Cellulose. Wax paper. Stuff made from seaweed and mushrooms.
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I would love to see increased standardization in the food industry limiting the possible sizes and shapes of containers (such as glass) making them easier to wash and reuse as-is. On the home front, for example, it's ridiculous that I have to go out and purchase brand-new Mason jars for canning instead of being able to reuse a store-bought salsa jar. But more importantly on the commercially-processed food front, standardization would make reuse easier by ensuring that containers do not have to return all the way to their original company; that way a jar used by a raspberry jam company in the Pacific Northwest bought by a customer in Florida could go to a local orange marmalade company for reuse rather than having to travel all the way back to the PNW.
I think should also start seeing a lot more compostable products. We're already getting there somewhat with paper replacing plastic in shipping, but more products need to be explicitly labeled as compostable, and more municipalities need dedicated compost pickup and processing facilities. It's insane that we've created a soil-to-landfill pipeline for nutrients.
The idea of a standardized container that is so sexy. Bonus points if it comes in a variety of sizes that perfectly scale and tesselate together.
You can reuse jars, ideally you would buy new lids, though when my mother or grandmother would make jam they would reuse "good" lids and the jars would seal well - I found a 20 year old reused jar and lid still sealed
Good lids being those where the seal is in good condition
There are very few lid sizes and threads
Only someone desperate or lucky would take city compost.
The chemicals that might have been sprayed on them can carry through even a good hot compost and affect your plants.
Then again I also don’t trust commercial compost for the same reason.
I have heard too many stories about losing a whole garden.
Agreed, there's a lot of issues with municipal compost currently. Ensuring cleaner compost output is important for making sure the end product is usable especially for edible crops, but in the meanwhile my understanding is food waste etc produces fewer greenhouse gasses when allowed to decompose via compost rather than in a landfill. Plus using municipal compost has to be better than the farms that are contaminating the soil with PFAS-laden biosolid fertilizer.
I live dangerously- I make yogurt in old jam jars!
...Though you only need to go to 180° and don't need pressurization for it.
But I absolutely echo you with that, the fact that you can't use most glass for this is insane.
And I only use the Baba Maman jars, they're the only ones resilient enough.
The problem that strikes me reading through this thread, and similar conversations about packaging, is that we can do all we want to reduce packaging and plastics at the consumer end, but there's a huuuuge amount of packaging all the way through the supply chain. From farming supplies, to ingredient packaging, and the packaging used to transport food products to stores. By focussing solely on the consumer end we're not addressing the whole issue. It's like the obsession with bamboo toothbrushes and paper / metal straws. They're consumerist solutions to a problem caused by consumerism.
Exactly, there is so much industrial waste before a product makes it to you. Yet everyone focuses on the consumer use which makes it inconvenient for the end user and ignores all the "invisible" waste which would require investment from businesses to fix but would have a far larger effect on the environment. Not being able to get a plastic straw or PE film bag doesn't really improve anything since the alternatives are worse and in many cases far worse for the environment even when reused.
I expect they’ll move back to earlier packaging materials like glass, metal tins, and waxed paper.
Why do we need the expense of returning glass bottles for washing and reuse, when glass recycling works and is much cheaper?
Washing and reusing is much more environmentally friendly than recycling. It may be more expensive because of the current societal/legal environment but given the right incentives, it doesn't have to be.
It would be amazing if a standard glass bottle was adopted. That way they can be collected, cleaned and reused by any beverage company.
German beer/water/juice bottles are mostly standardized. There are some massive warts in the system unfortunately: The deposit is legally mandated but the bottles are private standards. Hence breweries/bottling companies are increasingly deviating from the standard bottles for marketing reasons. And there's a separate single-use flimsy-plastic deposit system used by discount stores which is very effective at collecting bottles for recycling but doesn't foster reuse.
However, I find it ridiculous that we're transporting all that water at all even though tap water here is at least as drinkable as the bottled water.
beer
The usual 0.5L beer bottle:
water
A couple of different types here, some 0.7L, some 1L, some glass, some plastic, but all multi-use deposit bottles.
