I used to work in a warehouse that made a HUGE deal about the employees using the proper recycling bin so the company can get a nice check from somewhere or other for “going green”
This warehouse recieved thousands of pallets every day.
Each pallet is wrapped with hundreds of square feet of plastic wrap.
Each box is individually wrapped with maybe 10ftsq-50 depending on size.
Each box contains goods in plastic bags. Many of them with plastic clamshell packaging.
The products get unwrapped, and placed in larger boxes on shelves.
When the items get distributed to stores, the items were put in plastic bags, boxed up and wrapped in plastic wrap, boxes placed on pallets that were automatically wrapped by machines in hundreds of square feet of plastic.
None of the plastic from the warehouse floor is separated from the general waste.
Remember, it’s your responsibility to reduce waste.
I’ve seen the same or even worse. Pallets of stuff would be received, all wrapped up tight in an ungodly amount of plastic. The pallet would be unwrapped, plastic discarded and the contents scanned to confirm the correct items and number of items were present on the pallet. After each item was scanned and it’s serial number recorded, someone would go to validate the items. When validated and found to be correct, the items were again stacked on a pallet and wrapped by another ungodly amount of plastic. The terrible thing was, as I was outside of the distribution chain, I had a view on the bigger picture. Items would often go through several of these places, each doing the exact same. The amounts of plastic each item consumed in the process was huge. But it was necessary, errors were found often, so the steps needed to be done. And the pallets could often get wet, nobody would accept soggy cardboard, so it needed to be wrapped.
The issue is plastic is basically free and extremely good at what it does. A more permanent solution like encasing the goods in some other material, like wood or metal would be more expensive and do a worse job. It’s similar to asbestos, where the solution is so good, nothing else can compete. It took a mighty effort and strict laws to mostly abandon asbestos. I fear humanity has lost its will to live and won’t have it in us to ban single-use plastic.
Some places did use metal trollies instead of pallets, but the pallets were never really a problem. They were almost always made from sustainable woods, be re-used often, till they just about fell apart. After which they were sent out for recycling, either back into a refurbished pallet, or a stamped recycled wood pallet or other recycled wood product.
I loathe the trend to blame the end consumer for their waste and eliminate very publicly visible things like straws when the vast majority is caused by industry every step of the way. The amount of plastic I see in retail garbage bins is sickening, and the average customer has no clue because it’s all long before anything ends up on the shelf.
Then people stop using plastic cutlery and think they’re helping the planet meanwhile it’s just a facade to keep the real wasters off their radar.
Its a matter of scale. If labs went through pipette tips the same way that fast food joints went through plastic straws, they’d be banned too.
And we don’t throw pipette tips in the ocean, we throw them in the biohazard box. While not better for the environment, at least we don’t choke baby turtles.
The lab is a much more controlled environment. I trust a lab tech to dispose of the tips as per protocol, which could reduce the number of tips that end up as litter.
No they wouldn’t. Banning straws is politically expedient, not effective policy. Straws are a tiny drop in the bucket of plastic waste. But they’re visible, largely optional, and have alternatives. It’s easy to make them look bad so a politician can look big by banning them. Your average person can feel like they’re making a difference by buying a reusable straw. The industrial scale plastic waste that happens out of sight is allowed to continue because nobody cares about actually doing anything. Everyone wants to feel like they’re doing something.
Straws don’t pollute the oceans if you throw them in the trash. Well, unless that trash gets processed badly. Where I live trash gets burned. So I make sure to throw some straws in the river so the sea turtles can do coke off each others backs 😎
Good luck choking sea turtles by throwing straws in the river. The only turtles you’ll choke that way are the river turtles
To avoid plastic waste, they use now paper straws …wrapped individualy in plastic. Genius
I work in healthcare and sometimes I think about the amount of waste I generate in a day and it’s wild
Health of humans is always excluded from plastic reduction laws and for good reason.
