Well, all I can say is IT'S ABOUT TIME!

The family who founded this company (DART), appeals for its continuation saying they feel it was wrong to demonize particular materials.

Sorry, their fortune will have to go elsewhere. How about using it to research alternate packaging materials? That could surely be a big money-maker too.

Styrofoam coffee cups under attack

Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Good.

A local supermarket chain has announced their intention to eliminate single-use plastics within a few years and has initiated that move by removing single-use plastic bags from one of their stores and offering credits in their shoppers program for people using multi-use bags for their groceries.

I just look around the local store and say to myself, "I wonder how they'll do this?"

A few products in the store such as some produce and items such as pasta that are packed in cardboard containers may remain as long as they don't target single-use containers made of materials other than plastics. However, most foods, including staples such as milk, meat, frozen vegetables, cheese, deli products, etc. all come in plastic containers and there are no presently-available alternatives. A change to reusable containers, for example returnable glass bottles, will involve a wholesale change in the initial supply of those goods and a whole new stream of recycling to return and refill them. Such methods once existed for milk, soft drinks, and beer, but reestablishing them seems like a monumental task and one that is not too likely to be welcomed by many consumers. The single-use container is simply too convenient.

I think perhaps the recycling movement has been misguided in some ways. Certain materials lend themselves to recycling. In some recent years, there has been more steel recycled than produced in the USA as junkyards have been emptied to yield meltable scrap. Aluminum was attractive for recycling until world oversupply drove scrap prices very low.

Glass is a marginal material for recycling because the cost to separate and remelt used glass can be greater than melting virgin sand. It's also a relatively inert material that is unlikely to have high environmental impacts if landfilled.

Frankly, I believe the most environmentally sympathetic method of dealing with plastic scrap or waste would be incineration if methods existed to segregate the burnable plastics from other materials that foul common incinerators. Most common plastics are derived from petroleum feedstocks and burn very well under the right conditions. Incineration would destroy the potential for the plastics to remain in the environment indefinitely, to my mind the greatest peril of plastics and particularly single-use plastics.

I understand the need to change our relationship to materials that can clog our environment and pose possible long-term health risks, but the changes should have some relationship to feasible alternatives.

Big Al

Local incineration would be a good solution + could generate electricity without huge transportation costs. Set it up as a biohazard decontam & incineration plant within a reasonable distance of a testing laboratory like Quest or a diagnostics developer, and a steady stream of plastic is assured.

Where people are taught how and WHY to separate trash, they seem to be pretty good at it.