Why do we need the expense of returning glass bottles for washing and reuse, when glass recycling works and is much cheaper?
Consider simply the energy use...
Heating up water to high preassure steam to sterilize bottles uses way less energy than it takes to melt glass, keep it at the correct temperature, reform the bottle, letting it cool slowly (to prevent cracking) and steam clean it before filling the new bottle.
If anything we will see a new focus on the "reuse" part of the "reduce, reuse, recyle" process.
There is a reson as to why the verbs in the process are ordered in that way...
The most environmentally friendly action, is to reduce our consumption of materials, if that is not possible, then we should reuse the finnished product for as long as possible, if that is not possible, then we should recycle the materials into a new and better product rather than digging up more materieal.
I was not under the impression that glass recycling penciled out (as in, it costs more to recycle than make new). My area crushes "recycled" glass and uses it to cover landfills (which is better than having it inside the landfill, but it still leaves the consumer system).
With return policies we don't need to go through actual recycling methods. I don't know if growlers are popular in your area but it's pretty cheap energy-wise to just sanitize a returned jug.
Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle... specifically in that order.
when glass recycling works and is much cheaper?
Glass recycling works but its far more energy intensive. The saying was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle and it was in that order for a reason.
when glass recycling works and is much cheaper
[Citation needed]
As fireweed said, I think it is too energy intensive especially with the contamination issues.
I think it would be interesting if packaging in many areas was standardized to actually useful products, like if products came in aesthetically designed drinking glasses and dinnerware.
I think it might be more effective to ask how this is/was done in other parts of the world presently. I've never been outside of North America except for visiting Hawaii once. I've seen documentaries about foreign bazaars and know the basic history of the Roman Fora, but I don't know how this translates to or evolves to meet the needs of Western culture presently and visa versa.
Those aren't really good either. Even glass, as much as it is better, still needs yo be washed and reused which uses more aggressive chemicals than most would be comfortable with.
Fact is that like everything in life, stuff is a tradeoff. Can we wash and re-use glass without aggressive water harming cleaning fluids? Sure. But that means more danger from it. We could also use degradable plastics but those are problematic as well. Tins are an issue in general plus they can only be used for some foods. Waxed paper is even trickier to recycle than most other things, not durable, and again only suited for some foods.
Ultimately, it's health vs recyclability. There's always a tradeoff.
Your criticisms about washing are only valid if we assume liquid water cleaning. Superheated steam will burn off any organic material without any additional cleaning chemicals.
I'll tell you a story.
The other day I got some curry and rice boxed meals at a local closeout store.
Inside there was curry in one plastic bag, rice in another plastic bag, and a little disposable plastic bowl to combine them in.
But wait, there's more. They also included a bamboo spoon and fork. About the most useless disposable flatware I'd ever seen. Didn't work at all b
I don't know where I was going with this story but your prompt reminded me of it.
Aluminum is pretty great, as is paper for a lot of products
PLA (polylactic acid, commonly used for 3D printing) is made from biomass, and is thus sustainably sourced.
Bio-PET is functionally identical to petroleum-based PET, but is readily produced from plants, and is thus sustainably sourced.
I don't think energy is a particularly scarce commodity. We are utilizing only a tiny fraction of the energy readily available to us. We haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit of energy production yet.
We gave up on reusing glass bottles in large part because they were not sanitary. Every boomer has stories of finding cigarette butts in their soda and beer. Previous buyers regularly used their empties as ash trays before turning them in for the deposit, and the cleaning process was not nearly as effective as one would hope.
A better cleaning process would be needed to even consider commercial reuse of consumer glass today. Superheated steam, for example, would burn off pretty much any organic material, and machine inspection would be able to identify remaining contaminants and defects.
We gave up on reusing glass bottles in large part because they were not sanitary. Every boomer has stories of finding cigarette butts in their soda and beer.
I live in a county that almost religiously reuses glass bottles and have never heard nor experienced such a story. Seems like someone figured out how to sanitize them.
