So often, there is so much unnecessary packaging, box in the box, in the bag in the bag in the box, I wouldn't mind if a product or food is packaged much simpler
I wouldn't mind if a product or food is packaged much simpler
I'm ancient enough to remember that when you took your grocery list to the grocery shop, there weren't many shelves that had packets of whatever for sale. Mainly the store had a whole series of large bins: one for flour, one for sugar, another for salt, etc.
You read out the list and the man would scoop up what you had ordered and put in into a brown-paper bag.
In today's world, that business-model is too labor-intensive. Better that you buy a standardised amount of product that a machine can measure out more cheaply and more speedily than any man can. But that product now has to travel the country instead of just back to your place, so it needs more robust packaging, and that packaging needs to be labelled clearly so you know what you are buying. That entails an inner plastic, sealable bag, and a firm cardboard printed outer packaging.
Most sugar I see sold (and probably flour too) is sold in plastic bags, not paper. You can probably find the really huge sizes in paper, but the smaller sizes that most people want (because of convenience, they don't want to buy a decade's worth of sugar at one time) are usually in plastic.
It can be waxed paper, accomplishes the same purpose.
I have an issue with disposable plastic food containers. So obnoxious. Some processed food has more packaging than actual food. Like plastic sushi boxes with the stupid plastic grass between the pieces.
A recent plastic bottle and aluminium can tax was introduced in my country, thanx to the EU, which has led me to change my behaviour from avoid to avoid at all costs.
Scientists found microplastics in clogged arteries. Soon we won't have just high cholesterol, but also "high plastics" in our bloodstream, as if plthalates that were linked to high cholesterol were not enough.
The ban on plastic grocery bags has always felt silly to me when you can still walk out of the store with a 24 pack of bottled water, or candy where every individual piece is wrapped in plastic. And there's probably examples like that in every aisle.
If we think plastic is bad then wouldn't banning any of it be better than banning none of it? Wouldn't the answer be to ban more, not less? What's wrong with incremental improvements? We don't have to hit a home run on our first try.
If it truly worked as a series of incremental improvements, and considered total carbon footprint (transportation costs etc.), then sure.
Those are two pretty big "ifs" - people can be inclined to satisfice and pat themselves on the back for having done some minor symbolic thing, and then not go deeper. And it's much easier to sacrifice plastic straws than question whether your "bucket list" should really have a ton of carbon intensive global travel.
Straws were also banned because of their immediate impact on ocean life, the same reason we got rid of plastic ring 6 pack can holders. Animals get them lodged in their bodies.
Most ocean plastic comes from the western world and is exported to poorer countries where corrupt companies promise to 'deal' with it which means dumping it into the ocean.
It's not the straws that are the problem, but the policy that makes it possible to export trash and look the other way.
I wholeheartedly agree. I also don't see any problem with banning the straws in the first place, and I hope it is just the beginning of plastic items we ban.
FWIW... non-plastic straws in EU are great. For one thing, they are larger diameter than the plastic ones they replace, so a fast food milkshake is actually drinkable. (Too much seaweed.)
I don't understand the endless bellyaching about plastic straws. Is everyone so bad at drinking that they can't drink out of the cup? Toddlers or people in hospitals perhaps need straws but what's everyone else's excuse?
Banning platic bags is like banning plastic straws - it's wasting effort to piss people off on something that barely affects platic usage.
If platic reduction is that important, the primary goal should be the primary platic consumption, not useful tools to normal people that maybe contributes 1-2% and will end up pissing people off.
The green movement is really bad at convincing people because they ignore private jets for politicians that cause more environmental damage than any lifetime consumption of plastic straws ever would. The hypocrisy is unconvincing.
I work in the, "green movement." Since this movement is almost entirely volunteer driven, it is not typically well positioned to coordinate actions or balance tradeoffs. For example, the people working on banning plastic bags are typically concerned about bags stuck in trees and rivers or preventing soil permeability, not carbon emissions.
If one were to ask plastic straw or bag ban volunteers to go work on something else, they just... wouldn't. This would be different with employees but with volunteers there are rarely significant tradeoffs to consider.
A search engine would show that there this movement is not ignoring private jets. [1]
Lastly, perhaps this is not true of the parent commenter, but a last thing I'll note is that many people seem to believe that the, "green movement," is somehow powerful or well financed. This could not be farther from the truth.
The money most environmental orgs brings in from donations is dwarfed by what those same donors pay for gasoline, red meat, and other environmentally harmful products. Some percentage of these purchases is then funneled to fighting the causes that they just donated to. (Dear child commenters, I'm not shaming you for eating meat or buying gas. I also live in a society...)
