[Farradfahren]

Recycling works- for high energy artefacts. Producing steel, glass, aluminium - takes enormous amounts of energy. There recycling is common place.

The real trouble is - plastic packaging, especially if the food contained went to a bio-methan operation first. The packaged food is shredded and added to the fermenter- this is THE topsoil contamination source of microplastics.

Its really tough to get plastic seperated cost effective.

[nihonde]

In many (most?) parts of Japan, people are trained to separate plastics before they’re discarded. I remember thinking how crazy it was to wash and air dry plastic trash like juice bottles or meat packaging before tossing it. In my city, there were something like ten separate trash collection types and every household was tasked with maintaining separation along a complex set of rules assigned to them when they move in. These rules are enforced by a system of fines, of course, but more importantly there are a cadre of old folks who will shame the hell out of you if you try to bend the rules.

[pbhjpbhj]

I don't really understand why we're making high energy requirement artefacts and then throwing them away. Why don't we have reuse at all across the food supply chain (in the UK at least)?

I mean things like large barrels of cooking oil for take-away restaurants don't even get reused - why wouldn't they just collect, clean and refill them?

We get large "food grade" buckets for ceramics supplies: those buckets cost several pounds each to buy wholesale, they could easily be reused but there's no system to do that: I assume because there's no [cost] incentive.

Single use packaging needs some heavy fines to regulate it.

[sokoloff]

Presumably it costs more to collect, clean, sort/organize, and deliver to the point of next filling with enough certainty of availability. (No oil producer wants their line shut down because they’re short of barrels.)

[lupire]

Fines won't promote reuse by the supplier much, because reuse is expensive, they will promote reduction -- of both the buckets and the valuable contents of those buckets.

When buckets are expensive - large industrial containers, they are in fact protected by deposit and recipients of shipments are obligated to return the containers to the supplier.

[maxerickson]

We directly consume quite a lot more energy than we discard in manufactured products. I think what it comes down to is that we collectively don't actually care.