Well yeah the processing and transportation always complicates things, the net-zero is talking about where the carbon that is released is coming from.

Stuff like feed you can't really analyze in the abstract, since there are many different ways it's done, and AFAIK most cattle farms either grow feed on-site or are grass-fed. Transportation costs are expensive, and better farming techniques have expanded the locations grain can be grown. Of course there definitely exists farms that do transport feed in, but looks like this dairy farm in particular is also a grain farm.

I think when looking at investing in things like this it's more important to look at whether it can be net-zero, and whether it's improvement on the status quo. In this case both are true, it could be net-zero with improvements in other areas and it's definitely an improvement on the status quo.

Getting it from sources that would already be there, or from sources derived ultimately from the atmosphere.

For instance even if the animals are farmed solely for methane, the animals are converting carbon in plant matter to methane, and those plants are convert atmospheric CO2 to carbon. So ultimately the process is net-zero carbon.

Thanks! Yeah that looks like the right figure and matches up with what I've seen (which suggested about half was recycled).

That's a pretty good rate, definitely happy to see it. I suspect part of it is that North America had built their recycling programs based on the cheap return voyage to asia for container ships, and that fell apart. Germany wouldn't have designed around that.

But also do have to give props to Germany. They definitely do a lot of things really well, and glad to see this is one of them.

Yeah that's fair enough. I got a spray attachment for my sink, so most things are an easy rinse. I also picked up a decent shredder to shred the semi-rigid plastics, which do fit in fine but are a lot of effort to tear up otherwise.

Yeah it's why I didn't suggest it initially lol. It's cute and people should do it if they can, but it's like at-home composting and rainwater collection. I appreciate everyone who does it and we should encourage more but it's not realistic to expect everyone will do it.

Would love to see it improved upon, and combine with other methods to get a good waste management solution that isn't just built on dreams and lies.

Ooo there is! On mobile so I don't have the link handy, but the appliance is actually you!

Take a water/pop bottle and fill it up with non-degradable waste (that flimsy plastic is a good candidate). Find a stick that you can push into the bottle, ideally as close to the size of the opening as you can while easily pushing it in. Push it in and out to jam the waste down. Screw the cap back on and repeat this whenever you get more waste. A shocking amount will fit in here and with ripping things up this covers most of the worst offenders for waste.

Eventually you'll fill it up and it will be a very dense and solid piece. With the cap on you now have a brick that you can use. Granted it's not perfectly brick shaped but since bottles are designed for packing they fit together well (if you use the same kind).

I think they are called eco bricks. I did it a while back and was pretty happy with the results but I'll be honest I just got overwhelmed with life. I'd LOVE if I had a trash compactor that did the same thing.

But it's worth noting landfills do do this already. With the proper barriers in place, trash makes a decent building material. I mean Manhattan has parts built out of trash. I know my local landfill is evaluating putting solar panels on top of it. The Simpsons made fun of it, but the idea works if done correctly. (Note I'm not claiming Manhattan did it correctly and I know a lot of it wasn't consumer waste, but just giving an example)

So it definitely is better now that you've switched to inferior vs superior products and that would be a better metric (though not sufficient alone) but longevity isn't the same thing as quality.

I mean lead cups last longer than glass, but I'm glad we don't use them anymore! (And glad nobody thought to use the ultra durable uranium lol)

But we do get subjective now, since how do you compare durability to efficiency?

Paper towels in public bathrooms are a good example for this idea. They are single use disposable, but they come with a lot of health benefits. I don't think it's worth switching back to reusable towels in shared bathrooms. (I'm ignoring air dryers since they are more complex to compare)

Of course at home you absolutely should use normal towels. Context is important, and makes everything so complex we can't really make broad and general goals.

Better landfill regulations to prevent those microplastics from getting back into water or food supply, and a focus on what plastic. Not all plastics are equal in how they break down, and it's a lot easier to switch types of plastic then to find replacements altogether.

Waste to energy is probably fine too, I'll be honest I'm not up to date on the latest and the tech has some bad history, but it should be viable at its core with proper regulation.

And once we accept waste to energy then we can start saying "what happens when we incinerate this?" And start choosing our materials based on that too.

I agree with the movement that says producers need to consider how to deal with the waste, I just disagree that recycling is a plausible answer. I'm totally fine with "it goes in a landfill" as long as we know and are okay with what happens in that landfill

Yeah definitely true, considering that's pretty much the only thing I want it for.

