Yes. As someone who is used to putting far too much thought into grocery shopping, it is virtually impossible to advance this change on an individual level. The company making the sustainable toothbrushes is owned by turtle hating petroleum companies or worse. I probably just seem cynical or shitty, but I would be hesitant to potentially induce guilt in individuals who feel they aren't doing enough when there are no better options (within reach, anyway).

Nobody is individually dictating plastic use, and no truly high-level system exists to prescribe it: this is all largely emergent. I think we should try, and I think we need to hold ourselves and each other accountable, but ... what if this is just how it goes?

> Thinking that recycling would address the problem of plastic pollution is wishful thinking

People putting their rubbish in the bin rather than throwing it in the nearest gutter / river / garden would get us 90% of the way there.

>>Companies like plastic because it means thicker margins for them

Consumers like plastic because it is better than the alternatives.

I try to get stuff in glass/aluminium bottles that I clean and reuse myself. It's not easy. Supermarkets is an immediate no-go (when I was young, our village supermarket sold Coke and Milk and other stuff from taps , so you just brought your own); now it's something impossible. But for local farmers, local springs etc it works well. Same for veg, fruit, meat, eggs etc; no plastic needed. Allows us to throw almost all our garbage in the compost heap, give to the chickens etc.

Recycling does help with certain types of plastic

I read numbers from Norway where it says that 1/3 of the plastic that is processed is recycled.

There are also incentives from the government that helps. They add a deposit to every soda bottle sold, that is given back immediately when the bottle is returned for recycling. This incentivises many to return it, because they would otherwise basically throw money in the trash. 92% of all bottles are returned for recycling. Everyone brings their empty bottles and cans to a grocery store, and use the money as partial payment for groceries or participate in a lottery where the profit is given to charity. All stores that sell soda products are required to also process the return, so they are using reverse vending machines to handle this automatically to save time (since the 70s)

Maybe some of the plastic will not be recycled but it will at least be destroyed and not just thrown in the ocean

> Plastic recycles very poorly.

While I'm sure this is true in general, my impression is that the PET used in drink-bottles recycle well. For drink bottles I don't think we have a good option either? Glass is too heavy, aluminum is more energy intensive (I assume) even when it's recycled. Reusable bottles is unlikely to be realistic.

Not wishful thinking, a deliberate greenwashing scam. Aluminum is actually recycled, and should replace PET for all drinks packaging.

Recycling is busy work for activists who allow themselves to be behavioural hacked, so they do not actually change things.

Steel or aluminum cans might be better? At least they rust away and don't float.

I mean you could have a screw cap on a can too if that is important. Dunno why 33cl/50cl and whatever the oz. sizes are, are metal and plastic respectivly.

Using one time cannisters for water feels fundamentally unsubstainable.

The more I think about it, a lot of modern materials science seems to be just... bad.

Leaded gasoline, asbestos, plastics (micro plastics, the Great Garbage Patch, etc), teflon, etc.

We have some real winners in there but the constant push for growth leads to these wonder materials being used 1000 - 100 000 000x more than they should be used. Usually because of convenience and profit margins.

It's just that it's close to impossible to get rid of them. Plastic is in: paint, wall covering such as wallpaper, food packaging, waste disposable bags, cars, bikes, clothes, shoes, ...

It's basically impossible to find all natural products and they're also super expensive because, well, they are, but also because we're underinvesting in them.

Without plastic modern consumerist society as we now experience it wouldn't be possible, as such, that party-goer from the movie The Graduate was very correct in the assumptions he made towards the end of the 1960s.

Which is to say, are you sure that the current powers that be are ready to withstand the backlash of their political constituencies once that consumerist policy is actively reversed?

I have mixed feelings tbh. On the one hand, sure, Coca Cola and co manufacture the plastic in the first place. On the other, consumers buy them and discard the packaging inappropriately OR the place they live in does not have adequate trash infrastructure in place.

Plastic waste is not a problem if it's handled correctly is what I'm saying. In big chunks of europe you pay a deposit for even small plastic bottles nowadays, to be returned if you (or someone else) returns it to a collection point from where it's (theoretically) disposed of properly. If it ends up in general waste or the environment, that deposit is theoretically used for its cleanup.

>If I made branded disposable products which ended up thrown around all over town, the police would become interested in me very quickly

And what would they do?

> pieces of plastic that they collected during clean-up events

The article is about trash from littering. Surely the consumers fault.

> To everyone blaming consumers: I encourage you to take a solution driven mindset here. Consumers won't change. There's far too many people, some of which don't care about the environment.

Sorry, but this is absolutely not true. I routinely travel between Liverpool and Zürich, you can take a guess which one looks like a pristine modern city and which one looks like a junkyard/dump. Let me tell you, it's not just because there are more bins in one of those cities.

Not only a solution-driven/pragmatic mindset. Also a clear-minded perspective (in this case one and the same).

Yeah consumers “won’t change”. Because that’s an asinine focus if you want the whole (first) world to change. Would you rely on “personal motiviation” if you needed a whole brigade to storm a beach? Clearly not. Likewise these individualistic efforts are completely wrong-headed.

Because they’re not supposed to change anything. Only to assign blame. (Clear-minded: what motivation is behind the consumer nagging)

The proper way to change all of society is organized effort. Which means leveraging existing institutions. Like entire freaking supply lines. You maybe stop importing toothpicks from across the world instead of the false narrative of “educating” the “consumers” (keyword) to not “buy stuff from China”.

