Ireland is number 1 producer of plastic waste in Europe.

It's the manufacturers and retailers that are driving this problem. People don't want the plastic packaging. They're usually been given no choice in the matter.

All the focus is on the end users.

Nitrogan wrote: »

There's a cultural thing to waste disposal too. The idea that it should be free passes responsibility onto someone else and leads to more waste but a cost encourages fly tipping with some people. Personal responsibility is not a natural trait in Ireland so maybe it's a behaviour only the government can influence with direct intervention at source.

A tax on plastic packaging, whatever the product, would be the most effective solution. However industry lobby groups would kill anything like that. There's more money creating and disposing of plastic packaging than there is public will against it.

A tax would be pointless as it still doesn't encourage recycling correctly.

If people had to pay a deposit then it encourages proper recycling by returning the plastic.

Same goes for glass bottles

Every time I read stories about our mismanagement of waste, this image comes to mind, and then I think how flucked up we are on this planet:

The solution to everything isn't tax and manipulation of market forces.
We need to change the culture by regulation and also by just bringing people and businesses on board.

suicide_circus wrote: »

This is an area where state intervention can really make a positive difference. Deposits of plastic and glass bottles have been the norm in much of continental Europe for 40+ years. We are decades behind. This should be introduced along with punitive taxes on plastic packaging. There is no earthly reason why 3 Lemons should be sold in a polystyrene tray with a polythene wrapper.

It's quite simple. The supermarket can process the fruit in a fruit packing facility that's largely automated or at least centralised. This means they can not bother recruiting a few extra shelf stackers / fruit section manager as they're just reducing the job to stacking widgets, it makes stock control easier and so on. It's basically shortcutting needing to recruit retail staff.

Some of it's about differentiating otherwise very generic products, some of it's about convenience for the retailer / systematisation.

If you want to cut this stuff out, it will have to be done through regulation as the retailers could have moved on this years ago. They virtue signal every so often by coming out with campaigns and press releases, but then they seem to achieve very little.

Also, where plastic packaging is used, there's no need for it to be multi-layered complex, next to impossible to recycle products.

This is also a relatively recent thing too. Industrialised societies functioned extremely well for many, many years without all this plastic.

Suckit wrote: »

It's ridiculous when you take into account the products actual usage life.

A bottle of water can last for 1 minute. Wrappers last 2 seconds. It's nuts.

Someone in Iceland invented a drinks bottle made from Seaweed last year, and it can also be used for packaging. IIRC it was also cheap to manufacture. It makes no sense to still use plastic on many products. Only real reason is probably the owners of the plastic plants.

Eh? An item of packaging that is part of a typical product line will spend 99% of it's life outside of your hands in the making, filling, logistical and retail chain. So that bottle or wrapper will have actually have been in the system for weeks at least and probably months.