Yay, I'm also in favor of heavily taxing the horrible packaging of consumer goods shipped from overseas. I don't have any illusions we can shift mass manufacturing back to the US, that doesn't make any sense, but I think we should force our suppliers to use more sustainable packaging, even if the prices go up.
1. It's nice of you to be in favor of rising prices you can afford to pay. Wonder how people that are already at the edge of choosing cheaper processed food will feel about it.
2. What's wrong about plastic packaging, exactly? The alternative use for oil is to burn it. Having it do something useful and then get buried doesn't sound so horrible.
2. The alternative could be not using oil at all here. I don’t remember our ancestors needing plastic packaging to eat fruit.
Plastic packaging doesn’t always get buried either. Landfills aren’t exactly a solution because of toxins they leech into the surrounding soil. It could end up in bodies of water. It could end up burned in an incinerator which releases the CO2 + volatile organic compounds stored inside it (and volatile organic compounds are quite bad for human health)
>Landfills aren’t exactly a solution because of toxins they leech into the surrounding soil.
1. how much "toxins" are we talking about here? You'd think that if they were toxic enough to cause problems with the surrounding soil when buried along with tons of other stuff, that they'll make the food they're in direct contact with absolutely inedible.
2. Landfills are lined to prevent this specific issue.
1. Toxins over large timescales.(also I’m assuming they aren’t the only thing in the landfill) Most modern plastics won’t leech toxins onto your food in the short time it takes from field to fridge. However microplastics are a concern and they do end up on fruit and vegetables that are in plastic packaging. The amount of course varies.(factors such as type of plastic, temperature, friction, shipping method all impact this) The study of microplastics on human health is quite young but initial results don’t paint a pretty picture.
2. Good point! Errors in foundations or any permeable gaps can still cause leachate to escape. There is also the concern of gases escaping during the lifetime of landfills as well.
You also have an issue of land usage. We have a limited amount of land and that amount is expected to decrease as sea levels rise. I think landfills don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of land value as opposed farms, parks, (I’ve heard of landfills being turned into parks but we still have the concerns of low to moderate containments in the surrounding soil) nuclear/solar/wind farms (although luckily you can still use landfills for these since contact with the public would be minimal), and wildlife habitats. Any ban on plastics, even if it reduces the waste going to landfills by a tiny or fractional amount. Sounds like a win to me
>Toxins over large timescales.(also I’m assuming they aren’t the only thing in the landfill) Most modern plastics won’t leech toxins onto your food in the short time it takes from field to fridge.
What about the plastic wrapped foods that last for years? Are those just low in toxin and the plastic clamshell packaging for fruits/vegetables loaded with toxins?
>Errors in foundations or any permeable gaps can still cause leachate to escape. There is also the concern of gases escaping during the lifetime of landfills as well.
Without getting more specific about what what "toxins" consistns of, it's hard to know assess the actual risk of them. eg. for BPA wikipedia says:
>Despite a rapid soil and water half-life of 4.5 days, and an air half-life of less than one day, BPA's ubiquity makes it an important pollutant.
It's probably fine even if it leeches out into a landfill, and there's some cracks? By the time it leaks out it would have degraded already.
>We have a limited amount of land and that amount is expected to decrease as sea levels rise.
America is definitely not running out of landfill space anytime soon. For asia/europe incineration is an alternative
>I think landfills don’t provide much bang for buck in terms of land value as opposed farms
That sounds like a non-issue given that we have a functioning market for land?
One should keep in mind that degradation and half-life are technical terms with specific meaning - while the original substance is no more, in no way does it mean the products are less or more toxic. Often they are less toxic or even degrade fully (into CO₂, H₂O etc), for the most part, but not always and all of it.
Landfills are one of those places where numerous funny reaction take place, creating wondrous chemicals, that people haven't even dreamed of.
That being said, I don't worry much about chemical composition of fruit packaging and their degradation products in non-smoldering landfills.
These are all great questions, but I am out of my element here. Microplastics & land usage aren’t my areas of expertise (just a casual interest) so I'm hoping someone else can come along and give you informative answers.
> What about the plastic wrapped foods that last for years?
I appreciate a good whataboutism as the next guy, but please keep in mind that fruit already has short shelf life, and plastic packaging is not used for longevity or higiene but to protect the product from mechanical actions and to prebundle items.
> It's probably fine even if it leeches out into a landfill (...)
The whole point of using paper-based packaging is that this problem simply does not exist at all, it's recyclable, and the timespan it takes to biodegrade is not measured in geological time.
I fail to see how that's whataboutism. I'm not trying to justify one form of plastic packaging with another. I'm merely questioning how much stuff actually leeches out and how it compares to how much leeches out during normal consumption.
>plastic packaging is not used for longevity or higiene but to protect the product from mechanical actions and to prebundle items. The whole point of using paper-based packaging [...]
I'm not sure about you, but buying pre-packaged fruits from opaque bags does not sound very appealing to me.
> I fail to see how that's whataboutism. I'm not trying to justify one form of plastic packaging with another. I'm merely questioning how much stuff actually leeches out and how it compares to how much leeches out during normal consumption.
