrigeration and food preservation less developed.
Good guesses, but wrong as it happens.
The culprit was coal ash, on the order of 40% of all rubbish by weight. It had been > 80% in 1900.
Building heat was supplied by boilers running on coal. That left a large quantity of fly ash as residue. As heating switched to natural gas and cogeneration steam from the 1950s through the 1960s, coal use was largely eliminated.
Former generations of New Yorkers would often refer to receptacles as ash cans, and they were traditionally made of galvanized steel, both useful when contents might contain glowing coals. As trash evolved to colder refuse, plastic bins or bags could be substituted. "[T]he New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969." (<https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/...>)
Net non-coal refuse has increased, but the total, at least as of a decade ago, was still below the early-20th-century high point. Much of the current total however is plastics, and in particular disposable diapers.
I'd had additional sources on this at one point though I can't locate them presently.
This paper discusses composition and confirms the 40% & 80% figures above:
"How New York City Residents Diminished Trash", Paul E Waggoner and Jesse H. Ausubel, The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, New Haven andRockefeller University, New York.
October 2003.
> The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.
More or less, yes, but I think it deserves more nuance. Most of the general public is stuck trying to make ends meet, and regard the environment as a problem to be solved by their government and rich corporations.
If you take away their plastic bags and straws, they will make do.
You seem to believe plastic containers are used due to being a more affordable and technically superior solution. That’s a common mistake.
The true reason it’s so cheap and available, is subsidies. $7 trillion as of 2023, to be exact.
Without subsidies, using a non-renewable, expensive to harvest resource, to produce single-use plastic would be an absolutely irrational decision.
This bogus number comes from putting a value on the supposed environmental cost, but that is not what subsidy means in the economic sense. We already established that if we somehow could globally settle on a price for externalities, alternatives would be competitive, but they would still be intrinsically more expensive.
Except it isn't a "bogus number". Fossil fuel subsidies are real.
>"It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income."
I say give the subsidies to environmentally friendly producers instead, that don't use fossil fuels as the base material for producing packaging products. $1 trillion in one year is just an unfathomable amount of money to give away to corporations that are already making record profits far above the $1 trillion they already get.
If you say "$7 trillion to be exact" and then reduce that to $1 trillion in a followup, the number you initially gave is bogus.
I don't care to figure out exactly how much of that number is similarly misleading, but the article you quoted gives $20 billion for the US in 2022, or 0.3% of the federal budget that year. I don't support these (actual) subsidies, but clearly such numbers are not game changers when the average American spends 10% of their income on energy.
I never said "$7 trillion to be exact", that was someone else.
The fact is that any subsidies to fossil fuel companies is wrong. They don't need it, and petroleum use in almost all industries is ruining the planet.
The people lamenting “the ruination of the planet” would be the first to be eaten by the people starving due to cessation of petroleum use.
Nobody is advocating for a sudden "cessation of petroleum use". Taking away subsidies from petroleum companies that already make record profits year after year isn't going to cause mass cannibalism, and I'm not sure why you would think that. Replacing petroleum use with sustainable green alternatives also won't cause mass cannibalism - because the energy sources will be replaced with better alternatives. I'm not sure how you jump from "replace petroleum" to "mass cannibalism", it's really quite absurd.
You'd want to factor in externalities as well, both on the extraction side (fossil fuels are phenomenally under-priced, likely by a factor of millions), and disposal (environmental impacts of discarded plastics and pollution during manufacture).
Toxic stuffs are always technologically superior. Always. Fluoride etched Indium-Gallium-Arsenide-Phosphide make great solar cells. Iron-Aluminum-Gold alloy, not so much, if it worked at all.
Human life expectancy literally doubled as we switched from those "less hazardous and more reusable" options to disposable plastics. What justification do you have to go back to that? No one has one.
We need sustainable plastics production. Maybe from agricultural waste or something. Not a transition to a "Glass-and-steel Age". There's no way around that.
> Human life expectancy literally doubled as we switched from those "less hazardous and more reusable" options to disposable plastics.
Really? And are the two things causally connected in the way you imply? In that period infant mortality was falling which has a dramatic effect on mean life expectancy but is probably not all that greatly affected by disposable plastics.
Also life expectancy in Norway was 72.8 years in 1950-1955. When, if ever, was it only 36.4 years? I'm quite that plastic packaging was rare or non-existent in Norway and the rest of Europe in the early 1950s and life expectancy is certainly not 145.6 years now that it is ubiquitous.
That will be 5 $ more per butterstick, for the logistics of reusable porcelain butter packages.. which have to be collected, washed and shipped. Which makes it a rich people feel good status-symbol luxury, sadly.
