How Plastic Goods Took Over the World, Creating a Throwaway Culture (bloomberg.com) 49
A new book, by Wall Street Journal reporter Saabira Chaudhuri, traces how disposability became a deliberate business strategy rather than an accidental consequence of modern commerce. The book, titled "Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic," emerged from her reporting on how plastic bottles transformed bottled water from an occasional restaurant treat into an everyday staple.
Excerpts from a Bloomberg story: After World War II, the plastics industry made a conscious pivot. Lloyd Stouffer, an industry figure, openly said plastics should move from durable goods to disposables because companies make more money selling something a thousand times than once. The industry sold consumers on hygiene, convenience, modernity and easier household management. McDonald's dropped polystyrene clamshells in the late 1980s under activist pressure but simply swapped one single-use product for another.
Paper containers still cannot be recycled well once food soaks in. The old diaper-service model disappeared. Companies collected, washed and returned cloth diapers like the milkman, but plastics helped kill that business model. Chaudhuri argues companies built their businesses on disposability and will not change unless regulation forces everyone to move together. Executives admit that if they launch a reusable product but competitors do not, they lose market share and face shareholder backlash. Packaging standardization would improve recycling economics. Colored plastics like red shampoo bottles cannot be recycled in a closed loop and are down-cycled into gray products like pipes.
Excerpts from a Bloomberg story: After World War II, the plastics industry made a conscious pivot. Lloyd Stouffer, an industry figure, openly said plastics should move from durable goods to disposables because companies make more money selling something a thousand times than once. The industry sold consumers on hygiene, convenience, modernity and easier household management. McDonald's dropped polystyrene clamshells in the late 1980s under activist pressure but simply swapped one single-use product for another.
Paper containers still cannot be recycled well once food soaks in. The old diaper-service model disappeared. Companies collected, washed and returned cloth diapers like the milkman, but plastics helped kill that business model. Chaudhuri argues companies built their businesses on disposability and will not change unless regulation forces everyone to move together. Executives admit that if they launch a reusable product but competitors do not, they lose market share and face shareholder backlash. Packaging standardization would improve recycling economics. Colored plastics like red shampoo bottles cannot be recycled in a closed loop and are down-cycled into gray products like pipes.
Ok.. but (Score:1)
Re:Ok.. but (Score:4, Interesting)
I’m not even so sure if the general public would support it.. we learned that straws suck or rather don’t suck well now that they’re not plastic.
I know this is some cutting-edge shit not even AI could think of, but try and follow me here. What if, a planet learned to use that hole under their nose as a replacement?
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Seriously, though, straws aren't going a way, genius. Corn plastic (or similar technology) is the easy answer. If plastics are banned, the stupid drinking straw problem is already solved.. Sea turtles still won't like having them lodged in their sinuses, but I think they've got bigger problems.
Re: Ok.. but (Score:2)
The glory hole?
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What I think is interesting is that straws are named after something found in nature that is already both reasonably waterproof and biodegradable. Before man-made straws, people literally used plant stems like reeds or rye stems as drinking straws. Interestingly the first artificial straws were paper straws. All of this adds a certain irony when people complain about "real" straws being replaced with alternatives like paper ones.
Re: Ok.. but (Score:2)
Okay, kiddo. I'm 58. There were still paper straws in use when I was a kid. And I'm not talking about the ones filled with flavored sugar powder.
They weren't sucky back then because we didn't drink 44oz of pop at a time, so they didn't become terribly mushy.
Re:Cloth diapers? (Score:5, Insightful)
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For our first kid, we used resuable. Reusable diapers mean you must do laundry every day. Even if you have enough diapers that you can skip a day, longer than that, and the odor becomes intolerable. So, for the most part, it's laundry every frelling day, and you cannot do something like forget to move it to the dryer.
That relentlessness, on top of sleeplessness, on top of full-time job, meant hubby put his foot down for kid number 2, and we switched to disposables. It wasn't about convenience, it was ab
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We considered reusable diapers and did try them. If I recall, we tried them a few times, but we just couldn't manage. Just too much to do and too little sleep and time to do it. Of course, that was right at the start, it did get easier, but we were pretty much addicted to the disposables at that point and we did not experiment again.
Still, as someone with a basis for comparison, can I ask how effective were the cloth diapers as diapers compared to the disposable? In other words, aside from the inconvenience
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The functionality of both kinds of diapers were comparable for us, especially with a plastic diaper cover over the resuable kind one the kid was active. After a few washes, the cloth diapers become incredibly soft and absorbant. We kept a few that are still used to polish or protect precious items.
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So that does suggest that a composite re-usable/disposable system could work. For example a plastic (or other waterproof material if a suitable non-plastic material could be used) diaper cover as you mentioned and an inner cloth diaper style pad, maybe something with a woven light cotton surface layer, an inside stuffed with cotton or other surface material, then a starch based or other biodegradable absorbent. Something like that could probably be produced with similar cost to plastic disposable diapers, b
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It's not that likely that, after such a wash cycle, there will be significantly more E. Coli in the drum in your washing machine than there is in the water coming in through the pipes to fill it.
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I certainly do not. In any case, the more relevant data is the count of e coli in the actual supply water. What I can say with relative confidence is that a hot water wash with soap is going to remove the vast majority of all bacteria from the non-stick surfaces inside the typical washer. It's generally not enough to be completely sterile, but it will almost certainly be clean and the water supply, while also generally pretty clean will have a massive volume relative to the 3-dimensional volume over the sur
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Interesting. Ultimately though, you don't eat clothes, you wear them and they provide a barrier between you and the rest of the environment which is almost always going to have more concerning things in it than you will find in your washed clothes. Unless you're covered in weeping sores, the concern here is pretty much a non-issue.