It's textbook whataboutism, in the letter and in the spirit. The proposal consists of replacing plastic-based packaging with paper-based packaging for fruits and vegetables, which have a notoriously short shelf life. You, on the other hand, tried to divert attentions to "plastic wrapped foods that last for years", as if it was relevant or meaningful. That's a totally unrelated usecase, which has zero to do with the discussion.
Landfills are mostly just "lets push the problem forward and have the next generation deal with it". Yes, there is a lot of space we could use to fill up with trash, but everything is finite.
In the chain of raw resources -> refined resources -> partial assemblies -> assembled products -> used products -> waste all steps are finite, and it's just a matter of which limit we hit first. Instead of waiting and "hoping for the best" it would make much more sense to plan ahead and start limiting the growth and acceleration towards that finite limit so we have a chance at mitigation.
> Landfills are mostly just "lets push the problem forward and have the next generation deal with it". Yes, there is a lot of space we could use to fill up with trash, but everything is finite.
What timespan are we talking about here? Literally the next generation? Or a few hundred years from now? With the available space in the US I'm leaning towards the latter. With that in mind and recognizing the net present value of landfill space a few hundred years from now is close to zero, I can definitely get behind "lets push the problem forward and have the next generation deal with it".
Clean incinerators have been around for at least a decade[1] - potentially longer, as the Japanese have been separating out their burnable garbage from non-burnable for years.
A city near me does this, instead of recycling. Although, they still provide recycling bins, and still ask residents to separate their trash. I presume it's because it makes it easier for them to separate the burnable trash from the "wet" trash.
You're welcome! And, to be clear, I share many of the concerns that you pointed out in your comment - plastic going into landfills and older, unclean incinerators is a problem, and it can be really hard (if not impossible) to tell its final destination. I just wanted to clarify that (the right) incinerators are a solution for disposal - but it'd be better to not use plastic in the first place (or, at least, not in disposable packaging - long-lived goods like phone cases and Legos are slightly better than one-time-use things like plastic bottles for sodas).
Everything here is a game of trade-offs, and we often get misled by instinctive/faulty reasoning.
Nuclear energy produces some of the most dangerous, long-lasting byproducts imaginable, but appropriately handled it's preferable to almost every traditional form of energy production.
While reducing our meat intake is vogue, the impact it will have on climate change is depressingly incremental. Dishonest ideological documentaries like Cow/Sea-spiracy frustrate scientists dedicating their lives to fix these problems. 92% of the carbon impact reduction of going vegan can be achieved by switching from beef to pork/chicken/fish, before considering that plants are grown in animal waste and vast parts of manufacturing rely on animal products. http://environmath.org/2018/06/17/paper-of-the-day-poore-nem...
We need to examine our assumptions here. Are we short on land? Can we build adequate containment facilities? Is the carbon impact of properly transporting/containing these long-lasting products greater or lower than fast-decomposing paper products that can immediately release carbon into the environment?
Unfortunately there are huge financial/personal interests here and it's hard to get past the misinformation. Recycling was one of the biggest lies sold by corporate interests. It's rarely a moral or environmental good, in spite of all the propaganda for it. (Aluminium and paper are exceptions).
The answer depends on having the right facilities to handle the waste products, whether hydrocarbon or paper-based.
I don't know about you but I don't fancy the all potato diet of my Irish ancestors. Packaging does have benefits: prolongs shelf life thus reducing waste.
I cannot tell this if this is sarcasm or a misunderstanding of evolution, but I’m imaging a dystopian future where humans genetically modify themselves to consume plastic but are no longer able to eat the foods we eat today. Now that’s a good novel
I mean, I totally get why we wouldn't want to burn oil. We breath that air and it increases CO2. But why exactly shouldn't we extract it? After all, you can do a lot of useful things with it. Like, for example, food packaging :) Also half the device you're reading this on, most likely.
Because it is finite and has a cycle much longer than our generations of humans has. We're essentially creating problems instead of planning ahead.
That said, the same can be said for a lot of other thing like natural resources we drain faster than we replace them. Perhaps those can be classified similarly.
Beyond the limited availability of resources in the forms what we can make use of them, there is processing of those resources which has its own set of problems, as well as normal use of processed resources and waste management of used resources.
Example: Aluminium as we know it takes a lot of energy to get to a state where we have a use for it (parts of machines, or foil for example) but once it is in that state and we treat it properly it can be used and re-used and recycled almost infinitely with comparatively minute amounts of energy. Imagine such a process for other resources where we won't have to constantly input new raw materials and energy to get more of the stuff we want.
This is really hard for oil after we have changed it to whatever form we wanted to use it for; turning it back into oil or turning used oil into usable oil isn't exactly a viable process.
Properly disposed of, minimal plastic packaging can prevent damage and therefore waste, resulting in a smaller environmental footprint than alternatives, including no packaging and reusable materials.
The problem is that packaging is not always disposed of properly, and is not always minimal or justified by reasons other than marketing.
Also, not all plastics are the same, some are more environmentally friendly than others and you may need more or less of it.
nothing wrong with plastic. It's an amazing material. But using one-time disposable plastic to carry a banana home from the shop, no matter how convenient, leaves a bad environmental footprint and the microplastics used will persist forever.
Plastic production has pretty high GHG emissions. I think it's higher than glass for comparable bottles, though I'm not sure about that.
But people arguing about landfills are just idiots. Put it in a secure landfill in some geologically stable desert and stop worrying if that's really a problem.
