Two new alternatives to drowning in rubbish.
First an article with large benefits, and for a wonder I'm not talking about something that "will be initiated following more and more and more damn studies" - this is fait accompli, done, dusted, thank you Victorian State Government for another tick on the list.
Victoria Bans Single Use Plastics.
As of the 1st of February 2023, Victoria's Single Use Plastics Ban came into effect and it's reasonable, comprehensive, and not a moment too soon. We've been successful in requiring manufacturers of single-use packaging to indicate what to do with their various items for disposal and their triangle code, and that was great but in the steadily-accelerating need to divest ourselves of plastic, it's already a dinosaur and we need to go further.
Some points:
Better to not need to recycle single-use plastics in the first place by replacing them with more durable and environmentally-friendly materials that can be used over and over or have a clear path for the manufacturer to recycle. (That's by the way a thing I think is acceptable, that a manufacturer of food containers - to name the worst culprits in the piles of plastics at out local waste dumps - should take them back by providing at their own expense bins to return their plastic to recycle at their factory. But it would still be better if all the users of these containers could be educated to just not use them from now on okthxbai...)
I'm not sure how the ban will affect milk jugs because this is still one huge segment of the food market and I'll try and find out and report back and either update this article or if the story's worth it, an article of its own. I'm guessing they're classified as not being single-use, but it's also okay with me on the basis that (from my experience) these have their triangle code on them and are generally not PET more generally HDPE or PP, and those are far easier to recycle.
I also bet right here and now that Coca Cola, Nestle, and the other worst polluters of the plastics market will claim their damn drink bottles are re-usable so we won't see much change there either. But milk, fruit juices, and a few others, could probably easily switch over to coated paper tetra style containers. For instance, I'd buy my liquid detergents in a tetra style container, gladly.
And that would be good because along with take-away coffee and milkshake cups, these materials are now recyclable.
Recycling Beverage Cartons
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| Some images from the article |
Some points:
As I mentioned, many liquids we use and that are packed in odd-shaped PET bottles (why do I need to see the pretty green dye - and have to accept yet another chemical I didn't ask for - in my dishwashing liquid? I just wanted to wash my dishes...) would be just as useful in a plasticised cardboard tetra style pack, and being generally square, those sorts of containers just stack more neatly. Meaning fewer trucks transporting from the factory, more product being able to be stored at the supermarket, more product per shelf inch on the shelves at the supermarket.
I mean - there's only one real reason for clear PET bottles and fancy shapes, and that's brand differentiation. Brand differentiation benefits manufacturers but does bugger-all for us the consumers other than obscure the product's flaws and shortcomings. The reason manufacturers loathe-hate-detest these sorts of ideas of not using plastic is that their products would have to stand on their merits, and when you come down to it, those merits should be effectiveness, safety, and price. And they HATE having to admit that all their products are actually just the same dog's different legs...
How we can hasten these processes
We need to keep in mind that no matter how good the instructions on single-use plastics are about how to throw away the different components of the packaging, it would be far better to not have to throw anything away at all. Many of those packagings already had their triangle codes on them, but the manufacturers are making it OUR responsibility to recycle a product that exists for THEIR convenience far more than for ours.
It's their chance to package their product in a container they can almost infinitely customise and convey their identity with and woo your custom rather than having to have quality products.
It frees them from providing - and possibly, washing and refilling - containers for their products, it frees them to use petrochemicals to manufacture their containers rather than recycle the old ones. (Which is a far more expensive process than just making the containers using new 'virgin' plastic.)
And it frees them from even having to touch their crap again because they've successfully made it OUR problem.
We can fix this by requesting our governments to do more things like the single-use-plastic ban in Victoria. Many, many more laws to restrict corporations' freedom to generate rubbish products in rubbish packaging and then get us to shovel their rubbish for them.
We can ask governments to place large tariffs on 'virgin' plastic (that is, plastics that have been made by majority use of petrochemicals rather than recycled plastics) and provides incentives for 95% or more recycled plastics.
Contrary to what has been widely disseminated, plastics can be recycled almost indefinitely. Remember how long plastics can persist in the environment? That's an indication of how 'forever' those plastics really are. If we recycled all the plastic that's been dumped to date, we could build houses - millions of houses - with it, and still have enough left over to provide re-usable containers for every person on Earth, and still have enough left over to make 240gallon IBC totes to transport every product to go into those re-usable containers.
As far as building materials go, every plastic can be recycled to form new building materials or compose a significant portion of new building materials. There are bricks, the aforementioned construction sheets from drinks containers, and even pavers. Roads can be built using plastic.