I'm curious what will come of this deal as I do use a lot of dairy, but I do dairy heavy dishes where both taste and texture are very noticeable. But I don't know if I'd notice if kraft dinner went plant based for their "cheese"

> which one wants

It's unfortunate you're making wild assumptions like this. Hopefully our discussion can be productive despite this.

Because first off I absolutely do want us to get rid of as much single-use stuff as we can. My issue is with your goal/metric, not with disposable plastic elimination.

> that a family needing wash plastic sports

I didn't say needing. You missed the entire point of that example.

Granted the lower class part was unnecessary as anyone could reuse, but I just have found people with higher incomes to be more picky about stuff. I don't care if my utensils match or look nice, I care if they function.

It was also certainly not to justify the existence of disposable cutlery. The entire point here was that the cutlery is disposable not due to anything other than the fact that it's cheap and people want to throw it out.

If metal forks were cheap people would throw them out too.

The KFC was only mentioned to mention a particular kind of plastic cutlery, because not all plastic cutlery is equal in durability. This kind (also popular in many other restaurants) prioritizes function over form, while there's fancy looking plastic forks that break after one use.

> Exhaling CO2 is a mutually beneficial process.

Only until we produce too much of it, which we are doing.

> To say that returning the environment to a natural order is an impossible goal is just a deflection of the argument.

No it's not a deflection, it's a criticism of the goal you stated. It's a bad goal, we can't achieve it, and it's so obvious we can't achieve it that you immediately made concessions and switched to qualify it.

> returned to a natural, thriving condition, like Chernobyl. T

Chernobyl is an example of how quickly nature can adapt once left alone, not an example of something returning to it's pre-human state. Chernobyl is even today still polluting the environment and causing problems. Yes nature can adapt, nature be crazy like that, but no that doesn't mean that there's no impact.

> To discount the hard as impossible is a weak tactic which keeps us locked into actually solving problems

Keeps us locked into actually solving problems? I'm gonna assume you meant the opposite, please correct me if you actually meant what you said here. You also did that a few times later on.

> some new meme of the day like upcycling

Or like "product longevity"?

> We are well beyond the point in which our efforts can be inefficient and ineffective

I 100% agree, which is why some new meme like buying razors from antique stores isn't going to solve the problem. Like why replacing one environment-harming material with another isn't going to do anything.

I mean is your razor the only thing you use? Do you use collected rainwater and nothing else to shave with? What do you do with your waste hair?

You need to consider more than just whether you're chucking something in the trash. You need to consider what you're washing down the drain. You need to consider what you're using up and where those things came from.

You need to consider... your environmental impact. A wildly subjective and hard to define thing because this is a hard issue. But just because it's hard doesn't mean we should give up and use shitty meaningless metrics which encourage waste instead.

I mean oak milk is great, but I'm having trouble understanding what you're saying. Are you just saying you've grown used to it after 5 years? That makes sense, but you are probably still capable of noticing the difference, you just haven't compared (since you exclusively drink it).

I've found oak milk to be great in certain places, like cereal, but it's definitely noticeable drinking it straight. And the problem with all milk replacements is the pricing of milk itself. 4L of milk costs $6 here, 1L costs $3. If I halve my milk consumption I still pay the same price. And so I get the 4L of milk and 2L of oat milk and end up throwing out 2L of something.

That sounds like collection rather than how much ends up being used, but if you share your source I could tell better.

99.6% is a suspiciously high figure considering how much plastic breaks down and literally can't be recycled, and even for collection that's a rate that sounds like it has a very narrow definition for, like a "single-use plastics" type thing

abitrary and objective are not mutually exclusive. It's easy to measure products longevity, just not useful to do so. It's much harder to measure environmental impact and yet that's the thing we actually care about.

Goodhart's Law is very real and paper straws are a very good example of it.

> If you want to actually impact a metric

I don't want to impact a metric. I want to impact the world.

> Either way, the elimination of plastics is a given as better for the environment

Firstly, no it's not a given. It's only better if the replacement is better, and plastic is by no means the worst thing we can use.

Secondly that's a separate goal than you were arguing for. You were arguing for increasing the longevity of items, not for eliminating plastic.

I mean plastic has a heck of a lifespan, you're not throwing those bic razors out because the plastic broke down, you're throwing it out because the metal wore away. Most of the time when plastic is thrown out it's not because it doesn't work or isn't useful, but because it isn't desired.

Plastic forks are a great example. You walk into a lower class family, especially one with kids, and you're going to find some KFC forks in the utensil drawer that have been washed and reused a bunch of times. The reason people throw out plastic forks are because they don't want to wash dishes, not because they can't reuse them.

