Fuck people for trying anything, I guess.
Listen, as long as I can find fault in any attempt at making the world slightly less shitty, I can avoid having to take any responsibility for my part in all of this.
But what if I enjoy feeling morally superior to people who are trying their best?
You hit them with a signature look of superiority as you sip from your metal straw.
I like the meme but I would like it more if it didn’t have a wojak in it
I mean waxed paper cups aren’t super, they are likely better than plastic, but the wax is likely a fossils fuel byproduct
Yup, just looked it up from your comment because it made me realize that I had no idea what wax was actually made of.
Paraffin wax is a colorless solid derived from petroleum, coal, or oil shale, consisting of hydrocarbon molecules
It is also a mixed material which makes it difficult to recycle
I believe they increasingly use PLA which is a bioplastic. But yeah it used to be, and in many cases likely still is, polyethylene which is an oil product.
PLA is not compostable or anything of the sort. So honestly it’s more of a “this plastic could be recycled, given that it’s sorted out from the other plastic, and given financial viability”.
PLA very much is compostable, but only in composting facilities designed to handle bioplastics, which most aren’t (and also additives like pigments likely aren’t compostable).
Fair, I mean that it’s not compostable in home compost environments.
Yeah, unfortunately without some true dedication home composters do not have enough fuel (or material balance) to hit the temps required to compost PLA. It works great if you’ve got a hot composter, if you’re interested in the DIY side of things, but generally you need several households worth of input (or as in my area, a community garden with shared composting) to be able to reliably decompose PLA.
Not nearly as compostable as PHA though!
PLA isn’t food safe though, and it’s only bio degradable in very specific circumstances, and that ““biodegradable”” status also means it puts off tons of micro plastics
PLA itself absolutely is food safe, and a significant plurality of plastic disposable forks and spoons are made from it these days.
bacteria and other cooties
👍
I think you’re thinking of 3D printed PLA which indeed typically isn’t food safe. Industrially produced PLA can be food safe and it’s used in a lot of food packaging, disposable cutlery etc.
Gotcha TIL
Not if they use beeswax or some other natural resin
Hence the likely a fossil fuel byproduct. But let’s be real the cost associated with using beeswax would be unbelievable
unless you’re just a home manufacturer with a lot of bees looking for a way to use your extra bee products. but like how many of those are there
There’s so much plastic lining that paper otherwise everything would get too soggy anyway. Yay for glass and metal. Reusable beats disposable, no matter what it’s made of
Glass is glass and glass breaks. Win win for overpopulation, though.
A German talking about overpopulation. I don’t like where this is going…
Why would you assume I am German? Also, the person you were thinking of is from Austria.
We saw your snap feed in Poland…
“snap”? You mean, Snapcraft, the most evil of software?
Unlike plastic which never breaks ever
Sheet thin bendable plastic like that is difficult to break without tools. Especially while you are in progress of drinking from it. I was referring to glass shards going into people if it wasn’t clear. There’s already plastics in people (for various reasons, not just straws), not much to loose there.
Yeah, I want to be able shove my McDonald’s cups up my ass without ending up like the jar guy
Yay for glass and metal
Some poorly made reusable shopping bags rip or otherwise break before they get used enough times to break even with the single use disposable plastic shopping bags they are supposed to replace. Especially the cheap ones bring given out as freebies.
That’s bullshit from the oil companies. They did a “study” that concluded that, but if you read the methodology, they made the assumption that the reusable bag would be unusable after 20 uses.
Meanwhile I’ve been going to the grocery store every week for quite a few years using the same bags without much issue. I’ve had one strap on a bag break after ~10 years of use, so there’s that I guess. Still haven’t thrown it out, keep meaning to repair it which I never get around to doing.
Anyway, if you read between the lines of the study conducted by the oil companies, if you reuse the bag more than 20 times (half a year of going to the grocery store every week) you are reducing plastic waste.
