this post was submitted on 12 Jan 2024
419 points (97.5% liked)
Mildly Interesting
17358 readers
491 users here now
This is for strictly mildly interesting material. If it's too interesting, it doesn't belong. If it's not interesting, it doesn't belong.
This is obviously an objective criteria, so the mods are always right. Or maybe mildly right? Ahh.. what do we know?
Just post some stuff and don't spam.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
And now they come in disposable plastic that's poisoning the entire biosphere. Progress!
This is why we need a plastic tax. If it was even slightly more expensive to use plastic they would switch back to metal or glass in a heartbeat.
You mean plastic coated tin for the metal option.
It's baby-food glass jars or plastic somewhere.
Correct. The steel cans are lined with plastic. Aluminum cans are as well for some products.
toothpaste used to come in metal tubes too. not even long ago. it's like they saw everyone else was polluting and they wanted in too smh
Not only that, they advertised recycling to push public opinion that it was okay to switch to plastic, because plastic is recyclable. But they didn't tell us, it's never going to be economicaly viable to recycle plastic toothpaste tubes.
It's not economically viable and you can only make lesser quality plastic out of it.
Nivea Cream used to come in aluminum cans, then they changed to plastic. Recently they announced that they would come back to aluminum. We can still buy in plastic, though. I think it depends on the market.
Yeah, but those metal tubes were awful. I have been brushing my teeth with Tom's of Maine for decades, and I remember how much I hated those metal tubes. They always split open weeks before the tube was empty and then they'd leak and make a mess and I inevitably wasted a lot of product. When Tom finally sold to whatever corp and they switched over to the plastic tubes that don't leak and let me use all the toothpaste I paid for, I danced a little jig.
Your comment made me have a flashback to my dad getting irritated at me for squeezing the middle of the toothpaste tube.
You're only supposed to squeeze the far end of a metal tube -- pushing product from the very end to the opening. Then as it gets empty you fold/roll up the flat bit at the end. You can even even buy "wringers" designed to assist with that.
But it’s not that simple. Back then no one recycled the can and all too many wouldn’t now. The can itself was heavier and not as effective. Plastic truly is a wonder material for packaging / it does a better job of keeping things fresh, is more convenient, and saving that weight, saving the energy going into making a can, saving the weight for shipping, is all a benefit of a plastic. We don’t have anything that works nearly as well
We all need to face the idea that convenience items like pudding probably shouldn’t be sold at all, especially with how easy instant pudding is
The group think around here is so crazy. Should we be using less single use plastic, especially the thin films? Absolutely. But the environmental impacts of mining all that metal and making all that glass to replace plastic with, plus the added energy for transporting the heavier packages and the cost of increased spoilage and product lost to dented cans and broken bottles, dwarfs the negative impact of the plastic replacements.
Also, I haven’t seen enough research on where environmental plastic comes from. While they’re are some benefits to just using less plastics, less packaging where we can, it would be much better to focus on the larger sources
Realistically what I’ve seen for larger sources of microplastics is:
I already have a lint trap on my washer outlet and see there are a few filters meant to trap much of the manmade fibers that come off in the wash, to dispose of in the trash rather than back into the environment with treated wastewater. I have no idea whether that would actually be helpful but the filters aren’t that expensive, and it’s one of the few options under my control.
Increased standards on industrial waste cleanup are always a good idea. However a lot of this may be in undeveloped countries
If laundry is a significant source of micro plastics in the environment, we need to figure that out and add filters or something
We really really need to figure out something with tire dust, since it will continue to get worse as more people can afford personal transportation. I did read one article about filtering runoff near roads making a big difference but it was light on details and I’ve only seen something like that once
I actually work in the wastewater industry and from what I'm reading, a properly functioning sewage treatment plant already captures a very high proportion of microplastics. This widely cited study noted above 98% removal efficiency at one plant.
We're already at approaching 2 log (99%) removal without actually trying to. It doesn't seem improbable to me that with a few relatively modest tweaks to the system we could get 3 log removal (99.9%). Getting to 4 or 5 log removal is likely where things will get really expensive and challenging. But for now, a 2-3 log removal is probably good enough to focus on other sources like tire fragments/dust that typically pass directly to receiving waters with no treatment at all.
Good to know, thanks. While I don’t know how my system does with this , the treatment facility is new-ish and was supposed to be state of the art.
But then we’re back to needing to know more about the sources of environmental microplastics, then figure out how to cut them
I wonder how well PLA would work for food storage. I learned it's made with beets and can break down very quickly.
nah mate its always been HOME MADE what are you on about yall don't have a pudding sock?
I have a clootie, that's pretty close