Your sticks of butter come wrapped in plastic?
I don't think I've ever seen anything other than wax paper or foil, with only tubs of butter, rather than sticks, in plastic.
Up until earlier this year, many "grease proof" papers (e.g. butter wrappers) were PFAS.
PFAS aren't plastics.
And removing them clearly didn't increase the price of sticks of butter by $5.
A lot of plastic containers use fluorine-treated plastic [1], resulting in the creation of PFAS. The fluorine is used to strengthen the plastic and make it less permeable.
> Since EPA released its investigation, we have learned the disturbing fact that the fluorination of plastic is commonly used to treat hundreds of millions of polyethylene and polypropylene containers each year ranging from packaged food and consumer products that individuals buy to larger containers used by retailers such as restaurants to even larger drums used by manufacturers to store and transport fluids.
A lot of "butter" spreads are sold in plastic tubs.
Butter used to be packaged in wax paper, which was (then) biodegradable. The plastic packaging is about branding and shipping, not cost.
It still is.
Well maybe not at Whole Foods, I've never been in one, but at Walmart it's four wax-paper wrapped sticks in a cardboard box.
Do you know that it’s waxed paper, and not plasticized paper? Genuine question, since I imagine “wax” paper is either plasticized or using petroleum-based waxes.
Not arguing the general point, for which I agree, but isn't butter commonly sold in aluminum foil wrappers?
Or you know, supermarkets would purchase 50kg blocks of butter and fraction it, clients would then be responsible for bringing their own reusable containers.
No one will actually do that, except the few weirdos who think that it's a good idea.
Remember: "Reusable" containers also have an environmental cost. Each container will be used, on average, X times. Then it will break, or otherwise end its useful life, and end up in a landfill too.
Don't assume that a "reusable" container is better for the environment: My house is full of free, pristine, reusable water bottles that are gifts, souvenirs, ect. My kids go through about 2 reusable water bottles a year, each.
I’ve had the same steel water bottle for over 10 years. Just because you don’t reuse things well doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
I stress the word "free" here. Most of them were gifts.
What were the inputs like to manufacture the steel container?
Probably less than 3.650 plastic bottles, assuming he drinks one per day.
Wish there was a way to know
I mean, of course it's not perfect. But isn't 2 water bottles in a land fill orders of magnitude better than 300? Isn't the reduction of bulk trash the point? Why would the fact that a glass container can break make it not still a better alternative to 50 plastic ones?
> But isn't 2 water bottles in a land fill orders of magnitude better than 300?
I think you're making a lot more assumptions than you think:
For example, glass vs glass: My single-use glass container may be recyclable, but the fancy glass reusable one isn't.
Aluminum: Aluminum cans are highly recyclable. Is your metal reusable water bottle recyclable?
Plastic: Ooooh, I won't go there.
You’d still have to pay the employee who’d be responsible for cutting and weighing the butter for each customer, and taking payment for the butter (or however else that would work). Or build a machine that does it. Not sure how the cost for that would work out, or the machine’s ecological footprint in comparison.
Plus all of the food hygiene and logistical implications of handling products in bulk, multiplied by the 30,000 different products in a typical supermarket.
I don't know about the US, but in my country butter is packaged in waxed paper, which is fully biodegradable.
It wouldn’t be that different from how a lot of cheese is being handled where I live. Except they currently put the cuts into plastic wrappings (which are “sealed” by the price sticker) instead of customer-provided containers. On the other hand, for fruits we already do use nets brought by the customer, and the weighing happens at the checkout.
In my hometown in Italy you can ask to put your cheese or cold cuts from the counter in a container you provide.
I'm not sure this ends up as a net positive compared to the paper with plastic lining they provide tho, since you have to wash the container at some point.
> I'm not sure this ends up as a net positive compared to the paper with plastic lining they provide tho, since you have to wash the container at some point.
Unlike different kinds of plastic, water is 100% recyclable and doesn't come from nasty petrochemicals in the first place.
Water is, but detergent is not
>multiplied by the 30,000 different products in a typical supermarket
It's almost like we're going to have to reduce our consumption or something. Maybe we don't need 200 different kinds of cereal and 300 different kinds of coffee available every single day.
And due to the labor, it can only handle a low volume of goods with a high markup. When I go there, you end up waiting in line to be helped by the one or two people working that counter. Meanwhile, the cheaper, prepackaged foods can be picked up as needed.
My local supermarket chains already do that. It's called the Deli Counter. The cost is not a big deal.
Butter is, perhaps, a bit sticky for that, but my local co-op has various bulk grains and flour and beans and such that customers can bring their own containers for.
