This seems unsustainable. Cranberry fields forever?
Seriously, we need legally imposed limits on the use of single-use plastic wrapping, a correction of the economics and a change in habits.
Our family consumes two kinds of crispbread. One manufacturer (Wasa) uses paper for its wrapping. The other (FinnCrisp) use a plastic wrapping inside a carton box. That's just absurd.
Other products may not have a single-use alternative, like meat. Consigned containers is a solution here, already widely in use for beverages in many countries.
As long as manufacturers can get away with wrapping stuff in plastic, they will. We need to pressure them into finding alternatives.
As someone else pointed out here, we are paying a high price already for the damage we're doing to the environment (waste collection infrastructure, rising insurance prices, tax-funded repairs after natural disasters). If we folded those costs into the prices of the products most responsible for them, and added some legislation on top, we could change quite a few habits in relatively little time. It just needs someone with guts to make those decisions, which is something in rather short supply, at least here in Germany...
The paper packaging of Wasa has a thin plastic liner, which you can see stretching by slowly tearing the paper. It is probably better that the thicker FinnCrisp plastic, but Wasa paper does not belong in the paper bin for recycling.
We compost many things at home, but cardboard boxes around food are a minefield. Most look like cardboard, but after you compost them you'll be picking out the plastic sheet that was bonded into them. One that particularly annoys me are cat food boxes. The cat food is separately wrapped (in unrecyclable foil-bonded-plastic, of course), and then the cardboard box containing those packets has a hidden plastic layer - for what possible reason!?!
I've been packaging cat food when I was in high school and they do that because, when a single of those cat food packets rips open for whatever reason, the smell is pervasive and intensive. It spreads through the whole warehouse, from a single open bag, getting ever worse as it spoils. The plastic lining in the displays is to protect the shipment - think of an the oilsump the cellar which contains a houses oil tank is lined with. It's a way to contain the spread of a hazardous substance in case the probably containment unit fails.
We shred all cardboard that's not shiny. Generally you can feel if there's a coating. I will also be picking out plastic from our soil for years, but you use the resources you have. It's a worthwhile tradeoff IMHO.
Why is wrapping in thin plastic a problem if it prevents food waste? I think of the cucumbers covered in plastic. It’s a very small amount of plastic—and I imagine that it ends up saving energy if it means fewer cucumbers are wasted. Perhaps there is a way to model when plastic is “good” or “bad?”
I haven't bought a cucumber wrapped in plastic in years (I actively avoid them) and have thrown away maybe two cucumbers in the same time.
At this point, I think any plastic is a problem, and it needs very serious consideration whether plastic should be used. I'm fine with wrapping sterilized medical equipment in plastic. Crispbread, not so much.
> have thrown away maybe two cucumbers in the same time.
that plastic is not for you not throwing away two cucumbers, is for the supermarket and distribution centers to not throw away pallets of them, it increase the efficiency of the whole logistic chain (which runs on oil)
Unlike me, my children will never experience their home planet without microplastics everywhere, from the highest peak down to the deepest trench in the ocean. They will have to pay a hefty price for what we and those before us have done to the environment. I think that's a bit much.
Where's the cost-benefit for them of wrapped cucumbers?
Like I said, there are applications where plastic is justified, medical devices for example. Cucumbers, bread, smartphones, cutlery, plants, cereal, rice, potatoes, toys: I think there are plastic-free solutions that we should now absolutely and urgently go for.
If you live in a developed country, your contribution to the microplastic problem is minuscule regardless of the amount of plastic packaging you use. Landfilled, or better yet burned in industrial setting plastics don't get into the oceans, they are either fixed there for millennia, or don't exist anymore. Plastics are a non-issue for countries with functioning waste management, which is coincidentally the countries that can afford caring about it the most, so in a sense there is a self-contradiction in this debate.
International treaties forcing developing countries to get their waste management together combined with targeted investment there would help way more.