>I don't have any illusions we can shift mass manufacturing back to the US
Why do people insist that the thing that allowed the USA to become prosperous and go from a poor former colony of the British Empire to a world power wouldn't be feasible?
A big part of what has changed is that much of the innovation in manufacturing has shifted from the ability to mass produce things at all in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (the US did very well at this) to cost optimization in the twenty-first century (China is doing very well at this).
I'd say that it's feasible to have mass manufacturing return to the US, but not a mass of manufacturing jobs in the short to medium term. Manufacturing with automation that is cheaper than the world's cheapest labor is feasible in the US. But, until the US standard of living converges with parts of the world that have large, organized sources of cheap labor (today that mostly means Asia), the cost of US labor will not allow competitive prices on manufactured goods.
There are partial exceptions to this. For example, it can make sense to do final assembly of cars in the US. This has many reasons... parts can be sourced from all over the world, there has long been investment in automation around auto assembly so the cost of labor is a smaller fraction of the consumer price, shipping cars across oceans is expensive, etc. Even in this example, far less US labor is used in the end to end production of a US assembled car than was the case decades ago.
I'm not an economist by any stretch of the imagination (I'd love to see a response from someone who is!). But I do work on math and software systems that manage a sizable marketplace with a goal of efficiently balancing competition between many businesses with competing interests. You can get a long way on this kind of thing by just thinking about the incentives that would be set up and how companies would rationally respond to those incentives.
If I understand your question... the tax would, for example, be paid by Apple on their products sold in the US if they continue to build their devices in China and it would be based on the difference in the cost of labor between the US and China. Let's assume the administrative details could be worked out, which does not seem trivial (e.g., If you want it proportional to the labor savings of manufacturing in China, how many hours of labor are spent on an iPhone and how is that audited? And how many hours would it take to make in the US with different worker protection laws / expectations?).
Apple would not just absorb such a tax. It would be reflected directly in the prices of their products. So prices go up for products sold in America, regardless of whether they are made in China (prices go up to cover the new tax) or they start being made in the US again (prices go up enough to cover more expensive labor).
Apple would now have the choice of continuing to manufacture in China or bringing manufacturing "home". They still want to sell to the rest of the world. To be competitive in the rest of the world, the non-US products still need to be made in China to keep prices down. So bringing US-bound production home means managing a more complex supply chain. I think I'd want to just pay the tax and keep logistics simpler by continuing to manufacture everything in China, even items bound for the US. One way around this would be for the government to charge US companies the tax for products sold outside the US as well. This would almost certainly be a disaster for the US because non-US companies now have a price advantage everywhere in the world except the US. Apple now has two choices... cede the global market to non-US competitors or move themselves outside the US.
So, if the result is that this doesn't help American labor much, then we're left with Americans paying higher prices for products with little offsetting increase in income. So Americans' purchasing power drops relative to the rest of the world. Revenue does increase for the US government and some of that will benefit the people who would have liked those manufacturing jobs, but certainly not all of it.
In the long term I can see the US getting more competitive in the global labor market because of such a tax, but not in a way that many would choose. It's not hard to see this dropping the standard of living in the US to some extent. If it drops enough that Americans are eager to work for the same compensation that Chinese workers get, manufacturing jobs could start coming back. Be careful what you wish for?
I wanted to follow up after giving sufficient time for other replies.
I sincerely hope you check your history and read this :-)
First off, thankyou for the in-depth response.
I, personally, think the race to the bottom style economics hurts everyone. It promotes a style of business that isn't healthy to employees, and allows companies to find loopholes to abuse Labor.
I completely agree about the downsides of the race to the bottom - I think it's inherently short sighted on a number of fronts (humane treatment of workers, wise use of natural resources, long term success, etc.). But I also see it as an almost inescapable consequence of US style capitalism. US capital markets reward companies who squeeze out every last penny and punish those who don't. Executives in public companies that are seen sacrificing short term revenue or short term profits for anything don't often keep their job for long. And those executives exploit this by making sure they have golden parachutes.
I think it goes way beyond race to the bottom. It's the effort to optimize the exploitation of everything for money. There is so much money to be made by exploiting every nuance of every law and regulation (or lack thereof), that I don't see companies pulling back willingly for any length of time. And the people who are already benefitting most from this have accumulated so much wealth and power that I don't think there's much hope of establishing laws or regulations that don't have exploitable loopholes designed in. I fear it will take something on the scale of the Great Depression to get meaningful change in this regard.
You'd have to turn the clock back, when we were industrializing Asia wasn't competing, shipping and communications were expensive, etc.
I've heard that for many mass products China can get things onto the shelf for less than US manufacturers would have to pay for raw materials. On that extreme end I just can't imagine us producing those items.
Of course it's a sliding scale, I pay a lot more for certain types of goods that are made close to where I live but it seems foolish to extend that approach to everything.
California will have a proposition on the 2022 ballot eliminating foam packaging and imposing a 1 cent fee on plastic packaging to be paid by manufacturers.
> The measure is opposed by the plastics industry. Tim Shestek, a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, a trade association that includes large companies such as Dow, DuPont, 3M and ExxonMobil Chemical, called the measure “a massive taxpayer-funded giveaway of billions of dollars to fund a variety of special interest pet projects.”