Yes, I would rather healthcare and science used 5x as much plastic as they do already and everyone else had to go completely wasteless than try to put any undue limits on them.
Tbf, I remember the times we reused everything, even tubes.
And it was a mess and there is so much evidence that the whole process of reusing is even worse for the environment.
How about people driving those trucks that directly dump mixed waste into the ocean? That’s a very common thing to do in South-East Asia. Plus, there are a zillion villages everywhere around there that dump all of their mixed waste into creeks going through them – to be brought “away”. Into the oceans.
That’s where almost half of all microplastic comes from. Then there’s the other approximately half that comes from cars’ tyres. And then a part of a percent that comes from drinking straws and such. Hooray.
I feel like you might be doing something wrong.
Why? Seems like a reasonable amount. In the boxes i used there was place for i believe 80 tips so when i had to pipet something in a 96well plate with multiple components that where not able to be mixed before i sometimes got through multiple boxes in a single session. (And yes i wish i had a digital multi pipet but even then it would not have alwqys been possible to use it.
I was joking, honestly. There are both multitip pipettes and experiments requiring a ridiculous amount of separate wells to be filled, both which will make a box disappear.
Multi-channel pipette goes brrrrrr
Having to dispense a different volume to every sample goes faaaaack.
People in America who use pipet tips: probably 10k People who use plastic straws: 300 mil
Simple. Don’t throw them in the ocean. Why are you throwing them in the ocean?
deleted by creator
The straw thing seems like such an inconsequential place to start over things like switching to bar soap and bar shampoo to avoid using so many plastic bottles.
All you need to do is walk on the side of a busy road and look in the ditch to see what people just throw away.
It’s not a lot of shampoo bottles, but tons of plastic cups and accompanied straws.
Anecdotes aren’t a great way to measure this. Observations like this are variable by location, and ignores the much larger mass in landfills or unrecycled stockpiles.
And observations of landfills or unrecycled stockpiles doesn’t vary by location?
The idea was to try and remove plastic waste that people tend to just throw away without thinking much of it. Lab students don’t exactly take pipets with them and throw away in a ditch. But unfortunately, way too many people just throw away single use plastics like straws, cutlery, cups, “paper plates”, etc.
I didn’t make any such “observations”, or even claim that it doesn’t vary by location. I’m just pointing out that your approach ignores a lot of much larger plastic masses. It’s ok for identifying some obvious opportunities, but I’d hesitate to call it definitive for the purposes of establishing the most impactful strategy.
I’m not sure if people’s unmindfulness is responsible for a larger share of waste than indifference, but maybe?
I’m not ignoring anything. But if you want me to cover every single issue and aspect of various types of trash management, it’s gonna be a god damn university essay, I don’t even think lemmy would allow so many characters in a comment.
Peoples “unmindfulness” is responsible for every single piece of garbage you see around you. When I walk down the road and see a bag of crisps laying around. That’s because a person just tossed it. And no. I’m not ignoring corporate waste or pollution, criminal or otherwise. But that isn’t the topic right now.
This specific post was making fun of the straw bans vs other single use plastics that are seemingly fine. straws vs pipets used in labs. And what I said was that pipets are not being littered around every corner of the globe. But straws are. That’s why movements to ban such implements are ongoing. That’s why we have movements to ban single use plastics like straws and cutlery, while a plastic shampoo bottle is still “fair game” since they’re not typically just tossed in nature.
That doesn’t mean I’m just ignoring everything else. We also didn’t talk about how armed robberies are bad. But I can assure you, I’m not ignoring them, they’re just not the topic at hand.
Look, all I’m saying is that straws probably aren’t the #1 source of discarded plastic, and it seems like focusing on one thing like that results in more performative than substantive change.
Ah yes, the good old, “It’s not the #1 problem so why bother doing anything”. It’s that wonderful kind of attitude that simply doesn’t get anything done, ever. Because there’s always a bigger problem.
The only ones focusing on one thing like plastic straws, are people like you. The rest of us moved on