That’s the, "green movement." We're out-gunned, under-financed, and, due to those constraints, almost impossible to coordinate. I personally am currently struggling to figure out how to afford per-seat pricing of password managers for my team of 5-10 hr/week volunteers. THAT is the level of shoestring budget that this movement is on.
Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but if you’d like to see a more coordinated environmental movement capable of weighing tradeoffs and focusing on big issues over plastic straw bans, I’d suggest donating, not just once, but repeatedly. Otherwise, the fundamental dynamics of volunteer based orgs just won’t change.
At least the environmentalists learned yo make their pics more believable.
The old pic of a sea turtle with a deformed shell with a new-looking 6-pack rings around it convinced me to tear apart those rings for more than a decade, then someone pointed out how new the 6-pack rings looked and I felt like an idiot. I learned never to trust enviromentalists.
Yes thousands of examples in every grocery store. It is still crazy to me, since the answer for so many of them is just a cardboard box or paper wrapper. We have the technology.
Paper has it's downsides too, but they are surmountable. Plastic has no path forward at this stage. Recycling and incineration are not ideal for plastic, and you can't trust the general population with that task anyway.
Recycling is a cop out for big corps to keep pushing plastic into the environment. We need their products to live, but only they can choose to stop using plastic. Voting with our wallets is hampered by the reduced comptition from corporate amalgamation of staple grocery companies.
You can't call it a capital M monopoly, but the effect seems to be the same. The evidence is on the store shelves, even though the public clearly wants less plastic, no change.
I really love Berkeley Bowl (in Berkeley, CA) not just for its unpackaged and quality produce but for the extent to which I can go completely plastic free.
I can use my own bags for produce and my own containers for a massive range of items sold in bulk (flour, grains, nuts, cereal, pasta to name a few). And then a few others that I have not seen elsewhere: I can fill up my own bottles with shampoos, detergents and oils!
There's nothing like the Berkeley Bowl <3. It's Trader Joe's + Davis co-op on crack^2^5.
Various cities around the West Coast and Austin also have co-op grocery stores, but Berkeley Bowl takes it to a different hypermart level while retaining a flavor reminiscent of Whole Earth Access.
And, honestly, even the Whole Foods (Amazon) flagship HQ store is a disgrace and a disaster: they don't sell any form of pita or lavash bread of any sort and half of their bulk bins are completely empty as of writing. This is a consequence of corporate bean counters who optimize for the wrong things. They were supposedly once a boutique bougie grocery store patterned after Italian grocers but instead developed into conspicuous consumption of pseudo luxury by anyone who drives an Audi or BMW.
My nearest grocery store was a Whole Foods for a couple of years. Their product selection is incomprehensibly bad. There were something like 6 kinds of alternative chickpea-crust frozen pizza brands but no plain flour tortillas. Freshly baked bread was almost never stocked. A virtually untouched naturopathy aisle but barely the medicine cabinet essentials.
The global WF HQ has tortillas, but they're neither local nor authentic. The customer service person proclaimed I should use tortillas instead. Gobsmacked by the unprofessionalism of that, it was the last time I've been to WF.
In the places I've shopped, the produce is just loose, and I put it in my cart loose. I don't buy the packaged produced, period. Plastic packaging should be banned, along with drinks in plastic bottles. It can be done and it wouldn't affect life in a serious way.
So much of the current single use plastic packaging could be easily replaced with cellophane. Being biosourced, compostable and biodegradable would address the difficulty of plastic recycling.
My wife received a new phone case today. Hard to brake by design and function it was already encased in it’s retail box. And wrapped in a bubble bag. And in a plastic bag. And in another plastic bag.
41 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 61.3 ms ] threadI'm ancient enough to remember that when you took your grocery list to the grocery shop, there weren't many shelves that had packets of whatever for sale. Mainly the store had a whole series of large bins: one for flour, one for sugar, another for salt, etc.
You read out the list and the man would scoop up what you had ordered and put in into a brown-paper bag.
In today's world, that business-model is too labor-intensive. Better that you buy a standardised amount of product that a machine can measure out more cheaply and more speedily than any man can. But that product now has to travel the country instead of just back to your place, so it needs more robust packaging, and that packaging needs to be labelled clearly so you know what you are buying. That entails an inner plastic, sealable bag, and a firm cardboard printed outer packaging.
Progress? Perhaps.
But these numerous little exceptions don't invalidate OP's observation, wherein: Our needs have broadly changed, and thus so has our packaging.