> He said it threatens small businesses like restaurants and that the plastics industry is committed to reducing plastic waste.
Oh, good, the plastics industry is coming to help reduce how much plastic they sell. It's transparent to the point of being satirical!
It's also just funny to me that the slightest price signal ($0.01 per piece of packaging) is deemed completely untenable, and further a 'giveaway' of funds. Give me a break!
The market works on price signals. We are allowed to create signals to indicate our preferences (less trash everywhere please) in order to have the computer (the market) solve for a more optimal solution. Collective action (eg legislation like the one mentioned) is the way to do this!
Oh you know the only approved replacement for plastic will be some eco-plastic that the rep sponsoring the bill just so happens to have already invested in and actually takes more energy to produce than plastic.
My state of South Australia banned a lot of plastic last year. I don’t think even “ecoplastics” like PLA are allowed. It’s all cardboard, paper, bamboo, light wood or other odd things like sugar cane pulp.
The vast majority of the containers work just as well as the plastic ones did.
This is valid and interesting, in fact there are two almost separate problems we have from an environemntal/sustainability point of view: How much energy does a thing cost, and how much waste does it produce.
These aren't the same! For instance, a plastic grocery bag costs minimal energy but produces infinite-lifespan waste, while a reusable cloth bag costs like 10,000x energy to produce (between farming cotton, spinning it, weaving it, etc), but if left outside would only last for several years (ie a 1/10,000 lifespan).
We have to consider both these tradeoffs! Bioplastic probably is somewhere closer to a happy middle: costs 2x the energy of a tradplastic but lasts 1/10,000 shorter.
Admittedly I've made up all these numbers but: all compromises aren't equal, we can do better than we do now, the multipliers matter
> in fact there are two almost separate problems we have from an environemntal/sustainability point of view
Indeed they are, and I'd argue that in current situation, we can and should ignore one of them.
Climate change is an immediate existential threat to human civilization. Long-living, mostly inert waste is an inconvenience. As long as we're still sourcing majority of our energy from fossil fuels, more energy use = more carbon footprint = worsening the crisis. The issue of plastic waste is irrelevant relative to that - we can clean the house up after it is no longer on fire.
> It's adorable that CA thinks that manufacuters will be the ones bearing this cost.
Its adorable that you think that a activist groups having enough money (ballot signature gathering up to the small minority needed to qualify a ballot measure is pretty tightly correlated with spending on the purpose) to qualify a ballot measure says anything about what California thinks.
Also, adorable that you think that the measure’s authors thinking that manufacturers are the most efficient place to collect the a Pigovian tax on plastic packaging says anything about who will bear the cost; the point is to make the use of the packaging more expensive to influence consumer behavior away from products with it, of course consumers bear the cost (though not exclusively.)
>> doing it at point of sale would be far more fuss
One of the reasons why I oppose VAT style taxation
Each citizen should at minimum see on a itemized bill the amount of money the government is collecting from them, IMO each citizen should be forced to write out a check to every government entity that needs to collect money
Automated, and hidden taxes is one of the reason the government can actually steal errrr collect as much money as it does, because if people had to pay their taxes like they do their utility bill there would be continual protests in the streets
I believe GP's point is that a tax return only lists a small subset of the taxes being collected from a citizen, giving the impression that the amount is smaller than it is.
Social Security taxes are a great example of this - for W2 employees they don't show up on their tax return at all. And even if the employee looks at the box labeled "social security tax" on their W2, that's still only half of it, because the other half is a "payroll tax" that the employee never sees, even in their "gross income".
When you add consumption taxes, making sure to include both the ones that show up as "sales tax" on a receipt and the ones that get baked into the price (e.g. gas taxes), it becomes extremely difficult to come up with an individual's fully-loaded tax rate.
Even if consumers see their sales taxes and other consumption taxes on their receipts, it's not the full picture. Every business in the supply chain has their own taxes to pay. What portion of those are implicitly passed on to consumers? And what about the suppliers of those businesses (a supply chain is more like a a supply graph)? Where does it end? What about imported goods (which in the US is probably a majority of consumer goods) whose manufacturers were taxed in their own countries? How do you track their taxes? Who's going to do this calculation? How does it not end up needing an even larger bureaucracy to tally up?
Frankly "taxes are theft" is a narrow-minded point of view that I have little time for. Complain about how high your taxes are, complain about how the government wastes money. But it's not "theft", at least in democratic countries. It's the price of living and working where you do.
>>>Frankly "taxes are theft" is a narrow-minded point of view
Frankly the rationalization that taxation, specially income taxation is anything other than theft because of "democracy" is absurd
The fact is that the government, like a theif, says to a person: Your money, or your life. And many, if not most, taxes are paid under the compulsion of that threat.
The government does not, indeed, waylay a person in a lonely place, spring upon him from the road side, and, holding a pistol to his head, proceed to rifle his pockets. But the robbery is none the less a robbery on that account; and it is far more dastardly and shameful.
The theif takes solely upon himself the responsibility, danger, and crime of his own act. He does not pretend that he has any rightful claim to your money, or that he intends to use it for your own benefit. He does not pretend to be anything but a robber.
He has not acquired impudence enough to profess to be merely a “protector,” and that he takes a person's money against their will, merely to enable him to “protect” those infatuated travelers, who feel perfectly able to protect themselves, or do not appreciate his peculiar system of protection. He is too sensible a man to make such professions as these.