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This. There seems to be one of these announcements every so often, and i havent seen any of them used at scale, or making any kind of dent in the status quo.
> can be water stabilized with hydrophobic coatings
So when they make takeout containers out of this it's going to be coated with... something. I am suspicious of all these coatings they're slapping on compostable food containers these days.
Well, even vegetable oil is hydrophobic, so "something" needn't be too horrible. (Oil would obviously wipe off too easily.)
Apparently soybean wax works well: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7435775/
Though not for hot foods. It'll only work up to 50°C.
Borosilicate glass, metal, wood/bamboo/paper, ... there are many existing choices without looking for or inventing an impractical "flying car" option.
Downsides to using glass and wood for takeout should be obvious and please don't put my soup in a paper takeout container.
>Downsides to using ... wood for takeout should be obvious
I don't understand why our civilization has still not replaced almost everything with bamboo (though technically the bamboo is grass, not wood). It grows fast (and an order of magnitude better sink for CO2 than trees) and seems to be very usable as bamboo utensils demonstrate for example.
Bamboo requires a lot of processing to make anything useful out of it. It's not as eco-friendly as the manufacturers of bamboo products, especially fabrics, like to make out.
It’s more expensive and more of a hassle to deal with than plastic or plastic/wax coated paper.
A local chain here ships soup in some sort of biodegradable coated-cardboard-bucket-thingies. They still put a plastic lid on it, but I wouldn't dismiss cardboard/paper.
They're good enough for transport, though they do degrade pretty fast (they'll get leaky after a day or so).
Most of the time, these are actually done with PFAS ‘wax’ regardless of how it is labeled.
Just like them labeling a container with a plastic lid as ‘biodegradable’.
These are the personal lifestyle choices which enable major worldwide pollution. Maybe we need to take a step back and reevaluate which parts of our lifestyles are truly sustainable. I'm not speaking from a soapbox, I need to do this as well.
If we could unify enough to make collective demands about food packaging, and push for aggressive banning of most plastics in the food and retail industry, something might actually change.
Until then we can expect for things to get irreparably worse, as we trade immediate convenience for posterus generational suffering.
You have to become immune to all kinds of pathogens to stop companies from using plastics for food packaging and encourage takeouts. That's why restaurants don't allow brought-in takeout containers and why supermarkets vacuum bags everything made of nuclear grade lining materials.
Chances are that you or your surviving family members WILL successfully sue Walmart after you've gotten getting E. coli from deli section. They can either be brave and take your poorly sanitized glass bioreactors, or just give you bleached and prepackaged salad in transparent dinosaur juice and forget about all what I'm saying. The latter is arguably the better option for basically everybody.
I've worked in food service in just about every position but sous chef. I understand the regulations and pathogenic dangers.
I've also worked on organic neighborhood farm, where people would come to our location, grab vegetables with their hands and place them into their own cloth bags. We used plastic for items that went on store shelves, but everything else we tried to avoid them. We delivered vegetables to restaurants in cardboard boxes (which probably had thin plastic linings on them).
Steps can be taken to massively reduce waste in food service; the problem is no one wants to change their lifestyle. They'd rather get takeout 3-10 times a week than visit a local organic farm or start/find a cooking co-op.
> Chances are that you or your surviving family members WILL successfully sue Walmart after you've gotten getting E. coli from deli section
I don't eat meat and my only real risk of E. coli is from storebought greens. It's a non-zero risk, and I would prefer to get my greens from a farm, but they are hard to find in my state. Our own organic farm was the constant target of police and DEA raids, as they were convinced we were drug-producing hippies. The state DEA agent spit on the driveway once and bragged about how confiscating and selling the farm would pay his salary for years. So there is a real challenge here, it's not just on us. It's also on our government officials.
Besides, we can make hemp plastics, biodegradable plastics, etc. But there's no money in that as long as cheap single-use plastic is pervasive in the industry. What I can say with certainty is our current way of doing things is irresponsibly unsustainable, and we are failing in our duties to consider posterity. I'm watching my generation turn into an even more entitled bunch than the baby boomers when it comes to convenience at the sake of posterity.
> my soup in a paper takeout container.
There is an increasing use of paper takeout containers. Awful.
What about the downside of takeout?
Okay so now your solution involves banning takeout.
Also leftovers are a thing.
> Also leftovers are a thing.
Are you familiar with glass? Leftovers are a solved problem.
Or plastic, or whatever else. Leftovers are not an issue, unless I order from a place and they happen to use paper (or cardboard) containers as I cannot store them for too long.
You're bringing glass containers with you to restaurants for your leftovers?
Is that an insane proposition? Are we now shaming and ridiculing people for not prioritizing convenience over long-term sustainability?