Those damn oil companies really grind my gears
Electric motors don’t use gears… we have gears to grind because the oil companies have made a lot of people think they’re necessary.
The motors don’t but the drivetrains often do. Not for multiple gear ratios usually but to get a good ratio for it particular motor in the car. But IIRC some EVs do have two speed transmissions because high RPMs might not necessarily be the most efficient for an electric motor even if they can be reached.
No, that’s no bullshit, we just recently had a reusable shopping bag’s handles literally rip off after only the third use…
Consider buying less shitty bags then.
It was a donation from a food bank, but thanks for the thought.
Also, how do you know what bags are and aren’t shitty? Do you have a list of such bags, with weight limit capacity, plus age limit before the threads start to come loose or dryrot?
Didn’t think so.
Most of my bags are given to me by boomers that can never remember to take their bags to the store and just buy more. I think I’ve only actually bought one shopping bag about 25 years ago, which is the one that had it’s handle tear off after about near to two decades of service. I don’t put more weight in the bag than a plastic bag would be able to carry. I have a fabric tote bag and a backpack to use for heavier stuff. I just exercise some common sense with my shopping bags, I guess.
Are you claiming that disposable plastic bags would never have the handles tear off (or the bag just split open) if you put too much weight into them? I think the same rules apply to either, it’s a mess either way if you put too much weight into a single bag, so… don’t do that.
If they’re made from fabric they’re pretty repairable though.
Don’t tell that to the anti-repair folks, they’ll end up banning sewing needles and thread…
You’re discounting transportation and manufacturing (energy) costs.
Reusable only works if it’s manufactured fairly locally and actually gets recycled, which a lot of stuff doesn’t, even if it’s made from glass or metal.
We need to move away from packaging altogether.
Bring-your-own-container is the only way.
Wat? It’s great if it gets recycled, but it works if it gets reused
Glass = heavy. More transport pollution, more manufacturing pollution.
While glass is high in recyclability, all hinges on where it’s coming from and where it’s going (to be recycled).
Best container is the one you can bring from home.
Theres a plastic lining in aluminium cans too. So glass a the way.
It’s quite thin for aluminum, and the downside with glass is the high energy cost of melting it. I’d like if we went back to washing and reusing bottles, but I suppose that’s a big shift in processing capabilities.
there are plenty of beverage companies that simply wash and reuse glass bottles
McD should have a deposit system in Germany, but haven’t been there since ragulations cganged
Germany doesn’t but French McD has
There’s plastic in bottle caps :)
Not 100% win though:
Glass bottles of lemonade, iced tea, soft drinks and beer contained on average around 100 microplastic particles per litre, which is between five and 50 times more than plastic bottles or cans. Source
Forgive any ignorance or arrogance on my part, I’m not a materials scientist at all, but wouldn’t the plastic caps on plastic bottles also have the same deleterious effect?
I didn’t read anything in there about them exploring the source of the plastic particulates in plastic bottles. Whether from the bottle or from the cap too.
The cap is actually much worse than the bottle because the mechanical twisting motion abrades the surfaces, so yes it turns yes out you can badly contaminate a whole bottle of liquid with a simple bottlecap.
and tin cans. i think with tin it might be wax though
Epoxy resin. Which is basically plastic. Arguably worse because of BPA
Paper cups still have a plastic lining, and it’s related to PFAS chemicals iirc
As do metal soda cans to keep them from corroding
Go back to them being wax coated.
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also same in Australia
pretty sure this is just engagement bait for lemmy, seems to have worked
The cup wasn’t just made of paper. It was paper with a Wax Coating.
It hasn’t been wax in decades, its polyurethane.
I know. Thank you.
Glad to see somebody else notice this. I find getting a large plastic cup with these “disintegrate halfway though” paper straws bloody ridiculous.
I never had an issue with the paper cups. He’ll, I’d be more than happy if more places offered discounts to fill your own and I could just keep a clean tumbler in my bag/car.
Neither of those containers can be recycled.