Furthermore, having taken your money, he leaves you, as you wish him to do. He does not persist in following you on the road, against your will; assuming to be your rightful “sovereign,” on account of the “protection” he affords you. He does not keep “protecting” you, by commanding you to bow down and serve him; by requiring you to do this, and forbidding you to do that; by robbing you of more money as often as he finds it for his interest or pleasure to do so; and by branding you as a rebel, a traitor, and an enemy to your country, and shooting you down without mercy, if you dispute his authority, or resist his demands. He is too much of a gentleman to be guilty of such impostures, and insults, and villanies as these. In short, he does not, in addition to robbing you, attempt to make you either his dupe or his slave.
> Automated, and hidden taxes is one of the reason the government can actually steal errrr collect as much money as it does
The government creates, and then rents to us (usury), the money we all use [1]. It holds a monopoly on money creation.
Governments can create money to build infrastructure, hospitals and housing (many leftist governments in Europe have [2]) at will. Government doesn't need to collect taxes to do any of the things I mentioned, that's a myth. External constraints on national budgets are a myth. National budgets are just monetary debts by the government carried by citizens. [3]
This is laughably false, if the government just created infinite money the money would be worthless, would cause runaway inflation and could not be used to build anything
Fiat Currency requires a careful balance of fraud like pozi scheme to convince people that is is worth something, if they did away with the "myth" as you call it then the entire fraud would collapse like pozi schemes normally do
So you are objectively wrong that the government can create money at will, while technically true they do so at the risk of complete monetary collapse
I find it a bit odd that we always seem to ignore a very important cost when it comes to producing goods: the cost to (ultimately) dispose of them. Disposing of goods certainly isn't free, and it's a cost that both producers and consumers should probably share instead of just foisting it on the general public as a negative externality.
Will adding this disposal cost make certain products prohibitively expensive? Sure. But if no one can (or will) pay for your product after all the associated costs are baked in, then that's just the market's way of telling you that you shouldn't be making that product.
This isn't unthinkable - in Switzerland, whenever you buy a an electric device (not just electronics!), a part of your purchase cost will be the pre-purchase of the associated recycling cost.
This enables the workflow where anyone can simply walk up to a retailer and hand them their old white goods free of charge - and they legally have to collect it, even if they didn't originally sell that item.
I understand that the one-cent fee will raise money for state-run recycling and cleanup efforts, I'd like to see something bigger that would help shift the incentives towards using recyclable products.
Here[1] is a polystyrene case of 200 for $28.99 retail, this would make that cost $30.99. The eco-friendly version is $57.99: [2], and that doesn't even have the compartments that the foam does; if you want those it's closer to $90. I'm sure the costs to the manufacturers themselves are lower than that.
To a restaurant, it's a 2-dollar fee on a 30-dollar case that doesn't make the 60-dollar alternative a smart financial decision. Alternatively, it's a 1-cent fee on a 14-cent product, compared to a 29-cent product.
I like when a restaurant gives me my food in an eco-friendly container, now I know that it cost them about 15 cents of my purchase to do so.
I doubt it. In my supermarket, all the fruits in plastics bags/boxes are damaged more or earlier, because as soon as one of the fruit is in bad shape, no one buys the box and all fruits get ruined.
The irony is that the organic fruits are put into a container (because they're more expensive and the store don't want people checking out expensive food as cheap) so if you want to buy organic for the environment, you're the one paying for plastics and for good waste.
Why do bananas, broccoli, bell peppers, potatoes and such vegetables require an airtight container? I see those and other produce regularly in plastic wrap or packaging here in Europe.
Obviously not all produce requires it but plastic allows fine control of humidity/moisture. The green onions I buy sealed in plastic last about 3 times longer than those I buy without packaging. Food lasting a long time matters a lot to me, and many others, right now because I try to reduce my shopping trips as much as possible due to the pandemic.
This law is not preventing airtight packaging in weights above 1.5kg and I bet that the store will still get these produce shipped in weights above that. So, what I understand what you are saying is that the hour or so of you picking it up at the shop until you put it in your fridge will result in "losing weeks of storage time", but I can't understand how that is possible. Can you explain?
Throwing a bunch of produce together in large masses is generally a very good way of getting it to rot. Having it shipped, individually wrapped bundles in moisture controlled plastic bags, inside of larger containers, now that works.
Yep. That's a good job picking out the most easily transported and stored produce. Of course you're failing to find photos of giant stacks of leafy greens for a reason.
I don't know about those fruits and vegetables, but cucumbers in particular are often shrink-wrapped in plastic, for good reason. Without the plastic, they go bad much, much faster; a matter of days instead of weeks.
TBH cucumber would go bad for sure much faster than in weeks even in plastic
I usually buy cucumber with intention if preparing something, but get to it like 1-2 weeks later when it starts to get already soft, while it's shrink wrapped, so I really doubt it's really matter of "weeks" unless you mean 2 weeks
I don't know about airtight but bananas have repeatedly made a tacky mess in my backpack. Also salads. Just the other week I had a tofu salad leak all over my backpack :( I'm now wrapping these in plastic bags.
You can use the same bag for many, many salads until one leaks and then you get a new bag. That is significantly better than supermarkets using a new bag for every salad.