Re:Cloth diapers? (Score:5, Informative)
Diaper services still exist - I'm guessing the author either doesn't have kids or is justifying why they didn't use one.
Anyway... when our daughter was small, we used a diaper service. It worked quite well and really wasn't a big deal.
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Diaper services still exist
I just looked and I can't find a diaper service closer than 80 miles away in a rich suburb where there are several to choose from.
I'm guessing the author either doesn't have kids or is justifying why they didn't use one.
I actually said "I raised two kids ...", why guess?
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I actually said "I raised two kids ...", why guess?
You're the author?
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From TFS:
"The old diaper-service model disappeared."
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Your response still reads as a non sequitur, but thanks for playing.
Re:Cloth diapers? (Score:4, Interesting)
Suburban homes sourcing most / all of their drinking water from bottles is insulting unless there is a Flint water situation due to toxic city leadership. Having a crate of bottled water as backup / leaving the home is more reasonable. Abolishing straws or going to paper ones was always at the opposite end an absurd, insulting virtue signaling. When it comes to changing what something is made from to make it easier to biodegrade, the first question should always be energy input. How much more energy and cost accompany things like reformulating straws' plastic.
Disposable diapers are a necessity of the dual income household. There are a variety of other disposables and consumables which fall in the same category where given the option and time, many could / should / would use reusables. The dark gray area are things like laundry and dish detergent pods. They probably shouldn't exist, but portion control isn't just an eating problem with many people.
Going from selling something a thousand times instead of once, the selling something a few times extra instead of once though is its own form of rent seeking by defect. We're seeing this in the automotive world with PZEVs, direct injection, and SCR systems all designed to incur costly repairs which shouldn't have been necessary.
Plastics and the materials sector... (Score:2)
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An interesting idea, but simply not practical. The fundamental rule to remember with this sort of thing is that economics is king. Therefore, plastics are king because they are typically the cheap option (not always of course - economics is a social science for a reason and people make bad choices which is one of the big problems with economic theories from people like Adam Smith). You take oil, fractionally distill it and alter through heating and some catalysts and get big batches of chemical precursors f
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We already know that people will basically pick the cheaper option (at least, the perceived cheaper option, which is often not really cheaper) even when it's food that they know is terrible for their health. Humans in the aggregate almost always end up statistically choosing the bad option, which is why I have a teeny bit of an issue with Adam Smith and his invisible hand.
Earlier, you compared this to the search for the Holy Grail. The analogy I like better is the search by alchemists for the Philosopher's
Public hygiene also went up (Score:3)
But sure, let us focus only on the cons of single-use utensils.
Re:Public hygiene also went up (Score:4, Insightful)
Hygeine is one aspect of health, but so is not having your entire body filled with tiny pieces of plastic.
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Still, it's probably too soon to assume that it's dangerous.
Well, that's human nature though, isn't it. We think we hear or see something in the underbrush and it may be too soon to think it's dangerous, but we still tend to react as if it is because it turns out that the cost of assuming it is dangerous is lower than the cost of not making that assumption even if it's only dangerous 1% of the time. It's widely believed that's one of the reasons that we tend to see faces and animals in all kinds of things in nature that are not actually faces or animals. I'm going t
Efficient (Score:4, Insightful)
Unfortunately, disposing of plastic packaging is not a negligible task...
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Plastic packaging disposal is super easy for me.
My area has a waste to energy facility (an incinerator) that burns all of our trash. Our recycling goes through a single-sort facility, then all paper and plastic from that stream gets burned in the incinerator too.
At this point, I think of my plastic waste as natural gas that had been borrowed temporarily from the local power plant.
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As long as it all ends up in the proper facility, then that's almost all fine. It does still represent an indirect method of burning fossil fuels though. Of course, technically speaking the precursors of plastic like ethene, propene, ethenyl (vinyl), etc. can all be made without fossil fuel feedstocks. If we wanted a carbon neutral overall cycle for them, we could synthesize them, it would just be a matter of cost. Basically, if we could stop all of this from just ending up in our ground, water, air, food,
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Fully biodegradable == fully recyclable (Score:3)
I don't get why disposable paper products, assuming no plastic coatings of course, keep getting dumped on in these type articles. In my mind disposable paper is an idea food container. It's very good at contributing to the compost right along with the unused food.
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Greasy paper also burns very well which is quite relevant since combustion season is about to start. Tinder is often in short supply since local newspapers are gone and most of the advertisement flyers are coated paper which is only fit for a landfill.
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Tinder is often in short supply
You just need to swipe more often in the other direction.
C'mon why are we still accepting excuses? (Score:3)
"Paper containers still cannot be recycled well once food soaks in"
so what's done with them? composting or landfill?
for literally THOUSANDS of years human beings who barely possessed or understood technology dug up mountains of dirt & rock to get relatively minute amounts of materials they considered useful or precious.
We still do this today on massive scales.
So WHAT exactly is the problem with recycling containers that may have some peanut butter or salsa stuck on the bottom?
also the plastic industry has been lying for 50 years about the recycling rate and recyclability of plastics of all types
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"They get burned"
so again scant progress in how we handle garbage. we have the know-how to do better but we don't because of the excuse of economics which is just another way of saying "it ain't worth it"
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"Paper containers still cannot be recycled well.." (Score:2)
In defense of the exquisite "Golden Sea Gull Restaurant".
The paper packing even as it has printing on it,
will degrade quickly when in the nature,
can be turned into compost,
and this is the real benefit of this packing.
Market strategy existed before plastics (Score:1)
Gillette became wealthy with safety razors well before WWII. The idea was to make something disposable so people would keep buying.
I think the same was true with ballpoint pens.