Germany exports most of its plastic waste. China stopped importing it a few years ago, so now it gets bought up by African countries. I think your assumptions about a functioning waste system do not apply to most developed countries I know, unfortunately.
According to [1] and [2], most German plastic waste goes to Netherlands. Moreover, apparently a third of it gets incinerated or recycled domestically. So yes, officials turning a blind eye to developing countries pseudo-recycling plastic waste is a problem, but 1) it's not as clear cut as you present it 2) surely building a few incinerators is easier than reinventing all logistical chains to not use plastics?
Thanks for posting this. The issue I have here is that I would need to spend hours researching whether wrapping a single kind of produce is OK or not. It's a science!
Another example: is it better to buy the non-organic, locally produced apple or the organic apple that comes from Argentina? (I'm in Europe).
In the store, I need simple heuristics to make my decisions. My heuristics:
- Is there plastic? -> Pass
- Is it produce from far away? -> Pass, mostly
- Is it non-organic? -> Pass, if there's an organic alternative.
And yeah, sometimes it's a decision between the produce that's organic but wrapped in plastic and that which is conventional but without wrapping and grown locally. That's a head-scratcher every time.
Here be dragons. The instant you invoke cost-benefit you've lost the Overton Window and industry shills duped you.
The most common mechanism used is getting you to uncritically accept the timeframe the analysis takes place within, and the futility of a substantive, quantum qualitative difference. These go hand in hand.
The most common timeframe is "one generation", 30 years, usually framed as "zomg we're being SO nice to deign to accept lesser profits on such a long-ass timescale!".
If I could gift future generations an aquatic and soil ecosystem reverted to pre-anthropogenic methylmercury levels, I'd do it in a heartbeat. But that doesn't get accomplished when cost-benefit is measured in 30 years, but more like 60-90 years with Thanos snap-like policy action, closer to 3-600 years with cheaters accounted for.
Plastics disintegrating into our environment everywhere is the methylmercury story all over again. Industry externalization into our progeny's generations that will functionally last centuries into the future, for the financial well being of only a few hundreds of millions of families globally to afford contrivances with fleeting benefit even to themselves. Even in the "best" cases where instead of blowing the financial gain at the cost of externalization upon a frivolous 1000th Rolex or Nike, they sent Ruòxī and Sam to Harvard, that still doesn't help future generations contending with a deep energy problem of these diffuse materials pervading the ecosystem.
Because that's the real crux: this is an energy gradient problem within a timeline that stretches out for centuries when our civilizational economic planning horizon can't see past 30 years in the mainstream, 100 years in "outlier" use cases. Concentrating the wealth and material benefit of these materials happens within a brief time window set against that kind of timeline, using a specific amount of energy.
Once the material is dispersed into the ecosystem, it takes a lot longer and be much more energy intensive to perform harm reduction than it ever did to wield it in the first place.
We're seeing this pattern repeat increasingly more frequently because our civilization's scale is emerging more such use cases with different materials without considering cradle-to-cradle design. It seems a lot like a Tainter-style complexity collapse vector to me, but that's just my personal observations, YMMV. Actions are an entirely separate thread of discussion.
Seriously, we need legally imposed limits on the use of single-use plastic wrapping, a correction of the economics and a change in habits.
Our family consumes two kinds of crispbread. One manufacturer (Wasa) uses paper for its wrapping. The other (FinnCrisp) use a plastic wrapping inside a carton box. That's just absurd.
Other products may not have a single-use alternative, like meat. Consigned containers is a solution here, already widely in use for beverages in many countries.
As long as manufacturers can get away with wrapping stuff in plastic, they will. We need to pressure them into finding alternatives.
As someone else pointed out here, we are paying a high price already for the damage we're doing to the environment (waste collection infrastructure, rising insurance prices, tax-funded repairs after natural disasters). If we folded those costs into the prices of the products most responsible for them, and added some legislation on top, we could change quite a few habits in relatively little time. It just needs someone with guts to make those decisions, which is something in rather short supply, at least here in Germany...
End of rant.