Be cynical, clear-minded and pragmatic—all of these lead to the same conclusions on this topic.

Yes, as someone living in a country with clean and tasty water from the tap, it's quite shocking see the massive bottle consumption in countries where most (?) drinking water is distributed in disposable bottles/containers.

Glass and aluminium are recycled. This works quite well. Plastic (and clothing) on the other hand, is now mostly just collected and afterwards discarded (burned, shipped overseas to dumping grounds, etc.).

Plastic recycling factories are going bankrupt (five in the tiny Netherlands in the space of one year), because they can't compete with new plastic. Textile processors are stuck with warehouses full of unusable discarded fast fashion.

Littering is just a tiny part of this problem. Reducing plastic (by charging for bags) is good and works, but the bigger issue lies with the fact that we use so much plastic, and often have no real choice in the matter.

Unfortunately there is not enough funding for American municipal recycling programs. After China stopped buying American recyclables, most programs shut down nationwide. Then the pandemic, which I do not believe has led to a resurgence.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/3/18/18271470/us-cities-s...

I completely agree with you that a national beverage tax, refundable, would be a fantastic idea. The problem I see will be in how the program is administered. There will be tension between federal and state over who gets part of the money, who funds the program, maintains it, etc. How to get retailers to put the machines in their store which takes away inventory space? Pay them? Require it?

So many questions. Probably a federal tax that then redistributes the money equally to each state to fund local recycling programs would be easier.

The fact that Altria (ex Philip Morris), a tobacco brand, made it to this list is telling IMO. There is no way that the cigarette packaging produces that much identifiable plastic trash.

My guess would be that in some countries, the stores provide disposable plastic bags with any purchase and that these bags include ads for tobacco brands. This study would associate the brand with the generation of trash while the trash should rather be associated with the store.

I'll personally classify this study as unreliable.

>It wasn't 24%, it was 24% of the half that could be identified.

with a large enough data set the chance that the half that cannot be identified is also 24% looks pretty good, unless there is something specifically about these brands that makes the identifying of them easier than other brands - which is also a pretty good chance I would say.

If there is a good likelihood of identifying these brands specifically then I guess it is actually pretty close to 12% (assuming there are still some small amount which cannot be identified)

No, but it definitely should be in Coca Cola's charter to explore and invest in biodegradable alternatives. And the only way to hold such immense companies to their environmental responsibilities is either regulation or consumer perception.

No, but it definitely should be in Coca Cola's charter to explore and invest in biodegradable alternatives. And the only way to hold such immense companies to their environmental responsibilities is either regulation or consumer perception.

Waste is inherently bad (in that it is a downstream cost.)

Yes, the city of Seattle instituted a sweetened beverage tax in 2017 and there was a study with results published in 2023.

https://www.seattle.gov/sweetened-beverage-tax-community-adv...

In the US, President Wilson proposed a soft-drink tax in 1914, but the already-powerful Coca-Cola Company lobbied to defeat the initiative. In this country, the beverage industry is incredibly influential and has bought off a lot of legislators.

Yes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugary_drink_tax

Mexico, the UK, and Portugal all have a tax on sugary drinks. Norway seems to be the only country with an overall sugar tax though.

There's a marketing lesson in here somewhere...

that should put an ever so slight pressure on Coca Cola Company to clean up their act.

Maybe we could tax companies based on how much of their litter can be identified on randomly selected areas for sampling.

Also I don't think most of other types of disposable products other than medium duty bags are branded... So tracking them down those that have branding or large labels seem obvious.

You don't need 'more' regulation, but probably different regulation.

So eg instead of having lots of piecemeal regulation that bans straws and plastic bags and Kinder Surprise eggs etc, you can have a single relatively simple tax on plastic garbage. The total amount of regulation would go down, but effectiveness would go up.

(You can give companies who collect and deal with their plastic trash a discount on the tax, if you want to.)

Similar for carbon dioxide emissions tax, instead of silly gameable things like CAFE car standards.

Visible plastic pollution is horrible, and is only part of the problem. This then breaks down and was shown to enter and accumulate in not only animal bodies, including human bodies (soft tissue, lungs, even placenta[0][1]), but individual cells[2]. This includes BPA, a xenoestrogen used in most or all plastic bottles, which in EU is among the candidates for SVHC (substances of very high concern)[3].

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202...

[1] https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/advance-article-abstract/doi...

[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00489...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substance_of_very_high_concern (I expect the oil industry to do its utmost to delay this from having any legal effect, as per.)

While I agree with the ending statement largely, we have to blame the producers here. If I want water, I'm stuck with what's sold to me.

Most on this site are fortunate enough to be able to drink disposables and have it whisked away magically. It's when that doesn't or can't occur that you start to realize how much we all waste.

Single use plastics should have been outlawed years ago. Or at least taxed to high heaven.

good sentiment, but how did you reach that remote island? most likely, that 2 hour walk produced quiet a hefty amount of disproportionate pollution.

I'm not an engineer, so I may be wrong, but is it actually possible to build a stable landfill?

Wouldn't the micro plastics risk leaking into the ground when it is broken down eventually? When it rains, the water has to go somewhere and unless you invest in expensive filtration systems, this does not seem economically viable. The micro plastics may even leak into the ground water and spread far beyond the land fill.

Even if we do find an economic way to build a stable landfill that lasts a few decades, it will probably just postpone the pollution to a later generation when it is no longer maintained.

But at least it is better than just dumping it in the nature as many do today.