This is exactly what a lifestyle change looks like. I'm sorry, but there are exceedingly few such necessary changes which will introduce more convenience into your life. Most of them will be at an inconvenience.
Our problem was letting ourselves get conditioned into normalizing unsustainable habits. A large amount of plastic waste needs to be eliminated, and if you can't be bothered to bring your own leftover containers to a restaurant, maybe you should be getting smaller portions.
It is kinda insane yes. I'd rather just eat less takeout than carry glassware with me all the time on the off chance I decide to go out to eat.
It's too much work to keep some in the trunk? You can buy plexiglass with external silicone support structures which are much more practical and less noisy to have in a moving vehicle.
But yeah less takeout is an okay choice too. Like, I love the taste and texture of meat, I'm designed to, but I abstain from eating it because of the environmental and ethical impact of the global meat industry. It's a sacrifice, one I'm often ridiculed for down here in the Southern US as well.
what is the wood finished with?
Or hot climates that reach >50 C
Or simple locked car on a sunny day (maybe not during winter), with dark interior. This can reach >90C over an hour or two.
No car interior has ever reached 90C. Did you mean 90 F?
Overall temperature isn’t 90C but your lunch could be in contact with those temperatures:
https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2019/09/26/heres-how-hot-t...
“In a locked vehicle, a dark dashboard, steering wheel or seat can often reach temperature ranges of 180 - 200 degrees F, which then warms the air trapped inside a vehicle.” 194F is 90C.
And that’s Florida, other parts of the globe have higher outdoor temperatures which result in higher internal temperatures.
Objects left on the dash of a black vehicle with gray interior get into the 180s (F obviously). I measured because it's where I cure small painted objects in the summer. I live at at a medium northerly latitude.
90C seems completely believable for hot climates.
Maybe not far off from 90, given you can fry eggs in open air in the sun and for that you need 65.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhYkUuvDsGA
> No car interior has ever reached 90C.
Ever seen a car on fire? I have.
Ever seen a car on fire caused by heating from the sun? Well maybe not. But I have seen an egg get cooked on the roof of a car as a demonstration.
"London skyscraper can melt cars and set buildings on fire" (Sept. 3, 2013)
London isn't famous for hot weather, but that may change soon, and not because of global warming: The design of a new skyscraper in the city is melting cars and setting buildings on fire....
<https://www.nbcnews.com/sciencemain/london-skyscraper-can-me...>
Only one of several examples. Also the Vdara hotel in the somewhat more probable location of Las Vegas, NV, the Nasher Sculpture Center and Museum Tower, both in Dallas, TX:
<https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-buildings-attack-...>
Have you ever been inside a hot car? Metal surfaces can easily exceed 100C.
There's no reason you'd ever worry about that; no one can use any object in such a climate, because they'd die.
People definitely live in places where it gets that hot. (And note that's the air temperature in the shade, not even surface temperatures in sunlight which can get much hotter).
People survive because it's not 50°C all the time in those hot places. And the wet bulb temperature is lower, so sweating works (just about) to regulate body temperature. Mostly air conditioning and shelter, though.
You have not been paying attention.
https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Coperni...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/22/west-africa-he...
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66229057
Those links aren't shy about explaining that people exposed to that level of heat die. Here's the first one:
> According to a study recently published in Nature Medicine, more than 60 000 people died because of last year’s summer heatwaves across Europe.
It's not necessary for your home food storage to be able to survive temperatures that you can't. If it happens to the food in your home, it will happen to you too.
People die with less heat. But clearly not everyone, and it is not true that:
> no one can use any object in such a climate, because they'd die.
By the way, I know you can survive that heat because I did. No air conditioner. It was excruciating and I don’t wish it upon anyone. Well, maybe on climate change deniers, it would probably do them some good to suffer through it to believe the science. They probably wouldn’t but at least they wouldn’t be able to move to make it worse, either.
Not long ago this happened: https://apnews.com/article/hajj-heat-deaths-mecca-saudi-arab...
> More than 1,300 people died during this year's Hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia as the faithful faced extreme high temperatures at Islamic holy sites in the desert kingdom
There's also shellac.
Soluble in alkali environments. No thanks.
They specifically mention a coating in the abstract, parylene C.
I am suspicious of the food in the takeout containers.
Yeah that was my first thought too, "Oh great, they'll just coat it with PFAS".
Perhaps some sort of food-grade wax? Although then you've got to worry about hot foods...
My aunt got me a big wooden bowl in college and I was poor so I ate popcorn out of it. I noticed the popcorn tasted weird for quite some time. I finally put two and two together when the coating had all come off the bottom. The hot popcorn and oil had been removing the God knows what shiny finish and I had been eating it. :(
We’ve all eaten teflon coating at some point in our lives.
