I imagine all plastics will be out of the question. I’m wondering about what ways food packaging might become regulated to upcycling in the domestic or even commercial space. Assuming energy remains a $ scarce $ commodity I don’t imagine recycling glass will be super practical as a replacement. Do we move to more unpackaged goods and bring our own containers to fill at markets? Do we start running two way logistics chains where a more durable glass container is bought and returned to market? How do we achieve a lower energy state of normal in packaging goods?
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Cellulose. Wax paper. Stuff made from seaweed and mushrooms.
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.
Speaking of greenwashing I still remember laughing my ass off when I unwrapped a plastic cover for a paper straw, which made it even funnier is that before then, they would wrap plastic straws in paper wrapping, so why they didn’t just use that is completely beyond me.
I remember cheering sarcastically the first time I saw a paper straw actually in a paper wrapping.
Farming supplies? There is very, very little that we use farming that isn’t stored or transported using reusable containers like trucks, tanks and hopper bins. The most plastic we would use is things like silage tarps or netwrap that get thrown in totes and recycled.
The packaging starts long after it leaves the farm.
Mostly in Florida citrus, the packaging for pesticides is significant. Jugs for liquids, bags for dry powder. And irrigation drip and emitters are all plastic. Oh and cones for new trees from the nursery, zip ties for the protective cover around the stalk of newly planted trees. Flagging tape, um, there’s probably more.
I’d figure at any scale that they’d be using 500L deposit totes for chem and liquid fert. A lot of the rest of it sounds like equipment. A zip tie for a tree that’s going to produce for 15 years isn’t much in the scheme of things. Now when you see that apple individually wrapped in plastic at the store, that’s the sort of thing that should grind your gears.
Citrus does not have the scale of the big crops like corn and wheat, so big deposit totes. I am close to the industry, pesticides are sold by the jug or pack, packed on pallets, poured into sprayers by hand. I’ve known growers that just throw the waste into giant burn piles. Doesn’t matter, citrus is dying…unless we come up with a solution to citrus greening.
Which country are you in? Where I live my food comes from all around the world. Recycling is mostly a Western thing. It doesn’t exist in many of the countries that supply our food. I was just going by the amount of crap I’ve seen in many agricultural areas. Plastic sacks, containers etc.
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.
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.
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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.