> are you saying that modern landfill management mitigates all environmental risk and puts the landfill at an equal state of mutual benefit to all things on this planet that it was likely in before it became a landfill?

No because the alternatives very much don't either. We have a footprint, it's literally impossible to remove that footprint. You affect the world with everything you do, your basic existence produces carbon dioxide.

> but to natural order, pre-human influence.

That's an impossible goal, and impossible goals aren't helpful. Even if you stopped breathing you have an environmental impact as your body decomposes or is disposed of.

The problem we have is these impossible goals and the obvious concessions we then have to make. Like I'm sure you went "well obviously breathing doesn't count", but why not count it? If something makes you breathe more CO2, why wouldn't we consider that?

The only real alternative is not making it in the first place. Lots of proposed alternatives that have their own problem, ranging from "well at least it's better" to "holy F we just invented a process to turn CO2 into methane at scale!"

While companies definitely do push the idea and benefit from the misconception, they aren't the only ones. People got irrationally terrified of landfills for some reason, and that's what pushed a lot of recycling myths.

Like plastic is far from the only offender when it comes to failure to recycle. Besides newspaper and corrugated cardboard, every material has a <50% rate of actually being recycled according to the EPA. That includes basically all the product packaging that exists, including stuff people traditionally think of as easy to recycle, like cereal boxes, glass bottles and metal cans.

Do you have any statistics on the rates of recycling for EU or Germany? The reason USA is used is because of the EPA's extensive analysis. It's really hard to get good figures because a lot of reports very stupidly analyze collection rate rather than how much of it is actually recycled. The latter is a figure that has only recently gotten attention.

Here's some stats I've found which show that Germany is not actually recycling the vast majority of the plastic it's collecting, but it's still not the whole story.

> eliminates disposable products.

This is key, it frustrates me when companies replace plastic with some customized paperboard and act like they've solved in. All that's doing is lowering the recycling rate of paperboard, because nobody wants your ink and food covered soggy mess. The reason cardboard has a high recycling rate is because it's all very similar and it's not designed to look pretty.

> Non-consumable products should be designed to outlive single, individual users

I don't think that's a goal so much as a mechanism to achieve a goal. Just because something is designed to be reused doesn't mean it actually gets reused.

Plenty of what ends up in our landfills is totally fine, just no longer useful to the individual. It's not worth people's time to try and sell it so it goes in the trash.

> Think of men's razors, the old school kind that flip out like a knife. There are still tons of them in antique stores all around

Just because they are tons around doesn't mean that a ton actually lasted this long. For every one of those in an antique store there's hundreds sitting in a landfill.

> Instead, we have how many Bics floating in the ocean

This is a misconception. Consumer plastics aren't what's in the ocean for the most part, and the ones that are are primarily because they tried to be recycled.

If you threw your razor out, chances are high that it's in a landfill.

> or filling up landfills?

Which isn't inherently a problem. People have this idea that being a landfill is automatically bad, but modern (as in the last couple decades) landfills are managed pretty well. Waste gets disposed and stays there.

People make it sound all spooky like "those razors will be there for 1000 years!" but that's actually the ideal situation we'd want. The carbon inside it is now sequestered into a landfill and we don't have to worry about it breaking down into methane (like with paper). The problem with plastics in landfill isn't that it doesn't break down, but that it does (and this is getting less and less of a problem with better landfills).

> Having this simple design objective of maximum lifespan would immediately reduce the plastic problem

Not as long as we keep buying it. For instance reusable shopping bags need to be reused hundreds of times before they are actually better.

The goal should be to reduce environmental impact, not some arbitrary semi-goal of product longevity or even waste reduction (since waste is definitely not all equal).

Honestly what we need is to just accept the reality of plastic. It's trash, not recycling. We do generate trash, and trash itself can be dealt with, but we need to be aware of that.

And we need to accept that it isn't just plastic though. The focus is on plastic because it's the worst offender, but even the easiest to recycle material, paper, still only gets 68% recycled. And if you remove newspapers and corrugated cardboard (the no-duh ones) you get 43% for paper and just 21% for packaging.

That cereal box you're putting in your recycling is not likely to be recycled. That stack of papers? Not likely to be recycled. That glass bottle? No. That metal can? Nope. The only thing that actually is getting recycled is that large bin behind the mcdonalds with a billion corrugated cardboard boxes in it that are of uniform material.