Some of us, on purpose!
Hopefully just food grade mineral oil and beeswax if it was a wooden bowl.
It was one of those you might get at Pier 1 or Kohl’s back then and had a really plasticky coating. Not my best moment.
Unfortunately mineral oil is derived from petroleum. I don’t care if someone says it’s food grade, I wouldn’t want to eat it.
Paraffin wax (chocolate), polyethylene glycol (toothpaste), vanillin (vanilla flavoring), benzaldehyde (almond flavoring), and the plastic coating on medicine pills are all derived from petroleum.
You've likely been eating or using food grade petroleum products your whole life.
[flagged]
Interesting that this is a thermoplastic - my first question is how it performs as a 3D printer filament?
The researchers are wondering, too. Last sentence in the abstract:
> This approach can be extended to polysaccharide-based supramolecular plastics that are applicable for three-dimensional printing.
(So, they haven't done it yet, but are thinking about it.)
second question - does it/will it cost like $500 per 1kg spool?
these plastics that will break down are designed to fix the problems of plastics... which problems are that plastics break down. We only need for plastics to break down more because they've already broken down, into microplastics and god knows what else.
I want to go in the other direction, plastics that simply don't break down, ever. Plastic laundry baskets with handles that keep being handles. Slick looking rubbery objects that don't turn into a sticky mess. We never thought of plastics as a pollutant because we thought plastics wouldn't break down. Make it so.
I can't tell if this is similar to PHA or not, but that's a plastic you can buy for 3d printing today that is touted to break down in seawater. https://www.fabbaloo.com/news/pha-colorfabbs-fully-biodegrad...
This is their site: https://colorfabb.us/filaments/materials/pha-filaments
The sooner the cost of plastics actually reflect their true cost to society (which is basically infinite if they cause genetic damage), the sooner we get viable replacements.
> Plastics that can metabolize in oceans are highly sought for a sustainable future.
Really? I think that putting more nutrients in the water is almost as bad as having plastics floating around. The Baltic sea for example, have dead zones caused by agricultural runoff.
Surely, the best would be to not put more stuff in the water?
Plastics are mostly carbon and hydrogen atoms, neither of which are even remotely limiting factors because autotrophs at the bottom of the food chain produce plenty of both from water and carbon dioxide.
Agricultural runoff is mostly nitrogen and phosphorus, which are limiting factors (hence why we have to supplement them in agriculture).
> Plastics are mostly carbon and hydrogen atoms
In general, this particular stuff is significantly different.
The article mentions sodium hexametaphosphate [0] and guanidinium sulfate [1], which have phosphorous and nitrogen respectively. Those are both common in fertilizers and are implicated in algal blooms.
[0] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hexasodium-hexamet...
[1] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Guanidinium-sulpha...
it is certainly good to not put more stuff in the water. i would suggest it is even better not to make stuff that shouldn't go in the water. but apparently a lot has already been made and there's constantly more of it in the water, and it looks like nobody is stopping
so if some major fraction of present production of that shit that shouldn't go in the water can be eliminated, and satisfied by an alternative that is not a persistent accumulating poison, i'll take it
Seems like a pretty easy problem to solve if you ask me:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/stemming-the-plas...
Someone should send this link to Trump and Elon Musk so America and the EU can slap some actual serious and economy-breaking tariffs on those countries. I know that sounds snarky and drastic and funny and off-topic, but we seriously need actual serious politicians that just get shit done. We've tried the "reasonable politicians" approach so far, maybe it's time to bring in people that are unpalatable but actually willing to break shit and blockade some actual evil people and countries around the world in order to make positive change.
There seems to be a high correlation with people who are enthusiastic about breaking things to enable "simple" solutions, being legislative blockaders (instead of negotiators) of forming good policy from/with others, and not caring about external costs to the point of making that a vocal policy point.
A lot of damage is done in the name of real problems, associated with high frustration, leveraged politically.
If you mean this particular thing because it involves compounds [0][1] with nitrogen and phosphorous, then I agree it's a valid concern to look at.
However for existing plastics in general--mostly carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen--it's less of an issue. Just because a material can be metabolized doesn't necessarily mean it's a rich source of energy, or that the chemicals in it will unlock some limiting-factor that was holding back a population-boom.
Just to prove it's possible, consider lignin, another C/H/O polymer and the core component of wood. It was ecologically un-digestible for a long time until something (fungi) evolved to dismantle it efficiently. Yet even now, its breakdown is a slow, low-margin process that occurs in the background.