Granted, these re-uses of plastics don't get rid of the shedding of microplastic particles, but it's been discovered that some microbes are adapting to break down plastics and also, we should consider any recycling and re-use of plastics as just a way to keep them out of landfill until we come up with a clean way to break plastic down into its base components.
And that's closer than we may imagine. Because everything will break down into its component parts if you throw enough energy at it, the trick is capturing the byproducts and storing them for re-use in other processes where they won't be as prone to becoming a planet-wide pollutant. And energy is becoming cleaner and cheaper by the day. I know it doesn't seem like it with utility companies hiking prices by 22% while simultaneously enjoying 25% lower generation costs thanks to renewables and sustainables, but it's a spasm, a rictus, the last desperate jaw-snappings of a beast that's on its last legs and that we really should put down as quickly as we can.
Also, some plastics are harder to recycle because companies add so many other chemicals and compounds to them to colour them, stiffen them, soften them, make them more rigid or more flexible, and these compounds have to be taken into account when recycling/recovering plastics. And most companies don't give that information or put it on their products. We need to ask that plastic additives need to be listed every bit as much as there's a need to list all food additives. The companies will tell you it's too hard but - they have the bloody recipe on the desk in front of them FFS. They lie.
There's a good solution right off the top of my head - stamp a QR code into things right alongside the triangle code, with a number that can encode every percentage of every additive to the plastic. It can be a ten digit number - which is able to encode any combinations of literally a million additives and their percentages. We should really lobby our governments to get a schema designed and then enforced. Designing the QR code takes a school student level of mathematics (i.e. even a LNP treasurer should be able to come up with it) and enforcing it just takes determination by the world's goverments.
Our Secret Superpower - ALL our votes
Which brings me to another thing. Victoria has undertaken to reinstate government ownership of public utilities, specifically energy companies, but it doesn't hurt if we pointed out that governments were originally appointed almost solely for the purpose of providing public utilities such as energy, water, and waste management. It's time we politely asked them to get back to their roots, too. Email your local MP, email the Ministers for Energy, for Sustainability, for Recycling and Waste Management. They are all required to be made aware of our opinions and requests, and what they do with out requests should also ultimately guide your votes.
Don't buy a product in plastic unless that plastic has a clear path to being recycled and re-used by the company making it. Don't buy the idea that we're responsible for the plastic tide because of our insistence on quality AND price. Don't forget that the corporations that tell you how high labour costs are, generally quote you the labour prices in a Western First-World country but actually use labour from a third-world country. These corporations routinely triple-dip into our pockets because they put the cost of recycling on us, they don't put money into the labour force here, and they generally don't pay taxes either because they just dance around tax laws.
Government voting
Let me be a bit clear on this - we're not quite at the point of autocratic self-appointed government yet, so our votes are necessary for a party to become the sitting government. Let politicians' actions in relation to saving the planet guide our votes more than the promises to make rainbows shine out of our butts ("oh look! You just missed it. Also you can't see it because it's behind you, but we did make it happen! Honest!") and really really REALLY think about what their policies will do in the way of limiting or liberating corporations from taxes and responsibilities, what their decision to permit or deny another coal mine or cola-fired power station will mean, whether they're here to help you get out of a multiple-bad-idea expensive to run and maintain fossil fuel engined vehicle and into a simple cheap and inexpensive to run EV, etc.
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| Here are valid ways to vote. Use them at every opportunity. |
Activism voting
And then vote on that. Someone will come up with free open source butt rainbows made from environmentally friendly materials soon enough anyway. Take to the online community, share links to articles like this, chat with your friends about topics like this, put up posters drawing attention to the issues. All of these are a vote that you can put out there for recycling, for shaming corporations that are not doing their total best to save the planet rather than their shareholders. Vote often, there's no limit to your activism votes!
And remember the other Rule Of The Ultimately Fatal Game Of Life - besides your public opinion vote and your government vote, you have one other, far more powerful, means of voting at your disposal - your hard earned cash. Every dollar you spend is a vote. Are you spending $80 - $120 a time filling up your tank? That's up to 120 votes for a fossil fuel company. Use the car less, get the fuel bill down - reduce your vote.
Dollar voting
Know that the company where you buy your lunch from uses food grown in chemicals and processed in chemicals and presented in a plastic clamshell with 27 serviettes crammed in to hide the fact that the burger is half the size? (AND they forgot the bloody pickles. Again.) - there's a simple answer - bring lunch from home a few times instead. Every meal like that which you pay for, you voted for.
Is your driving, your fast food burger, that Electrashine Butt Rainbow[tm] - worth the amount of rubbish and toxic waste they generated? Don't vote for that any more. It's rubbish.
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