Sweeping California law on single-use plastic meets with outrage from all sides as it goes live

Especially not the LA Times, with its current owner.

We use a product called JAWS (Just Add Water System), which is just refill cartridges for a single bottle. They make a half dozen cleaners that all work pretty well. I'll wait for someone to come along and say that the cartridges have just as much plastic as a new bottle.

> There are refill bottles (also plastic) that refill like 2? 3? sprayers. At work we get Windex refills in a 3 or 5 gallon "Bag-in-Box" that has a thin plastic bag (holds the liquid) inside a cardboard box (for structural support). *Way* less plastic than plastic bottle refills.

Fr dude had hundreds of employees working on draft rules for YEARS before he decided he wanted to seem business-friendly for his 2028 presidential run and forced a complete rewrite of the regulations. He’s a terrible governor and a terrible boss. Please do not vote for him to get promoted to president.

Corporations will do nothing if it doesn’t increase the bottom line and the EPA…. well we all know that’s corpse currently being dissected and buried in pieces.

I worked at Walmart and *one* bundle of packages had to be wrapped in layers and layers of plastic wrapped, then all of that was individually wrapped and we haven't even reached the consumer part inside of the cardboard box yet. And that's *one* thing. Imagine how many shipments Walmart gets in a day. The plastic use is terrifying and ungodly. Imagine a human's entire lifetime of plastic waste, gone and used up in 5 minutes.

We buy 500 pallets a day.....we trash them... everyone.

I worked in a large hospital p******* and it wasn’t uncommon to fill 2-3 95 gallon recycling bins a day of manufacturer medication bottles. The amount of plastic is INSANE and that was just the outpatient/discharge p*******.

Indeed, it is common now on livestock farms to wrap individual round hay bales with probably 20 square yards of white cling wrap, so the bale ferments in a sealed airtight container. Plus “silo bags” that are torn open in large fragments and discarded. Plus plastic bale tying twine and netting to hold the compacted bale together. Plus polytape electric fence that eventually wears out and is discarded. And single use plastic seed bags and chemical shipping containers. None of it can be reused and all will go straight to a landfill. This is far beyond the waste any single household would generate by themselves.

I try to recycle every damn water bottle, etc. that I use. And then I drive past a single strawberry field that is covered with more plastic than I will use in my entire lifetime. I’ll keep trying - but what the f***…

Do you have a source? I'm unable to find an individual-vs-corporation breakdown, and I'm not sure how you would even generate one in a meaningful way. About 40% of plastic waste is from packaging, and something like another 25% of it is from consumer products (including textiles), so even though the "packaging" category includes a lot of corporate packaging you can't sweep individual usage under the rug. Agriculture supposedly is like 3.5%. I'm with you on the fraught nature of recycling policy, and we certainly shouldn't ignore corporate contribution to waste, but i think it's fair to prioritize individual habits, especially since they drive corporate behavior, and i don't think it's correct to say "we can recycle all we want it won't matter literally at all" - recycling isn't the real solution and it's rarely what it is presented to be, but i think the spirit of "blame the corporations and militaries instead of consumers" is much more applicable to energy usage/greenhouse gas emissions than plastic (although even there a big majority of emissions come from the production of consumer goods.)

all of that is just to meet the public's demand

This. I can recycle my entire life but it’s nothing to counteract the waste produced by Taylor Swift’s private jet for example

Corporate accountability……. the entire f****** planet and every living being would be better off if this was enforced.

this is the core issue, the upstream producers create exponentially more amounts of evrything from plastic waste to carbon emmisions but no regulators have the stomach to do their job and address the issue other than throwing subsidies their way and blaming down stream individuals for system issues.

As always, blame the peasants

Right. By the time you collect, sort, wash, melt, pelletize plastics a lot of time and energy is spent. Even if the mechanical (melting) recycling plant was powered completely by green energy, it would be more profitable to just sell that energy to the grid. Especially with the looming new data centers.

A significant portion of the plastic in the Ocean were believed to come from ships bound to and from China, most of recycled plastic was at the time shipped to China for recycling. It also shifted responsibility of product end of life to the consumer and help make adoption of plastics mainstream even though it has never even been a transparent service

I had a next-door neighbor, married to a cop, put her dirty diapers into the recycling because they were paper.   Is it just my imagination, or are people really stupider than ever?

the illusion of choice

Plastic resins degrade during traditional mechanical recycling, and chemical recycling needs 90% virgin material to make a useful end product. Plastic recycling was always a sham.

The basic gist is that most single-use plastics are made using byproducts of the petroleum industry that are already being produced in huge quantities. Using them costs basically nothing (you'd be surprised how many common products use oil as a base) and they aren't going to scale back oil production, so the effort and cost of recycling started to outpace it's actual net benefit. It's still a good practice but due to cost it's not being preformed on scale where it would actually make a difference. 

imo, not so much that it's hard... it's that it's harder to do it cheaper than new plastic. new plastic is basically a byproduct of the oil manuf process... they're basically giving away ethylene for free because if they dont get rid of it they have to pay to dispose of it how the hell are you going to convince people to wash their dishes when someone is offering to deliver new dishes to their door anytime they need them? gotta start incentivising recycling or penalizing oil/gas production.

Virgin PET still costs less than rPET

> because it’s the right thing to do. Eh... when you're talking about Japan, I think you had it right the first time: not doing so is taboo. Japan has a very collectivist culture. People are expected to fit in and toe the line, and not doing so is seen as a social faux pas. In some ways it's good, like everyone taking care in sorting trash and cleaning shared spaces. In other ways, it can stifle individuality and result in bullying. It's a mixed bag.

I think it’s a strange mentality to go out of your way to do something that makes 0 difference. Why should I sort my plastic when they just dump it all in the same bin at the end of the day? Why should I buy an electric vehicle that will be an inconvenience for me in every way when there are people flying on jets every day to go sit in a meeting?

I think it's less apathy and more exhaustion personally. Also, culturally we also have too much of a reliance on ones self and total lack of thought around doing better for the community - just because it makes the whole community better.

You're not wrong but I can't stand how people act as if we can't cut down massively on the amount we use. We got by without these materials for a very very long time. The fact that we treat our most permanent materials (environmentally) as disposable is a crime.

Glass used for containers is indeed heavy, but it doesn't break easily at all. I have a bunch of old bottles and a house full of cats and they've never broken. I remember throwing old bottles at fences and trees as a kid, and it took a LOT of force just to chip them. Not like modern glass, which shatters into a billion microscopic pieces.

I really wished they build proper paper bags that don't rip and spill my groceries half the time or develop some kind of composite bag that disintegrates after a couple years into something safe.

Glass recycling is extremely difficult. Even grinding it back down to sand is very energy intensive but often the "last resort" as there is nothing else that can be done with it. The best glass recycling is the systems of Europe where glass beer bottles are taken back and inspected by machine for defects and then industrially washed to be reused.