____
Side note: The long delay between the evolution of trees and the evolution of something to eat wood has been suggested as a cause of coal formation, but it is disputed. [2]
[0] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Hexasodium-hexamet...
[1] https://pubchem.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/compound/Guanidinium-sulpha...
[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1517943113
The natural input of "nutrients" to the ocean is vast, compared to the natural input of modern artificial plastics.
Depends on what you put in, how much, and where.
I do not think moderate quantities of nutrients are a problem, and very likely has benefits.
What the other commenter is alluding to is that, if this comes into widespread use, it won't just be a moderate amount. We produce mind-boggling amounts of plastic waste and a lot of it would concentrate in rivers and estuaries.
These would not break down into the kinds of nutrients that cause algal blooms and dead zones. That is cause by nitrogen and phosphorus runoff.
That's interesting. I didn't have access to the paper, just the abstract, so didn't know it was different.
It will be a moderate amount compared to the amounts that produce dead zones.
Well yeah but good luck with that.
We've heard the "biodegradable" greenwashing scam of plastic technology advances over and over again. Maybe we shouldn't be seeking continued use of toxic petrochemical processes and should instead change our storage and packaging materials to be less hazardous and more reusable, because many other options already exist.
It's very easy to say "why don't we just stop using toxic petrochemicals," but very hard to do in practice. For a sustainability advancement to be considered a success, it has to actually replace something. To replace something, it:
- has to be affordable, or people will refuse to buy it. The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.
- has to be at least as performant as what it's replacing, or people won't want to change. The general public is not going to buy an inferior product in the name of sustainability.
- has to be more environmentally friendly than what preceeded it, or it has no benefit.
If you can find a more environmentally friendly material that is able to replace plastic, achieve its physical properties, at the same cost, then patent it and you will be very wealthy. And will have outplayed the billions (probably a lowball) being dumped into this by governments, universities, and private companies around the world.
Also, the reason most of these articles hype their own work up is because the name of the game in academia is grant money. If a funding agency doesn't think your work is impactful, they'll give it to someone who is. That's why articles rarely describe their incremental work as just being incremental.
It doesn't have to be cheap, It just has to be made cheaper artificially with globally enforced taxes.
The number one economic role of government is mitigating externalities that arise from free trade, often through the restraint of that trade.
globally enforced taxes
Why not just pass a law requiring everyone to be good?
Congrats you just made everyone subject to those taxes artificially worse off. People aren't stupid and can see what you did. You will be voted out of office next term. If you're going to artificially adjust prices it's got to go the other way where you subsidize the behavior you want. It worked with lightbulbs.
Or perhaps everyone is actually better of if negative externalities are taxed.
You made a change which caused consumer prices to go up, folks are already struggling financially it doesn't matter if it's for a good reason.
This is the "I know you're struggling but the economy is actually doing great" but applied to environmentalism.
Or perhaps everyone is worse off because some well connected lobbyist got the government to mandate their more expensive, less effective product.
I would be interested to know the cost of more sustainable packaging at economies of scale. Almost all plastic-based packaging emerged after 1950, yet even before then, there was a need to package mass consumer goods on a large scale.
I also believe plastic and PFAS coatings are used in packaging largely because they are assumed to be the only suitable materials. However, in earlier times, there were many clever and cost-effective solutions.
Population of the world in 1950 was 2.5 billion. The population of the world has over tripled. This world put a lot of scaling pressure on everything.
I didn't think plastics are used because they are considered the only submittable suitable material, but they are definitely the cheapest and easiest to use. You cannot injection mold wood to be the exact shape and size with a snug fit for something you are packaging.
The fraction of the world's population regularly consuming manufactured and packaged goods is also increasing. That increases discarded plastics and other materials.
About a decade ago I tracked down the somewhat provocative claim that contemporary New Yorkers (city, not state) produced less refuse, by mass, than those of the 1930s. My first thoughts were that total packaging weight and waste food might account for this, older packaging materials being more ecologically-friendly, but generally more massive: wood, glass, metal, etc., and refrigeration and food preservation less developed.
Good guesses, but wrong as it happens.
The culprit was coal ash, on the order of 40% of all rubbish by weight. It had been > 80% in 1900.
Building heat was supplied by boilers running on coal. That left a large quantity of fly ash as residue. As heating switched to natural gas and cogeneration steam from the 1950s through the 1960s, coal use was largely eliminated.
Former generations of New Yorkers would often refer to receptacles as ash cans, and they were traditionally made of galvanized steel, both useful when contents might contain glowing coals. As trash evolved to colder refuse, plastic bins or bags could be substituted. "[T]he New York City Sanitation Department began encouraging the use of plastic garbage bags in 1969." (<https://archive.nytimes.com/cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/...>)
Net non-coal refuse has increased, but the total, at least as of a decade ago, was still below the early-20th-century high point. Much of the current total however is plastics, and in particular disposable diapers.