We gave up on reusing glass bottles because the return payout never rose to match inflation. It was a nickel in 1960, that’s be 50 cents now!
It had to be that much because otherwise it didn’t make sense for people to actually return the bottles to the local pickup spot or drive them a few dozen miles from that spot to the local bottling plant.
As bottling moved away from washing and reusing glass, it became more centralized and switched to a medium more suited to centralized distribution, plastic. Now it really doesn’t make sense to return bottles and drive them hundreds of miles back to the national bottling plant.
"Sustainably sourced" doesn't always mean "environmentally sustainable". Unfortunately a lot of bioplastic still isn't biodegradable and will leave us with the same waste issue as regular plastic.
Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332220303055
Video explainer: https://youtu.be/-_eGOyAiNIQ
We gave up on reusing glass bottles in large part because they were not sanitary.
We gave up on them because they are less good looking. It's dead easy to sanitise glass. You can do it chemically, thermally, or radiologically (with UV through to gamma rays).
Renewable sourcing is nice, but that doesn’t really address the main problem, which is what happens to the plastic after you’ve used it. If it’s burned, it will release the previously stored carbon into the atmosphere. If it’s recycled, the carbon stays in circulation. If it’s biodegradable, it solves the plastic problem for the most part.
"Biodegradable" and "burning" release the same mass of carbon into the environment. Burning releases it as CO2. Biodegraded plastic releases that carbon as methane.
Biodegradability is not a desirable property of trash bound for a landfill.
Actually it depends on how it decomposes. Anaerobic processes tend to produce methane, whereas aerobic ones usually produce CO2. Anyway, I was mainly thinking of the microplastics though. Biodegradable plastic wouldn’t stay in a harmful form for thousands of years, but it would still produce carbon in some form.
At the end of the day I think the answer is less availability and more local production is the way to go. Heavy sustainable packaging uses to much fuel. So it is better if we can grow and produce locally so we can theny recycle locally back to the packers and producers.
We can grow anything indoors now. We can bottle anything locally. The larger issue is electronics. Which can use sustainable materials.
I wish we could tax corporations for trash produced. Have the dump sort trash by company and offer them to recycle and charge them to recycle or trash the items.
I am here to preach of cellophane. It's not the perfect product right now but if we invest in it, it is fully biodegradable and jus plain cool.
Also, shoutout to PLA. Again not perfect right now but with the right implementation we can start getting rid of a lot of waste.
Plastics. I think your assumption’s incorrect. We’re going to keep using plastic.
Unfortunately, it will get less effective, because organisms will evolve to eat it.
Why does energy have to be scarce?
Anyway, reusing metal and glass containers seems like a straightforward plan.
Make the packaging edible while also not having it be destroyed by what's inside in the process.
We're not technologically advanced enough to do that yet, but I feel like this could be a delicious solution.
Go to a grocery store, bring your metal containers to the grocery, get them autoclaved while shopping, and get em filled up with your rice/cereals/juice/etc.
Edit: The below is a bad idea unless new materials are found, see comment thread.
Also, SLA Printing for ceramics is already possible, just expensive for now. Once we figure out how to do that sustainability and in a foodsafe manner, we could just print our single-use cups and dishes from a slurry.
Yeah, finding the gunk from a bone dry ceramic cup left in random places outside would suck, but nature would be able to reclaim it as easy as any random dirt clod. (Well, not as quick in the short term, but when it comes to materials)
One could potentially even just rinse out the clay, stick it in some water, and with some elbow grease and effort, process it into actual, useable ceramics. Depending on the formulation required for the SLA process, of course.
Deposit systems with standardized containers would be my wish. And I wouldn't mind if some of the standardized containers were made of plastics.
I'd also hope for all sorts of concentrates and powdered drinks to take over. A large portion of the packaging we go through every day is actually for drinks.
Single-use bioplastics and fungi-based materials may also be part of the solution. Bioplastics would ideally be created from byproducts of other processes though.