I agree. This is incredibly stupid. The amount of food waste that will result will far outbalance the minor environmental impact of packaging. All that food requires lots of plastic in it's production cycle.
Produce is mostly made out of natural gas and diesel, not plastic.
Those plants aren't going to fertilize themselves LOL.
As with most greenwashing announcements, the net result will be increased, not decreased, environmental damage. Burn more diesel planting and transporting food, make more fertilizer out of natgas, then wash it into rivers to cause algae blooms and dead zones...
The other environmental effect will be decreasing the amount of fresh produce poor people have access to, eventually resulting in higher profits for health care industries. Think of it like an investment in turning pain and suffering into profit.
People have done okay without plastic containers before, it will be okay, trust me. There are biodegradable containers that can be used instead of plastic ones.
Second, lots of incentives can be introduced to sell food about to go bad such as selling it cheaper or reuse it in different products such as juices for fruits and so on. The only limit here is creativity, really..
I'm not sure when it happened exactly, but Spain went crazy for over-packaging supermarket fresh fruits and vegetables in plastic. When I lived there as a kid, it was basically just thin polyethylene bags. When I went back about three years ago.. it was much worse than here in Britain, which I already thought bad.
Italian supermarkets, at least all those i saw during my vacation there this summer, had bio-degradable bags for almost everything. Those that weren't you had to pay for. Not sure why that isn't the case everywhere. Of course, bringing your own non-plastic bag would be better.
Yeah, Italy is surprisingly good in this regard - even their recycling seems well-organised, although I'm still unsure how/why they mix soft plastics in with bottles, etc. I was under the impression that sort of mixing screwed up the recycling chain.
I know I'm at constant loggerheads with my Italian partner who keeps putting soft plastics in the recyling here in London, even though it's supposed to be filtered out!
Us Germans are recycling for what seem to be forever. At first the Italian system (it is quite a while we spent time there) was really confusing. One get's used to it so, I still mixed up the colors between organic and plastic waste occsionally so.
Are we talking "paper bags" or "bio-degradable plastics" here? The former is trivially compostable, whereas the latter requires industrial composting conditions, and depending on the polymer type, might just end up "composting" into microplastics.
Plastics. I used to work for a chemical additive manufacturer a while back, they had additives for foils that resulted in a brake down into molecules that could be consumed by bacteria in the ground. Even did some tests according some EU standards. Not sure if those bags in the supermarkets were up to those standards.
IIUC biodegradable plastic bags must be fermented in an industrial fermenter to break down properly. If it ends up in nature it will break down to microplastics.
Use biodegradable containers or if you insist on plastics, use a strict recycling program where you pay extra for the container and you can get money back if it gets to a recycling facility. If you're lazy and don't care to return the item to some recycling facility someone else will for that deposit...
Plastic recycling is not great though and it's better to use plastic sparingly.. One time use plastics are the worst offenders for the environment.
There are several scandals of corruption about recycling programs (that billed and taxed but didnt't recycled) in the past.
The effect is similar to the 'Tax to the Sun' in the last years that destroyed by design most public interest into solar projects after deliberately making the life of the independent solar domestic producers a bureaucratic nightmare.
Now they try to convince people to adopt it, but there is a lost of distrust by people risking their money aware that a change in the government would block it again, because some people have an economic interest into blocking the adoption of clean energies.
Most people interested in nature conservation had been punished and burnt a few times yet, so much of the momentum has been lost.
People promoting "Two time use" plastics forgot that mold loves fruit, so you need to protect your product from spores and bruises that would destroy totally your investment. You would wrap a second fruit on the same plastic and is like bathing it into rooted stuff, is spoiled really quick.
To made illegal to wrap in plastics the same fruit that is cultured in the so called 'sea of plastics' is heartwarming but also a perfect irony. To compensate the loses in spoiled fruits we would need to increase the surface covered in plastic to culture more fruits.
Promoting to eat more meat and less fruit would be a much more efficient way.
If something didn't go right in some cases doesn't mean it's not doable. Bottom line is that we need to stop polluting the environment and plastics are a big offender. We can fix this problem. What's wrong with biodegradables? Not cheap enough?
Right, because this will save the planet, EU and western countries must be laughing stock in Asia/Africa.
Pollution produced by EU/West is drop in ocean compared to pollution produced by Asian/African countries, but let's annoy everyone with smallest things, while people in Asia just dump trash into rivers/oceans.
I really love when politicians flying in jets, riding limos tell me, someone doesn't even own car, how my few plastic bags per week or packaging of grapes is destroying the planet.
At least 90% with kids I know regularly use car, but hey, I am destroying planet because unlike them I don't use those useless single use paper bags, but use for grocery same few plastic bags for years, same with recycling, God forbid to admit you just dump your stuff without recycling (let's ignore the fact you are just helping recycling companies to make money, since they have to sort out recycled trash anyway, you just make it cheaper for them, recycling is good business).
EDIT: thanks in advance for downvotes from people who never been to Asia to see how clean it's there and who ride their car everywhere to preach me
Off topic, but I recently tried a free HelloFresh meal, and was blown away by how much plastic packing they used. Unbelievable, every individual thing was wrapped in tiny plastic.
This is only a half measure and doesn't directly tackle the emissions or pollution problems in today's disgustingly wasteful and destructive global food production system.