I'd had additional sources on this at one point though I can't locate them presently.
This paper discusses composition and confirms the 40% & 80% figures above:
"How New York City Residents Diminished Trash", Paul E Waggoner and Jesse H. Ausubel, The Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, New Haven andRockefeller University, New York. October 2003.
<https://phe.rockefeller.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/NYTra...>
The NYT article above also confirms "ash cans".
> The general public cares more for its wallet than the environment.
More or less, yes, but I think it deserves more nuance. Most of the general public is stuck trying to make ends meet, and regard the environment as a problem to be solved by their government and rich corporations.
If you take away their plastic bags and straws, they will make do.
You seem to believe plastic containers are used due to being a more affordable and technically superior solution. That’s a common mistake.
The true reason it’s so cheap and available, is subsidies. $7 trillion as of 2023, to be exact.
Without subsidies, using a non-renewable, expensive to harvest resource, to produce single-use plastic would be an absolutely irrational decision.
https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel...
This bogus number comes from putting a value on the supposed environmental cost, but that is not what subsidy means in the economic sense. We already established that if we somehow could globally settle on a price for externalities, alternatives would be competitive, but they would still be intrinsically more expensive.
Except it isn't a "bogus number". Fossil fuel subsidies are real.
>"It’s not just the US: according to the International Energy Agency, fossil fuel handouts hit a global high of $1 trillion in 2022 – the same year Big Oil pulled in a record $4 trillion of income."
https://www.budget.senate.gov/chairman/newsroom/press/sen-wh...
I say give the subsidies to environmentally friendly producers instead, that don't use fossil fuels as the base material for producing packaging products. $1 trillion in one year is just an unfathomable amount of money to give away to corporations that are already making record profits far above the $1 trillion they already get.
If you say "$7 trillion to be exact" and then reduce that to $1 trillion in a followup, the number you initially gave is bogus.
I don't care to figure out exactly how much of that number is similarly misleading, but the article you quoted gives $20 billion for the US in 2022, or 0.3% of the federal budget that year. I don't support these (actual) subsidies, but clearly such numbers are not game changers when the average American spends 10% of their income on energy.
I never said "$7 trillion to be exact", that was someone else.
The fact is that any subsidies to fossil fuel companies is wrong. They don't need it, and petroleum use in almost all industries is ruining the planet.
The people lamenting “the ruination of the planet” would be the first to be eaten by the people starving due to cessation of petroleum use.
Nobody is advocating for a sudden "cessation of petroleum use". Taking away subsidies from petroleum companies that already make record profits year after year isn't going to cause mass cannibalism, and I'm not sure why you would think that. Replacing petroleum use with sustainable green alternatives also won't cause mass cannibalism - because the energy sources will be replaced with better alternatives. I'm not sure how you jump from "replace petroleum" to "mass cannibalism", it's really quite absurd.
You'd want to factor in externalities as well, both on the extraction side (fossil fuels are phenomenally under-priced, likely by a factor of millions), and disposal (environmental impacts of discarded plastics and pollution during manufacture).
Toxic stuffs are always technologically superior. Always. Fluoride etched Indium-Gallium-Arsenide-Phosphide make great solar cells. Iron-Aluminum-Gold alloy, not so much, if it worked at all.
Human life expectancy literally doubled as we switched from those "less hazardous and more reusable" options to disposable plastics. What justification do you have to go back to that? No one has one.
We need sustainable plastics production. Maybe from agricultural waste or something. Not a transition to a "Glass-and-steel Age". There's no way around that.
> Human life expectancy literally doubled as we switched from those "less hazardous and more reusable" options to disposable plastics.
Really? And are the two things causally connected in the way you imply? In that period infant mortality was falling which has a dramatic effect on mean life expectancy but is probably not all that greatly affected by disposable plastics.
Also life expectancy in Norway was 72.8 years in 1950-1955. When, if ever, was it only 36.4 years? I'm quite that plastic packaging was rare or non-existent in Norway and the rest of Europe in the early 1950s and life expectancy is certainly not 145.6 years now that it is ubiquitous.
That will be 5 $ more per butterstick, for the logistics of reusable porcelain butter packages.. which have to be collected, washed and shipped. Which makes it a rich people feel good status-symbol luxury, sadly.
Your sticks of butter come wrapped in plastic?
I don't think I've ever seen anything other than wax paper or foil, with only tubs of butter, rather than sticks, in plastic.