I have an issue with disposable plastic food containers. So obnoxious. Some processed food has more packaging than actual food. Like plastic sushi boxes with the stupid plastic grass between the pieces.
A recent plastic bottle and aluminium can tax was introduced in my country, thanx to the EU, which has led me to change my behaviour from avoid to avoid at all costs.
Scientists found microplastics in clogged arteries. Soon we won't have just high cholesterol, but also "high plastics" in our bloodstream, as if plthalates that were linked to high cholesterol were not enough.
That would definitely get us rid of shrinkflation.
Egg in plastic container with lid
Burger wrapped in 3 layers of paper and one layer of foil
Above put into plastic bag with napkins
20 mins later all in trash all of which happens 10ft from cashier.
Crazy bad
Those are two pretty big "ifs" - people can be inclined to satisfice and pat themselves on the back for having done some minor symbolic thing, and then not go deeper. And it's much easier to sacrifice plastic straws than question whether your "bucket list" should really have a ton of carbon intensive global travel.
All we need is a seemingly copacetic catch phrase to bring the ocean-dumping not-recyclers into the light.
"Scamcycling"?
If platic reduction is that important, the primary goal should be the primary platic consumption, not useful tools to normal people that maybe contributes 1-2% and will end up pissing people off.
The green movement is really bad at convincing people because they ignore private jets for politicians that cause more environmental damage than any lifetime consumption of plastic straws ever would. The hypocrisy is unconvincing.
If one were to ask plastic straw or bag ban volunteers to go work on something else, they just... wouldn't. This would be different with employees but with volunteers there are rarely significant tradeoffs to consider.
A search engine would show that there this movement is not ignoring private jets. [1]
Lastly, perhaps this is not true of the parent commenter, but a last thing I'll note is that many people seem to believe that the, "green movement," is somehow powerful or well financed. This could not be farther from the truth.
The money most environmental orgs brings in from donations is dwarfed by what those same donors pay for gasoline, red meat, and other environmentally harmful products. Some percentage of these purchases is then funneled to fighting the causes that they just donated to. (Dear child commenters, I'm not shaming you for eating meat or buying gas. I also live in a society...)
That’s the, "green movement." We're out-gunned, under-financed, and, due to those constraints, almost impossible to coordinate. I personally am currently struggling to figure out how to afford per-seat pricing of password managers for my team of 5-10 hr/week volunteers. THAT is the level of shoestring budget that this movement is on.
Perhaps it’s counter-intuitive, but if you’d like to see a more coordinated environmental movement capable of weighing tradeoffs and focusing on big issues over plastic straw bans, I’d suggest donating, not just once, but repeatedly. Otherwise, the fundamental dynamics of volunteer based orgs just won’t change.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=environmentalists+block+jets
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/the-last-straw-footage-of...
I'm not sure if people are intentionally misrepresenting this, but it wasn't about the total amount of plastic used or climate change.
It's more similar to the old can ring plastic that became a meme for it's danger to wildlife.
The old pic of a sea turtle with a deformed shell with a new-looking 6-pack rings around it convinced me to tear apart those rings for more than a decade, then someone pointed out how new the 6-pack rings looked and I felt like an idiot. I learned never to trust enviromentalists.
Paper has it's downsides too, but they are surmountable. Plastic has no path forward at this stage. Recycling and incineration are not ideal for plastic, and you can't trust the general population with that task anyway.
Recycling is a cop out for big corps to keep pushing plastic into the environment. We need their products to live, but only they can choose to stop using plastic. Voting with our wallets is hampered by the reduced comptition from corporate amalgamation of staple grocery companies.
You can't call it a capital M monopoly, but the effect seems to be the same. The evidence is on the store shelves, even though the public clearly wants less plastic, no change.
I can use my own bags for produce and my own containers for a massive range of items sold in bulk (flour, grains, nuts, cereal, pasta to name a few). And then a few others that I have not seen elsewhere: I can fill up my own bottles with shampoos, detergents and oils!
Various cities around the West Coast and Austin also have co-op grocery stores, but Berkeley Bowl takes it to a different hypermart level while retaining a flavor reminiscent of Whole Earth Access.
And, honestly, even the Whole Foods (Amazon) flagship HQ store is a disgrace and a disaster: they don't sell any form of pita or lavash bread of any sort and half of their bulk bins are completely empty as of writing. This is a consequence of corporate bean counters who optimize for the wrong things. They were supposedly once a boutique bougie grocery store patterned after Italian grocers but instead developed into conspicuous consumption of pseudo luxury by anyone who drives an Audi or BMW.