We need 1.) more travel distance labels that show where things are from, while 2.) at the same time showing how much of the costs are government subsidized, as well as the emissions generated by the transportation costs.
Of course we need corresponding shifts, e.g. in helping communities learn how to cook with seasonal vegetables etc.. Living in the Netherlands, I don't need to eat asparagus from Peru in December.
But yeah, like in the airline and oil industries, it's the use of subsidies that's one of the root problems (although we all know that the US military industrial complex alone is one of the biggest polluters [1]).
We need more signaling systems that show the real costs; not to shame the working class who buy food (or pretend they have any real power to effect change), but to help reveal to them the wastefulness and destruction of the current system.
"Many urbanised people have lost touch with the sources of their food, and may not realize that the distance their food travels has been steadily increasing. In the US, the average pound of food now travels 1,500 miles before it reaches the dinner table, and the distance continues to grow.
Much of this transport is needless: every day, identical commodities pass in opposite directions, criss-crossing the globe. The ‘logic’ of the global economy leads the US and other nations to import hundreds of thousands of tons of staple foods each year, while simultaneously exporting roughly the same amount. In an era of dwindling fossil fuel reserves and rising CO2 emissions, this is both senseless and wasteful. But it is a trend that is accelerating as governments systematically promote a single, globalized food system."
Wouldn't a carbon tax on primary energy sources, e.g. per barrel of oil or ton of coal, help account for pricing food more appropriately according to its carbon impact?
1. Plastic containers need to be manufactured from raw material, shipped to the packaging site, and recycled or disposed of after use. So there is that.
2. Increased shelf life of food products also have an induced demand behavior (similar to highway lanes) which might result in more overall food being shipped and spoiled then if the shelf life would have been shorter.
3. Increased shelf life allows food to be shipped further, which might sound like a good thing, but not if you factor in the same product is available from a closer source. This also encourages large scale mono-culture as local farms have a harder time competing against larger farms farther away.
So it is definitely not as simple as increased shelf life == better carbon footprint.
Or rather look at ways to why food is traveling more would should be counter intuative, and is likely caused by increased regulations and taxation in local area's that make food production unprofitable locally so it has to move further and further to make it work economically
But yes more government regulations, more labeling, and shaming poor people into buying more expensive food is the better path ...
Once again government creates a problem, then people look to government to solve the very problem it created which creates even more problems
//When my "Local" farmer is charging 4-5x more than the supermarket for the same food, guess where I am shopping... hint it is not local
> Once again government creates a problem, then people look to government to solve the very problem it created which creates even more problems
What? And your answer is the private sector? Yeah i totally love how Bill Gates is trying to make Indian and African farmers dependent on Monsanto/Bayer's toxic GMO seeds. [1][2]
I don't think that the dichotomy that you allude to, between the government/state and business/companies, makes much sense:
1.) A national government is what creates the laws and maintains the registry of land/resources (land/resources which are owned by companies)
2.) A company is literally a database entry in a government database, the state issues the 'birth certificates' and 'death certificates' (folding a business or bankruptcy) for companies.
3.) When a profit-seeking company builds up knowledge today they want to enclose it by using intellectual property laws (useful for a monopoly).
4.) Competition between nations leads to useless competition, because often the same research and development has to be done twice (or just, every time again for each new country) - wasting resources and labor. The working class pays for all this dearly, since they are not part of the propertied class and are thus completely at the mercy of their whims and with only their labor to sell.
So yeah, the nation state needs the concept of companies, and companies are only possible by having a state. Capitalism and nationalism/patriotism is the name of this game.
Imagine if all of humanity pooled all it's non-scarce resources, removing all knowledge gatekeeping apparatus that blocks the diffusion of innovation by creating artificial scarcity where none need be. Imagine all technology and science open access for the benefit of the working class. What a dream. [3]
Spaniard here, from Madrid. A lot of fruit and veggies are sold here in prepackaged format (say, 5-6 apples or tomatoes) weighing below 1,5 kgs, specially online shops.
I would not say it is the majority but it's absolutely usual. Most likely they will become bigger so as to weigh more than the limit.
I think people will just use paper bags. That's what we all used to do anyway, and it worked fine. I think the heavy weight exemption is targeted at items like potatoes that people often buy in large bags.
“food wastage” is not a real thing—non consumed food is perfect for composting and many other things. Organic materials literally cannot be wasted it gets 100% recycled.
Single use plastic on the other hand takes the scenic route straight into the ocean…
Does this only mean you can't buy prepackaged tomatoes, or you can't even use one of the little plastic bags that come off a roll that you put tomatoes from the display into?
Pollution? It comes from underground, does something useful, gets buried again.
Waste? Uhh... It may "feel" wasteful, because it's more durable than paper, but if it's both cheaper and better than paper, I don't really see the issue. Plus if I want to pay to buy something, it's kinda by definition useful.
Environmental damage from fruit & vegetable plastic packaging. Again, not clear on the how. Plastic is very chemically inert to the point of being used as food packaging. It may at worst be visually unappealing in the wrong context, but that's a disposal issue.
And please, please, for the love of all that is still logical, don't tell me about plastic in oceans. A ban on packaging in Spain will do absolutely nothing about how municipal waste is disposed of in Africa and Asia. Both wrong problem and wrong continent.