Up until earlier this year, many "grease proof" papers (e.g. butter wrappers) were PFAS.
PFAS aren't plastics.
And removing them clearly didn't increase the price of sticks of butter by $5.
A lot of plastic containers use fluorine-treated plastic [1], resulting in the creation of PFAS. The fluorine is used to strengthen the plastic and make it less permeable.
> Since EPA released its investigation, we have learned the disturbing fact that the fluorination of plastic is commonly used to treat hundreds of millions of polyethylene and polypropylene containers each year ranging from packaged food and consumer products that individuals buy to larger containers used by retailers such as restaurants to even larger drums used by manufacturers to store and transport fluids.
[1] https://blogs.edf.org/health/2021/07/07/beyond-paper-pfas/
A lot of "butter" spreads are sold in plastic tubs.
Butter used to be packaged in wax paper, which was (then) biodegradable. The plastic packaging is about branding and shipping, not cost.
It still is.
Well maybe not at Whole Foods, I've never been in one, but at Walmart it's four wax-paper wrapped sticks in a cardboard box.
Do you know that it’s waxed paper, and not plasticized paper? Genuine question, since I imagine “wax” paper is either plasticized or using petroleum-based waxes.
Not arguing the general point, for which I agree, but isn't butter commonly sold in aluminum foil wrappers?
Or you know, supermarkets would purchase 50kg blocks of butter and fraction it, clients would then be responsible for bringing their own reusable containers.
No one will actually do that, except the few weirdos who think that it's a good idea.
Remember: "Reusable" containers also have an environmental cost. Each container will be used, on average, X times. Then it will break, or otherwise end its useful life, and end up in a landfill too.
Don't assume that a "reusable" container is better for the environment: My house is full of free, pristine, reusable water bottles that are gifts, souvenirs, ect. My kids go through about 2 reusable water bottles a year, each.
I’ve had the same steel water bottle for over 10 years. Just because you don’t reuse things well doesn’t mean it’s impossible.
I stress the word "free" here. Most of them were gifts.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42214319
What were the inputs like to manufacture the steel container?
Probably less than 3.650 plastic bottles, assuming he drinks one per day.
Wish there was a way to know
I mean, of course it's not perfect. But isn't 2 water bottles in a land fill orders of magnitude better than 300? Isn't the reduction of bulk trash the point? Why would the fact that a glass container can break make it not still a better alternative to 50 plastic ones?
> But isn't 2 water bottles in a land fill orders of magnitude better than 300?
I think you're making a lot more assumptions than you think:
For example, glass vs glass: My single-use glass container may be recyclable, but the fancy glass reusable one isn't.
Aluminum: Aluminum cans are highly recyclable. Is your metal reusable water bottle recyclable?
Plastic: Ooooh, I won't go there.
You’d still have to pay the employee who’d be responsible for cutting and weighing the butter for each customer, and taking payment for the butter (or however else that would work). Or build a machine that does it. Not sure how the cost for that would work out, or the machine’s ecological footprint in comparison.
Plus all of the food hygiene and logistical implications of handling products in bulk, multiplied by the 30,000 different products in a typical supermarket.
I don't know about the US, but in my country butter is packaged in waxed paper, which is fully biodegradable.
It wouldn’t be that different from how a lot of cheese is being handled where I live. Except they currently put the cuts into plastic wrappings (which are “sealed” by the price sticker) instead of customer-provided containers. On the other hand, for fruits we already do use nets brought by the customer, and the weighing happens at the checkout.
In my hometown in Italy you can ask to put your cheese or cold cuts from the counter in a container you provide.
I'm not sure this ends up as a net positive compared to the paper with plastic lining they provide tho, since you have to wash the container at some point.
> I'm not sure this ends up as a net positive compared to the paper with plastic lining they provide tho, since you have to wash the container at some point.
Unlike different kinds of plastic, water is 100% recyclable and doesn't come from nasty petrochemicals in the first place.
Water is, but detergent is not
>multiplied by the 30,000 different products in a typical supermarket
It's almost like we're going to have to reduce our consumption or something. Maybe we don't need 200 different kinds of cereal and 300 different kinds of coffee available every single day.
And due to the labor, it can only handle a low volume of goods with a high markup. When I go there, you end up waiting in line to be helped by the one or two people working that counter. Meanwhile, the cheaper, prepackaged foods can be picked up as needed.
My local supermarket chains already do that. It's called the Deli Counter. The cost is not a big deal.
Butter is, perhaps, a bit sticky for that, but my local co-op has various bulk grains and flour and beans and such that customers can bring their own containers for.
This. There seems to be one of these announcements every so often, and i havent seen any of them used at scale, or making any kind of dent in the status quo.