Corporations are saving the planet!
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We just need thousands more little steps. It all adds up. Like the whole plastic straws debacle. While mocked, it’s one more little step.
Yeah, the big problem is that each of these steps takes monumental effort while yielding only very little result.
At the current pace, new areas of plastic waste generation are added much faster than old areas are removed.
While we were busy banning plastic straws and plastic bags and stuck the cap onto the bottle, the plastic garbage production industry added thousands new types of unrecyclable products.
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Simon Clark had a pretty good nuanced video on recycling and goes over plastics recycling in the latter parts of the video https://youtu.be/iOtrvBdRx8I
TL;DW Consider the environmental impact of systems over materials, most plastic doesn’t get recycled but some types of plastic are highly recyclable, existing plastic is undervalued, reduce > reuse > recycle.
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Yeah, the big problem is that each of these steps takes monumental effort while yielding only very little result.
At the current pace, new areas of plastic waste generation are added much faster than old areas are removed.
While we were busy banning plastic straws and plastic bags and stuck the cap onto the bottle, the plastic garbage production industry added thousands new types of unrecyclable products.
I don’t disagree.
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I get what you're trying to say about homeless people, and there are many people reliant on collecting plastic bottles in Germany too, but motivation in that context sounds a tad off imo
Annoying? Am I the only one who thinks it’s more convenient? The cap cannot fall, you can open it one handed, you cannot lose the cap…
I'm not saying its good that homeless people rely on collecting bottles. But the fact they have cash value means they will collect them and feed them back into the system. So less litter and more recycling.
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Annoying? Am I the only one who thinks it’s more convenient? The cap cannot fall, you can open it one handed, you cannot lose the cap…
I'm not saying its good that homeless people rely on collecting bottles. But the fact they have cash value means they will collect them and feed them back into the system. So less litter and more recycling.
No, I get that. Just the word "motivation" seems off in this context. I'm all for having deposits on plastic bottles and cans - it's free money (girl math
) - I just didn't like that word in that context -
In many countries people collect their own bottles because there is a refundable tax on the container. Here in Ireland it's 15c, i.e. a can of coke might be €1 but you'll be charged €1.15. So it motivates people to take the empties back to a supermarket and receive a refund chit. It also motivates homeless people to pick up bottles & cans that people toss, so that too.
That's an idea, but it requires the incentive to be more than people… let's call it laziness. I see people drop their trash in front of an empty trashcan on the regular.
Regarding plastic bottle deposit, a quick search (https://www.statista.com/chart/22963/global-status-of-plastic-bottle-recycling-systems/) around 30 countries had such a system in place, with varying degrees of success, with only 10 US states. That's not a lot. In France, we also had this for glass bottle. It was discontinued long ago but we're looking to bring it back. Let's hope this do motivate people, although I don't have my hopes up.
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Real ones get their micro plastics by chewing on used car tires.
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What do you think happens to bottles after you throw them in the trash? They get shipped off to some landfill where they're buried and forgotten about, that's just littering with extra steps.
shipped off to some landfill
No. I know this is shitpost, but that’s a stupid take.
In countries like Germany the amount of waste grows, but amount of landfills is actually in decline. Landfills mostly contain building waste and household garbage is required to get treated before getting landfilled.
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PET bottle recycling is the only part of plastics recycling that actually works. Making sure the bottle caps are also correctly returned to recycling plants is a good goal. Also it makes picking up litter a little easier, because now you only need to pick up one thing instead of two.
Btw, this is why clothing/bags/... made out of recycled plastic bottles is actually a terrible idea, because once the PET is out of the bottle recycling stream it is permanently removed from this recycling loop and new PET needs to be produced to compensate.
while i can appreciate the goal and potential result, those attached caps are terribly impractical, i wish they'd find a better solution
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while i can appreciate the goal and potential result, those attached caps are terribly impractical, i wish they'd find a better solution
Do you know that these caps can be overextended? They have a second open position, where they are opened at ~180°. At that position they don't flop back closed and are quite well out of the way.
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I was handed a water bottle the.other day at a volunteer event and was lamenting the fact that in the US, we don't have attached caps. I almost immediately lost mine. It's possible to make them attached, AND not suck.
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Not only that, but the plastic in the cap is actually made of plastic that is better recyclable than the rest of the bottle.
The cap and the bottle in soft drinks are made of PET. Most deposit schemes will accept plastic (PET), or aluminium and a machine will separate and sort the material into the appropriate bin. Cans get melted down, plastic is stripped, washed, turned into pellets and fed back into hoppers that make new bottles. Because it's all the same plastic material it can be ground up into pellets and fed back into a machine to make new bottles. The biggest issue is probably that caps are usually black, red, blue or whatever so I imagine somewhere in the process the chopped up plastic goes past cameras that sort fragments by colour.
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That's an idea, but it requires the incentive to be more than people… let's call it laziness. I see people drop their trash in front of an empty trashcan on the regular.
Regarding plastic bottle deposit, a quick search (https://www.statista.com/chart/22963/global-status-of-plastic-bottle-recycling-systems/) around 30 countries had such a system in place, with varying degrees of success, with only 10 US states. That's not a lot. In France, we also had this for glass bottle. It was discontinued long ago but we're looking to bring it back. Let's hope this do motivate people, although I don't have my hopes up.
Germany collects glass, plastic & aluminium. Glass and plastic can be single use or multiuse. It's kind of interesting how most beer is sold multi-use (every brand is using the same size bottles) to reduce the amount of recycling necessary. Beer bottles can be washed and reused rather than broken into cullet and remelted. I don't know what France does but I could see people losing their minds if wine bottles were standardised the way beer is. But really glass could be collected and recycled even if it isn't reusable.
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The cap and the bottle in soft drinks are made of PET. Most deposit schemes will accept plastic (PET), or aluminium and a machine will separate and sort the material into the appropriate bin. Cans get melted down, plastic is stripped, washed, turned into pellets and fed back into hoppers that make new bottles. Because it's all the same plastic material it can be ground up into pellets and fed back into a machine to make new bottles. The biggest issue is probably that caps are usually black, red, blue or whatever so I imagine somewhere in the process the chopped up plastic goes past cameras that sort fragments by colour.
I remember last time I checked, the bottles and the caps usually had different RICs, but I'm not an expert, so I can be mistaken
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Do you know that these caps can be overextended? They have a second open position, where they are opened at ~180°. At that position they don't flop back closed and are quite well out of the way.
nah they dont go far enough for my big nose and that makes it awkward and messy, may depend on the bottle and the nose i guess
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nah they dont go far enough for my big nose and that makes it awkward and messy, may depend on the bottle and the nose i guess
Overextend the cap and turn it so it goes sideways. It doesn't have to point at your nose at all.
