WTF Series #11 - The Endless Picnic

The Avalanche of Plastic, Stupid Packaging and the Lies of Recycling

Sitting on the toilet and looking at a shelf full of plastic containers holding every useless thing imaginable, you suddenly realize that single-use crap is everywhere.  Look in your fridge and kitchen cabinets. Go to a grocery store and it’s like a plastic nightmare.  Check out the local big-box store. Plastic is a carbon product and it’s doomed.  We are not just the people of the corn, we are ‘plastic people!’ as Frank Zappa sang.  Check it out:

*  Bread is sheathed in plastic bags or paper with a cellophane window! (The latter can’t be recycled unless you remove the cellophane.)  Sometimes you return plastic bags to a grocery store.  Do you know where those bags actually go?  No, and stores aren’t telling.

*  Milk is put in small or large milk containers that are plastic or have a plastic pour spout. (Can’t technically be recycled unless you pry out the spout.)  Or put in a bullshit ‘’Tetrapak’ made up of a plastic lining, paper and a thin aluminum film.  (Can’t be recycled because it has multiple materials.)  Remember when we had a waxed paper box that you could just pop open?

*  Then there is the plastic packaging of food or products that have no number on them.  (Can’t be recycled.)

*  Only plastic numbered 1, 2 & 5 are recyclable for the most part, while higher 'mixed' plastic numbers are not actually recyclable in most systems or are fake recycled. (I.E. sent to landfills, Haiti, Africa, Vietnam or Albania as garbage.)  You have to check each city’s regulations and then actually believe them.  China called the U.S. bluff on this ‘feel good’ habit that enabled so many consumerist fantasies. 

*  So much packaging uses two, three or four different materials which can’t be recycled as is. 

*  Products that you can barely open because of the way they are packaged in plastic, as if terrorists are on the prowl everywhere.  Thank the ‘Tylenol bomber.’ In other words, why do we have plastic bottle caps instead of metal ones?   Why the ubiquitous plastic seals?  Hardware stores love unbreakable plastic shells on products. Why do they have plastic packaging you can’t get open without a reciprocating saw?

*   Plastic assures food products stay ‘fresh’ longer at a lighter weight, which means they can be brought from thousands of miles away.  Which, naturally, increases carbon transport output compared to most local produce.

*  Then there are all those stupid tiny containers made of plastic – ‘travel size’ stuff that has no reason to live.  One-use bottles an inch tall containing one day’s worth of something. 

*   Small plastic caps and similar small items get stuck in recycling center conveyor belts and equipment and cannot be recycled.

*   The insanity of one-use plastic pop and water bottles.   

*   Visit a hotel or travel on an airplane and that shit is there too.  In fact, what happens to all the airplane meals trayed in plastic containers, eaten with plastic utensils, cupped in plastic?  Garbage, garbage, garbage.  When did you take a flight with a real knife and fork?  A metal cup?  Reusable food containers?  A long time ago.  

*   What about all those company feeds in the company kitchen or meeting room in which everything is made of throwaway plastic like its an endless picnic?  As if no one knows how to wash dishes or bring a reusable plate, knife and glass to work.

Tetrapak Fantasy

Look in your fridge and you’ll see nearly everything is in a plastic container or bag.   Some plastic-like materials pretend to be recyclable but aren’t and others are plant-based but people don’t know they are organic recyclables so they go into the garbage.  Or when they get to the recycling center they are trashed.  Incinerators are used in some cities like Minneapolis to provide power or heat by burning trash, so that is ‘some’ kind of recycling.  Just check the air quality though.  Others are turning the off-gases from landfills into methane fuel, but that’s not common yet.

Now in the old days people brought containers and bags and put raw food into glass, metal, wood, paper, canvas or burlap.  Unless you are in a real co-operative or organic food store, that option is not available or for just a few products like nuts, trail mix or coffee.   Actually nearly everything is going to have to be provided that way in the future as we go back to the past.  If packaging doesn’t get better, bringing glass Mason jars, tins, canvas bags and paper or plant-based bags to every grocery store will become normal.

Plastic is actually a pretty weak material in most crucial consumer uses, as it breaks easily.  Crappy plastic zippers, crappy plastic snow shovels, crappy plastic toys, crappy plastic switches and crappy plastic moving parts which break after sustained use.  Anytime you see a heavily-worked part made of plastic, look out.  Plastic is a key ingredient of capitalist planned obsolescence.  The businessman in the 1960s film The Graduate didn’t tell Ben to go into ‘plastics’ for nothing.

How many individuals, supermarkets or restaurants dump their food waste into compost bins and put it in the soil instead of putting it in the garbage?  1 out of 1000?  At least some cities have leaf/wood collections which are mulched or used as fertilizers.  Only San Diego as far as I know recycles toilet water and human waste.  Why aren’t grey water systems and point-of-use electric hot water heaters mandated in construction to not waste or recycle water?  The questions and answers are endless.

Single-stream recycling (everything put in one bin) is cheaper but ends up being a mess at the recycling plant because residents are no longer dividing their materials first.  Some cities like Atlanta are not picking up recycling from people who treat their cart like another garbage bin.  A few cities have stopped recycling all together due to this problem. Yet in Japan they have 45 separate categories of recycling.  In European countries like Finland, recycling is much more targeted as well.  In the U.S. you actually have to research and take certain items to special places.  For instance some cities say batteries don’t need to be recycled or taken to toxic sites, but they leak in land fills, so you even have to ignore some city recommendations and find someone who takes them!  (And why aren’t single-use batteries outlawed anyway?) Coke© in Atlanta expects municipalities to recycle Coke bottles but rejects return fees for their plastic PETE bottles and pressures politicians and bureaucrats to go along with them.  Remember when Coke⟳ was in a small washable glass bottle? (Bloomberg, 1/29/20)

So what is the solution?  Hey, plastic is convenient but not sustainable.  The corporate government doesn’t care and the corporations certainly don’t.  The government has never mandated ‘single material’ packaging.  They have never mandated only recyclable plastics. (Which of course can only be recycled once or twice anyway.)  They’ve never mandated banning ‘single use’ plastic except for local moves against plastic bags and straws.  They’ve never limited plastic products to useful long-running purposes.  They’ve never mandated that production facilities use plant-based ingredients instead of oil-based plastic.  Henry Ford actually invented a naturally-made plastic in the 1920s made from hemp and other plants. They’ve never told producers to find something recyclable to replace plastic.  The federal government has never given a shit. It is laissez faire capitalism because Big Plastic / Big Oil, the retail sector and Big Capital own most Congressmen and have for decades.  This is no surprise.  Ultimately capital cannot stop itself. It's internal drive for profits means it will package any way it pleases.

P.S.  - Those 'terrible' Chinese have announced they will phase out single use bags and bottles in 2020 in major cities and the rest of the country in 2022.
P.P.S. - Link to Guardian article debunking plastic recycling:  
 https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/18/americas-recycled-plastic-waste-is-clogging-landfills-survey-finds

Another on how plastic is ubiquitous in the U.S. - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/europe-is-beating-its-addiction-to-plastics-why-is-the-us-so-far-behind

Other prior reviews on this issue, use blog search box upper left:  "Garbage Land," "Civilization Critical." 

Red Frog

February 1, 2020