Assuming that plastic ban was carried out (say in china) how would it affect imports and exports, what would the alternatives be, and would it even be feasible? If so, why has no nation even attempted a ban, even if slightly more expensive isn’t aluminium, glass or carton a way healthier alternative?
I was just thinking today about the logistics of banning disposable takeout/delivery containers entirely and replacing them with durable, reusable ones. The customer would drop them off at collection points scattered about your town/city where they would be collected, sanitized, and redistributed.
I actually looked it up, and apparently Seoul has a pilot program like this that they launched this year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFBxDczFulA
if it’s like shopping bags you’d have to use each container a few thousand times to make up for the extra energy used in production and the attrition rate of ones that are damaged or incorrectly thrown away.
This was touted a lot way back when, but suddenly capital has decided they have infinite amounts of energy for data centres. So in hindsight this feels a bit like a red herring / BP protip
in an ideal world we don’t have consider the ‘lifetime energy cost’ because we ideally use energy from sources that don’t ruin the world we live in
i think the BP part of it was caring about consumer use of shopping bags to begin with, plastic used in packaging that never gets to a shelf would be a better target of regulation if you had a government that wanted to actually do anything on that vector.
From what I recall the math on shopping bags isn’t quite that bad—well, cloth tote bags are awful and don’t come even close to breaking even (that might be where the “few thousand times” figure comes from), but the math can work out on certain kinds of more durable plastic bags. However, plastic grocery bags use barely any plastic to begin with whereas most takeout containers use a substantial amount, so I think the break-even point is more favorable in this application. But even so, it’ll only work if you have strong incentive programs in place to make sure containers get returned (e.g. large deposits), a wide network of drop-off points (to prevent extra trips from being taken, especially car trips), and a unified system (to prevent inefficient fragmentation of said drop-off/sanitization system). It’s not an automatic win, but I think it’s worth studying the feasibility of such a system.
That said, this is all in service of preserving treats with the minimum amount of inconvenience to consumers. In a degrowth scenario, it’d probably be a lot better if we had more communal cafeterias and stuff like that, since it’s more energy efficient to ship, store, and cook large batches of food and you don’t need a complex city-wide logistical system to wash dishes. In that pie-in-the-sky scenario we’d also actually take infection control seriously and have stringent filtration and ventilation systems, Far-UVC, contact tracing, masking on public transit, and so on. Because no fucking way are you gonna catch me dead sitting down to eat in a restaurant in this day and age
…just spaced out a bit for a second there thinking about how much nicer the hellish nondescript suburbs would be if they replaced the stroads with streetcars and tree-lined bicycle and pedestrian lanes
You wouldn’t need to for very long, because you’d eradicate a large number of diseases
i wonder if recycling rates are any different in the rebate states
yeah i liked that at uni, especially since it was attached to the dorm
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: