Report Reveals 'Massive Plastic Pollution Footprint' of Drinks Firms (theguardian.com) 71
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Four global drinks giants are responsible for more than half a million tons of plastic pollution in six developing countries each year, enough to cover 83 football pitches every day, according to a report. The NGO Tearfund has calculated the greenhouse gas emissions from the open burning of plastic bottles, sachets and cartons produced by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestle and Unilever in developing nations, where waste can be mismanaged because people do not have access to collections. Taking a sample of six developing countries, reflecting a spread across the globe, the NGO estimated the burning of plastic packaging put on to the market by the companies creates 4.6 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent -- equivalent to the emissions from 2 million cars.
Tearfund analyzed the plastic put on the market in China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria by the four companies to examine the impact of single use plastic in developing countries. The countries were chosen because they are large developing country markets, spread across three continents. The sachets, bottles, and cartons sold in these countries often end up either being burned or dumped -- creating a pollution problem equivalent to covering 83 football pitches with plastic to 10 centimeters deep each day. The report says: "This massive plastic pollution footprint, while a crisis in and of itself, is also contributing to the climate crisis."
"These companies continue to sell billions of products in single-use bottles, sachets and packets in developing countries," says the report. "And they do this despite knowing that: waste isn't properly managed in these contexts; their packaging therefore becomes pollution; and such pollution causes serious harm to the environment and people's health. Such actions -- with such knowledge -- are morally indefensible."
Tearfund analyzed the plastic put on the market in China, India, the Philippines, Brazil, Mexico and Nigeria by the four companies to examine the impact of single use plastic in developing countries. The countries were chosen because they are large developing country markets, spread across three continents. The sachets, bottles, and cartons sold in these countries often end up either being burned or dumped -- creating a pollution problem equivalent to covering 83 football pitches with plastic to 10 centimeters deep each day. The report says: "This massive plastic pollution footprint, while a crisis in and of itself, is also contributing to the climate crisis."
"These companies continue to sell billions of products in single-use bottles, sachets and packets in developing countries," says the report. "And they do this despite knowing that: waste isn't properly managed in these contexts; their packaging therefore becomes pollution; and such pollution causes serious harm to the environment and people's health. Such actions -- with such knowledge -- are morally indefensible."
Not only that (Score:1, Interesting)
Their machines, that make the bottles could extrude 10.000 face-masks and face-shields per hour, just by changing the mold.
Instead hobbyists print them out 2 per day.
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Ya, but the FDA wants three months to decide whether to approve or not.
Re:Not only that (Score:5, Informative)
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What exactly are "football pitches"? Sounds like a cross between football and baseball?
Is this a soccer terminology thing?
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"What exactly are "football pitches"? "
It's the very high sound that a player makes when a ball hits his genitals.
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"Bottles are blow molded from bottle blanks, not extruded. Entirely different toolset."
Yes, but most companies have also the machine from Husky that makes those blanks.
The same machine that can also do chairs, stools, flower pots, buckets, whatever.
Re:Not only that (Score:4, Insightful)
Surely they're not buying injection machines with the pressure capacity to make chairs if they're only making small bottle blanks. But would they be powerful enough to make masks? Perhaps.
Marketing department: here's a great marketing opportunity. Make plastic masks branded with "Nestlé" or whatever. You get good publicity at a very low cost, your masks+logo get shown in newspapers, on TV, on the internet. It's a win-win.
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Bottles are blow molded from bottle blanks, not extruded. Entirely different toolset.
What, facts? How dare you let facts come into conflict with some nice rant about "them" being the root of all evil?
In other news, even in a crisis, idiots continue to be idiots.
Morally Defensible (Score:1)
Anything that fulfills a human need that was not being met is morally defensible. I am not saying it implies a strong or credible defense, just debunking an absolutist edict.
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I have a human need for a better car. You have a pretty nice car. I think I'll take it.
Re: Morally Defensible (Score:1)
It's plausible that you're entitled to it. It would be absolutist to say "never".
Can you get the oil changed before you return it?
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How is the U.S. better? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the plastic that consumers think they recycle in the U.S. is burned or landfilled.
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Landfilled is better than burned.
Burned is better than dumped into the ocean.
LK
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If these countries were dumping the waste into the ocean we would be swimming in garbage right now. All that plastic ends up in landfills.
But the US, the country that acts every day more and more like a third world country, wants to differentiate itself from "developing economies". America is better. You know. They're WHITE, ANGLO SAXON PROTESTANTS.
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I'm a black pagan and I too believe that American exceptionalism is something to which we should continue to aspire and sometimes achieve.
LK
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If done properly, burning isn't THAT bad. Burning 1kg of plastic is 1kg of oil that doesn't need to be burnt. (Or at least not before it served as a plastic bottle) but again, requires a plant with proper filters.
Landfills however is pure waste of material and space.
Reuseable bottles would be ideal, but also require infrastructure (transportation networks) that is probably not available in a 3rd world country.
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Re: How is the U.S. better? (Score:3, Insightful)
Landfills are long term storage of vital resources for our descendants. Believe me, the people of the future will hate and revile the do-gooders who burned a bunch of the plastic instead of storing it.
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In theory, combustion any hydrocarbon could produce carbon dioxide and water. But in real life, outside of carefully controlled conditions (such as an incinerator that's being used correctly) you get lots of soot and smoke that's full of a cocktail of hazardous organic molecules.
Here's an example: burn some gasoline in a well designed, properly working internal combustion engine with a catalytic converter, and most of the fuel gets converte
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Exactly. And again, that is nothing that the drink makers could improve on their side. And environmentaly better solutions would also be no immediate options
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Burning 1kg of plastic is 1kg of oil that doesn't need to be burnt.
False. Burning plastic does not compensate for oil. It is usually used for heating or electricity generation which can more environmentally be resolved in other ways. Actually I don't know why I used the word "can". I should use the word "is". Oil burning is worse then coal for the environmental footprint, so if we're not running plastic recycling plants and instead burning coal we're still winning compared to your example.
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Right. That's why it's even better if the plastic served multiple duty cycles as bottle (or whatever)
Landfill (Score:2)
The main problem with global warming is increased CO2 in the atmosphere. We are getting that extra carbon from fossil fuels. That's also where we get the carbon base to make plastic. If we are putting the plastic back into the ground, that's ideal as far as re-capturing it.
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And what's the problem with that?
Plastic is sourced from carbon that comes from underground, gets used, and goes back underground.
There's cost to manufacture, but you'd find glass even worse for environmental contamination.
Where the problem lies is in waste management (and individuals not giving a crap, and littering the place)..
Most of the waste that's problematic seems to come from various countries with very poor waste management (so it's not even landfilled; often just left on the surface, or tipped int
Not a lot (Score:1)
Umm, 83 football fields a day is not a lot. It would take tens of billions of years to cover the whole planet at that rate.
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Not quite that long: 1 million years instead of 10s of billions. Both are long times, but your off by 4 orderhttps://science.slashdot.org/story/20/04/01/014219/report-reveals-massive-plastic-pollution-footprint-of-drinks-firms?utm_source=rss1.0mainlinkanon&utm_medium=feed#s of magnitude.
83 football fields at 1.32 acres = 109.56 acres. So about 40000 acres per year. Let's exclude covering the ocean, since we don't laWorld land area is 37 billion acres, so call that 40 billion, so close to 1 million years
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Sorry about the weird typo, somehow the URL for this page got embedded in my post.
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How thick is the plastic? That's the missing quantity here. If you took a standard roll (70 square meters, 0.024mm thick) of aluminum foil and thin it down to 1 atom thick, that single roll would cover around 2300 soccer fields. Most people don't realize just how far you can push things...
Now, most bottles are made from PET, which is around 1.4g/cc in terms of density (1400 kg per m^3). For half a million tons (assuming metric tons), that would be about (500,000,000 / 1,400) 357,143 cubic meters. A soc
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That was from just 6 developing countries. Your use of the word 'field' suggests you don't know that a football pitch is for soccer, which is larger than a field for America football. Also, when I ran the calculation, I came up with globe-covering in just 2.4 million years. That combined with the fact that you didn't actually provide a number tells me you didn't even bother to do a calculation, just pulled a number out of your ass.
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Coverage is nice but the report's authors seem unaware of a third axis.
Depth is important. In more ways than one.
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Food companies (Score:2)
"These companies continue to sell billions of products in single-use bottles, sachets and packets in developing countries," says the report. "And they do this despite knowing that: waste isn't properly managed in these contexts; their packaging therefore becomes pollution; and such pollution causes serious harm to the environment and people's health. Such actions -- with such knowledge -- are morally indefensible.""
And food companies continue to sell food in places without sewage treatment.
Does that also make food companies morally indefensible? I mean food is basically just future feces, and open sewage is harmful to people's health....
It is when they lobby against fixing the problem (Score:2)
The counter argument is that poor countries can't afford the cost, but that just begs the question of why they can't afford the cost.
We as a species seem to have given up on trying to solve problems. Every time we do there's no money, and everybody asks "who's gonna pay for it?".
"Responsible"? (Score:1)
I'm just buying syrup nowadays. (Score:1)
My supermarket sells sugar-free Aspartame-free syrup at $2.60 for 2.5 gallons of finished soda,
we got better water coming out of the taps than are sold in bottles, here in Germany (and the USA used to too),
and I bought a carbonator / soda maker (don't know what you call them) once, long ago. (Avoid Sodastream, they are evil monopolists.)
So why the hell would travel to a place, look for water, and carry tons of it home, *like our ancestors did*?
Yet those firms are sneakily marketing the hell out of the cheap
How about glass? (Score:2)
What caused us to switch away from it in the first place? If Americans were willing to re-use washed bottles, how would the price compare to plastic?
Re: How about glass? (Score:1)
Glass is heavier to transport and more fragile. High quality plastic bottles can be cleaned and reused.
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Glass is heavier to transport and more fragile. High quality plastic bottles can be cleaned and reused.
Reusable bottles are not particularly fragile.
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I live in Argentina. Coca Cola tried to implement reusable plastic bottles MANY times. They're nice, they don't collapse on your hands when you're pouring the drink. But every time they failed. People don't understand the concept of "reusable plastic bottle".
It also depends on the habits of people. Some people buy their stuff in a supermarket. It's annoying to carry a bunch of empty bottles, carry them all the way to the back of the supermarket to get your "deposit ticket" (for some reason the machine that
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When Coca-Cola was using glass bottles, they had bottling plants in major cities all over the country. The extra weight of the glass meant that transport costs were high, so you wanted to keep your supply as local as possible. With the rise of plastic, Coca-Cola could move to fewer massive plants, and just have distribution centers (which are just warehouses) in the major cities. When there were more bottling plants, Coca-Cola had to have a larger workforce. Now they don't.
There is increased water usage in
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OTOH, plastic is recycled
It's a Catch-22 (Score:2)
Make a degradable container, and you diminish its ability to keep the food fresh/uncontaminated as long, if at all.
Maybe corporations should consider not selling their products in markets where proper recycling/collection doesn't exist. But you know
Recycling (Score:2)
If metal containers were used, it would give developing nations access to valuable scrap metal. Maybe that is the point of using plastic, to remove that benefit?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Blaming Pepsi Co. and others is partially correct because they are the ones choosing to sell their products in plastic bottles.
Have they even looked at the recycling programs in the countries/markets where they sell their products? Maybe some markets would be better served with aluminium cans instead? Aluminium is actually worth something, much more than plastic. Maybe some other places are better equipped to recycle glass bottles than plastic ones.
Read up about life-cycle assessment [wikipedia.org].
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The solution would be to stop transporting flavoured water all over the planet. Something like the "Soda Stream" could be the solution. Maybe partner up with that company to sell Pepsi/Coke/Nestlé-branded Soda Stream machines, along with their own flavours.
I was searching to see if they're not doing that right now, and it turns out it's actually happening (at least as far as PepsiCo is concerned):
https://www.fooddive.com/news/... [fooddive.com]
Re:Focusing on the wrong problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Or: Pepsi Co has naturally enough chosen the cheapest packaging, but it is only the cheapest because they have externalised the cost of recycling it. Blaming the people they have pushed those externalised costs onto (and who get no local benefit from recycling it) is a little unfair, isn't it?
Shouldn't the people who want to use Pepsi Co's product be the ones paying for disposing of it in a way that doesn't harm the planet? And isn't the easiest way to achieve that is to push that cost onto Pepsi Co, so they pass it onto their consumers?
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I pay for the recycling of Pepsi bottles through my property taxes. And service fees.
If Pepsi suddenly started recycling their own bottles, do you really think the Government will give anyone tax money back? Or, reduce the taxes by the Governments reduction in costs of recycling Pepsi bottles?
Nope!
Interesting, but.. (Score:1)
Real Charity (Score:1)
Settle down... (Score:1)
Blame shifting (Score:2)
>"And they do this despite knowing that: waste isn't properly managed in these contexts; their packaging therefore becomes pollution; and such pollution causes serious harm to the environment and people's health. Such actions -- with such knowledge -- are morally indefensible."
Nope. They are providing a product, a product people want to buy, in a form that is consumption-safe, convenient, and affordable. If that country's government and inhabitants don't mange the waste PROPERLY, that is *NOT* the "fau