Set aside the asinine idea that those cups were “paper.” Absolutely nobody has a choice in what McDonalds serves them. McDonald’s stocks what it thinks is profitable. And zero people falsely believe they’re “saving the planet” by consuming McDonald’s products.
There is actually a bit of sense in there. Paper cups weren’t simply paper - its tetrapak-like material with plastic coating inside. They are notoriously hard to recycle. Plain plastic cups on the other hand are made from single material, most likely PET. Moreover, they are transparent, without colouring additives.
There are two reasons why colour in plastic makes it harder to recycle. First, pigment is a completely different substance, which behaves differently from plastic itself. It makes it harder to “re-melt” into stable material. If you ever 3d printed anything with matte/gloss filament, you’ll know that it is more finicky than plain one. Second, uncoloured plastic can be coloured into anything, while other needs to be either sorted by colour or mixed with strong dye (black, gray, dark brown, etc) to have consistent colour.
PET itself is pretty easy to turn into something new, actually. A workshop near me had a live demo of the whole process - chipping it into small pieces, feeding to the heated tube, and then injection molded into trinkets. Industrial grade processing usually have “turned into pellets” step in between, but it’s basically the same.
Plastic-covered paper, on the other hand, should be somehow separated first, and then handled with two different approaches - one for paper, another one for plastic film. Doable, but much harder. Paper straw can probably decompose by itself, without any special conditions.
this would be a legitimate argument if any of the plastic was actually recycled … last time i checked it all goes into the incinerator to make electricity out of it.
the recycling of plastic is difficult, not because melting and re-shaping the plastic itself is difficult (it is not, it’s trivially easy); the problem is that you basically never get correctly-sorted garbage. when you get “plastic waste”, it has at least 20% things in it that are not plastic, including food waste, aluminum, paper, etc. some even throw toxic batteries in it, chemicals (soap), pharmaceuticals … then there’s the risk of infections on the plastic (viruses, bacteria, fungi). there’s absolutely no chance that you’re just gonna take plastic waste and mold it into a new shape that’s food safe. best you can do is to mix it with concrete and use it as a construction material in road construction.
Even if you perfectly sort the plastic out, it can only be recycled about 1.5 times before the structure changes so much it’s not suitable for the original use. Plastic recycling is a scam.
yeah btw this is because it’s not purely-sorted input. mixing is up with other plastics is what leads to the molecules to not properly align and that’s what makes it brittle.
I’ve worked with plastic recycling in West Africa at one factory, and just sorting plastic waste by hand is a decent job for a few dozen marginalized women because it demand real human level work.
The reason why is pigment and color. They could recycle yellow into yellow or tan, red into red, green into green. But blue and black were the deal breakers. Black being probably already recycled plastic that uses black pigment to mix colors.
Everything after the sorting is trivial. Shredding, re-peletizing, molding, all easily done.
I’ve worked with plastic recycling in West Africa at one factory, and just sorting plastic waste by hand is a decent job for a few dozen marginalized women because it demand real human level work.
lots of waste are toxic and you get skin rashes if you touch it because it’s toxic. also fumes, smell etc.
i would not call these “decent jobs” TBH
The women sorting plastic are all outside, 150m from the re-peletization machines. They’re the only ones with a job that isn’t knee-deep in carcinogens.
UPD: Be wary that recycling is not a panacea. There’s multiple videos about how recycling plastic isn’t actually a thing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68zjxTTl5Ik for example.
Yeah, there’s a reason “recycle” is only number three on the “reduce, reuse, recycle” list. Recycling is the last (and worst) option, and only really makes the list because it’s hopefully not contributing to landfill issues. It’s not the very first thing people should rely on.
I’ve heard of the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, in that order”, and in looking that up TIL there’s even a bit more to it:
Just implement a carbon tax already FFS.
They literally have reusable cups for a deposit
So you see the salmonella in the watered down coke ?
Corporations are bad and therefore I cannot make any changes myself!
