Comment on Corporations are saving the planet!
froh42@lemmy.world 3 weeks agoIt works by applied statistics.
When you littered before - with the old cap - you’d have two pieces of plastic, now they are connected and it’s only one piece.
I’m only mildy annoyed by the new lids and got used to them, but it’s the bottle cap regulation is one of those that’s purely better for statistics.
It reduces littering by bottles to around half, just because we count the pieces differently now.
Maybe we should better just start taxing by the amount of plastic used in food packaging, as a lot of the packages get bigger and bigger just to display the contents more visibility.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Beyond the statistics, collecting bottles seems easier than collecting bottle caps. Since people can’t stop tossing their trash in the street, at least it makes it easier for people that clean up to get them.
arc99@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
In many countries people collect their own bottles because there is a refundable tax on the container. Here in Ireland it’s 15c, i.e. a can of coke might be €1 but you’ll be charged €1.15. So it motivates people to take the empties back to a supermarket and receive a refund chit. It also motivates homeless people to pick up bottles & cans that people toss, so that too.
cley_faye@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’s an idea, but it requires the incentive to be more than people… let’s call it laziness. I see people drop their trash in front of an empty trashcan on the regular.
Regarding plastic bottle deposit, a quick search (statista.com/…/global-status-of-plastic-bottle-re…) around 30 countries had such a system in place, with varying degrees of success, with only 10 US states. That’s not a lot. In France, we also had this for glass bottle. It was discontinued long ago but we’re looking to bring it back. Let’s hope this do motivate people, although I don’t have my hopes up.
arc99@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Germany collects glass, plastic & aluminium. Glass and plastic can be single use or multiuse. It’s kind of interesting how most beer is sold multi-use (every brand is using the same size bottles) to reduce the amount of recycling necessary. Beer bottles can be washed and reused rather than broken into cullet and remelted. I don’t know what France does but I could see people losing their minds if wine bottles were standardised the way beer is. But really glass could be collected and recycled even if it isn’t reusable.
v4ld1z@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
I get what you’re trying to say about homeless people, and there are many people reliant on collecting plastic bottles in Germany too, but motivation in that context sounds a tad off imo
arc99@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I’m not saying its good that homeless people rely on collecting bottles. But the fact they have cash value means they will collect them and feed them back into the system. So less litter and more recycling.