Plastics-and-a-new-consciousness
The little coffee grounds sieve is 20 years old, and has finally gotten over hardened, I think they call it, where it is not as strong as egg shell. It’s a great little strainer, and with a slightly different composition, it might have lasted 50 years. One thing we can do to cut down plastic waste is to make things better, and have some independent lab certify the better quality some of us would be happy to pay for.
Recycling didn’t work. Nobody wants to sort trash except material recovery centers, and we have shipped millions of tons away, and found out they are not recycling stuff people wasted time and water to clean. On the disposal front, the not worth recycling plastics can be cooked in a “plasma” system that makes them into liquid fuel. Since we should be using much less oil, old refineries can be reworked into systems to make fuels, lubes, solvents or whatever out of the old plastics. As I think it works, it’s like cracking, and you break up poly something into the smaller links of the chain, which are something like oil or gas.
On the manufacturing front, re-use is the best, because it is easy to do. Put lube oil in a bucket with a lid, and then you have a bucket when it is done. Washing machines could use liquid soap sucked out of a drum like commercial ones use. Many other containers could be re-used, as the canning jars some foods come in. Many other things could be packed in, say a wide mouth square side storage jar. If a 7” one was common, you could put a 1x8 shelf in the pantry and have a row of them with stuff like rice and beans safe from mice and bugs. Another in the garage for all that stuff, and maybe something could be put in the little plastic drawers that go in the micro chests of drawers.
People are going to say manufacturing will not do this. It doesn’t look profitable on its face. I think it is, if manufacturing approaches it with the idea that this is instead of advertising, a way to get loyal customers with lots of shelves filled with the containers they made. And if manufacturing doesn’t want to do it, we will have to make them do it.