This is what happened with the straws kerfuffle. We are absolutely willing to give up things that we don't care much about. Like what is alluded to, we don't really want to have to consume less, which would have far reaching consequences beyond plastic.
>It's like software code churn. A bunch of git commits must indicate we're really getting some serious work done!
Is this seriously a thing? ie. people refactoring stuff for the sake of refactoring? Maybe the company I work at hasn't progressed to that stage yet, but the type of "change for the sake of change" that you're talking about I mostly see with designs/layouts.
Is there a picture of those containers in question?
What are we talking about here? Bananas in plastic boxes?
Because in my supermarket in Germany, nearly everything is without packaging, except maybe berries in cardboard containers.
There was a public discussion about organic cucumbers in shrinkwrap, I think for differentiation reasons. But many switched to simple stickers here.
i think it's mostly berries and grapes at least here in Czechia, cherry tomatoes are usualyl in cardboard though still in plastic bag
cucumbers should be shrink wrapped, they go bad MUCH faster if unwrapped, so you will eliminate any benefit of removing plastic by much more food waste
I guess the goal is to only penalize plastic when there is a good alternative. For example, cars have a lot of plastic in them, but they make them a lot lighter and more fuel efficient, so you might not want to tax that plastic. It would be borderline impossible to write a general law that describes when plastic is ok and when it isn't, much better to issue practical rules on a case-by-case basis.
Because it results in a greater inconvenience as opposed to targeting a specific item which will have less political opposition. We need to reduce consumption by x amount, but the political will is only there to reduce by .0001*x
Otherwise, you would have seen far higher taxes on fossil fuels around the world decades ago.
Taxes for food-related policies are unfortunately regressive. The people who can least afford it are hardest hit. Furthermore that might discourage purchase of healthy food.
But if this means that more fruit and vegetables will spoil, it may not be so good. What kind of containers are used for fruit in Spain? For example grapes are sold in plastic containers where I live. They are kind of sensitive for pressure.
An important piece of information missing from ideas like this is how much of the overall total we are talking about. My guess is that plastic fruit and vegetable containers account for a very, very small portion of plastic use overall.
You'd also want to consider how much utility is gained from that use: a lot of food packaging is stuff like plastic wrap or paper/plastic/metal combinations which cannot be recycled, and it's only used once whereas a reusable plastic container might use 10x the volume of plastic but could be reused for many years.
This bill won't affect bulk purchases, but for consumer-sized purchases salad greens don't require CO2 in packaging if you're expecting to use them in a reasonable amount of time. Our penchant for produce that doesn't go bad for very long periods of time is new, historically weird, and probably not great, yeah?
Also, if you absolutely need greens that are more robust and last longer, there are options like cabbage that will last quite a while just sitting in the fridge.
Yeah, but it's cabbage. So there's already an issue there. You forcing/suggesting someone to buy cabbage because it lasts longer than spinach, arugula, etc is not going to fly well with people that don't like cabbage.
And adding to our hilarious overuse of plastic shouldn't fly well with anyone. So what's your solution? Mine's "shop more frequently", which I do because I live in civilization and the store where I get my produce is a nice and pleasant walk (even in the winter it's not bad), but I'm open to alternatives.
The "tyranny"--of not filling landfills with junk because I don't like impossibly slow arugula eaters, apparently!
Why are hackernews posters so awful and weird about food? Do you even listen to yourself? I mean, jeez, just put a wet towel in the pack like a normal person to get an extra couple days out of it instead of ranting about "tyranny" because somebody thinks that maybe it's okay that your spinach goes over in five days instead of eight and you should just buy less and get over it.
I don't want to shop daily, so I need produce that can last for at least a week. Otherwise I will cut them out of my diet, which will be slightly less healthy.
We have had a penchant for food that doesn't go bad for very long periods of time for ages (why do you think meat was salted?). Achieving it, especially without ruining the food, is a very recent accomplishment, which naturally the environmental people are looking to take away.
> if you're expecting to use them in a reasonable amount of time
I don't know if you've noticed, but there's a pandemic currently going on and you should reduce your shopping frequency. Going to the grocer every week to get new produce is counterproductive.
Indeed, busy people should just grab 20 McNuggets on the way home and be done with it.
I mean, the nerve, wanting a bag of quick already shredded lettuce that they can use for tacos tonight, a salad for lunch tomorrow, and finish out on Friday night burger grilling.
It's kind of strange that leftism is very concerned about future people when it comes to the environment but the polar opposite in other areas like technology and social stability where they favor individuals alive today over long term benefits to the whole society. For example worker's rights ahead of business growth or individual freedoms ahead of robust social structure.
I honestly believe there is lots of potential for making people realize this is a position one can believe, hold and live. The bullying from those who care more about some future humans I don't care about is getting out of hand. McDonalds paper straws literally tear the flesh from my lips after sucking the moisture out of them and I am fed up.
Meanwhile, the planet gets hotter and many more people die during heatwaves than 20 years ago. Are you sure your McDonalds experience is more important than preventing more and more people from ceasing to breathe?
I'm pretty sure the conservative party has been the "no future" party for some time now, economic policy has been benefiting those who are alive at the expense of those who are not yet alive.
Don't mind if you see a little pushback by a youth who would like to have a future themselves.
