Asklemmy

43879 readers

1420 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

162

How do we package food products sustainably in coming decades? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

100 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I imagine all plastics will be out of the question. I'm wondering about what ways food packaging might become regulated to upcycling in the domestic or even commercial space. Assuming energy remains a $ scarce $ commodity I don't imagine recycling glass will be super practical as a replacement. Do we move to more unpackaged goods and bring our own containers to fill at markets? Do we start running two way logistics chains where a more durable glass container is bought and returned to market? How do we achieve a lower energy state of normal in packaging goods?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Renewable sourcing is nice, but that doesn’t really address the main problem, which is what happens to the plastic after you’ve used it. If it’s burned, it will release the previously stored carbon into the atmosphere. If it’s recycled, the carbon stays in circulation. If it’s biodegradable, it solves the plastic problem for the most part.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago (1 children)

"Biodegradable" and "burning" release the same mass of carbon into the environment. Burning releases it as CO2. Biodegraded plastic releases that carbon as methane.

Biodegradability is not a desirable property of trash bound for a landfill.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Actually it depends on how it decomposes. Anaerobic processes tend to produce methane, whereas aerobic ones usually produce CO2. Anyway, I was mainly thinking of the microplastics though. Biodegradable plastic wouldn’t stay in a harmful form for thousands of years, but it would still produce carbon in some form.