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Comment by tambourine_man | Hacker News Reader

I think the parent meant an anecdote I've heard many times, in slightly different ways. It goes like this: a major toothpaste company was having a meeting, trying to increase sales. Many solutions were tried: new flavors, advertising, none had much effect.

On a whim, a director asks the guy serving coffee:

  - Jack, what would you do to increase sales?
  - Have you tried increasing the hole on the toothpaste?

There might be some truth to this, toothpaste tubes used to be metal in the 60s and you were supposed to punch a hole on the front of it with the back of the cover cap. That hole got a lot smaller than the ≈1cm wide in the plastic ones of today. It was also much easier to squeeze the very last gram by folding it.

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I had also heard a point for toothpaste involving the marketing: toothpaste advertisements, and all marketing imagery of toothpaste on a toothbrush, almost always show absurdly larger amounts of toothpaste than is effective or appropriate to use brushing teeth, trying to increase consumption by increasing waste.

Another explanation could be that advertisers are trying to increase the visibility of the product being sold.

It's amazing how backwards we went from a sustainability perspective when you consider likely no one had this issue front and center as they did in the early industrial days.

We used reusable metals and glasses much more. Now everything is plastic.

On the other side, just take a "Tragerl" of beer (German beer crate with 20x0.5l):

- It weighs much more than a crate of 20x0.5l aluminium cans or plastic bottles

- it is more voluminous: glass bottles have way thicker walls and they need plastic spacers to prevent the bottles from crashing each other, whereas cans and bottles can be shrinkwrapped just fine)

- the return logistics are simpler: glass bottles and the crates have to be returned to the brewery to be refilled, whereas PET bottles and aluminium cans enter the normal, regional recycling stream

The switch to plastics has saved lots of money and environmental pollution in logistics. What was missed though was regulating recycling capabilities of plastics - compound foils are impossible to separate, for example - and mandating that plastics not end up in garbage, e.g. by having a small deposit on each piece of plastic sold.

> The switch to plastics has saved lots of money and environmental pollution in logistics

Ah, but this is debatable!

https://www.wri.org/insights/planes-trains-and-big-automobil...

"Trains move 32% of goods in the United States, but generate only 6% of freight-related greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile trucks account for 40% of American freight transport and 60% of freight-related emissions."

From the beginning of the industrial period, we relied on rail and boat for logistics, and buggies for last mile deliveries, until the advent of affordable, mass produced vehicles, and the interstate system, this didn't change much. Our reliance on plastics combined with airplanes and trucks for logistics results in much greater pollution in my view.

Granted, coal was the primary fuel source for steamboats and steam engines, but sail still was common until iron boats became widespread, and still more economical for cross-sea transportation.

All this to say, as an amateur historian, in my view, this all comes to a precipice between the late 1950s and early 1960s, with the completion of the interstate highway system in the US, and DuPoint proliferating plastics in 1960s.

>in the United States.

Fun fact, Europe moves most of its freight by road: https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/figures/road-transpo...

Compare with the US: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQ13vD9... (A screenshot from this PDF: https://www.kth.se/polopoly_fs/1.87118.1550154619!/Menu/gene... )

That's an interesting point that without the interstate highway system (which had many benefits) we might be using rail a lot more than we are currently and therefore emitting less CO2.

Another way of looking at it is that we could consider the interstate highways only half-complete, and that the important part that was never built was an electrical delivery system for the cars and trucks that use it, so they can recharge their batteries without even stopping. It's what we would have been forced to build if fossil fuels weren't plentiful and cheap and we still wanted to use cars and trucks for our main transportation. We could have built that in the 70's in response to the oil crisis, and we could've had 50 years of electric vehicles by now, and it could have worked even using awful lead-acid batteries if cars didn't have to go more than twenty miles or so between electrified road sections.

Building the same thing now would be a lot easier. Battery technology is good enough that it would only be needed at regular intervals on the major freeways, and we can pair the electrified road sections with cheap solar power where it makes sense to do so.

> electrical delivery system for the cars and trucks that use it, so they can recharge their batteries without even stopping.

> and we can pair the electrified road sections with cheap solar power

I don't know. More cars on the road in general is just a bad idea IMO. Traffic, noise, accidents, parking lots, Fast and the Furious movies...

Alternatively we can use a system of transport that can carry a whole neighbourhood in one go, is electrified and can be built underground like a billionaire suggested we do for cars. It can be automated and sorta self driving too, can hit 180km/h without too much of a fuss. And we've been building them for almost 200 years.

Wouldn't that make more sense?

More trains would be good. In the U.S. that's a hard sell, though. People do road trips in their cars for vacation in part because it's so convenient to be able to bring a whole carload of food, luggage, and camping gear with you. And there's a lot of places trains don't go. How many national parks have rail service?

Replacing trucks for long-haul would be good, but you'd have to accept slower deliveries. (I wonder if Amazon ever ships things by train?) I expect it's less of an uphill battle to just figure out how to make the things people are already doing more energy efficient and emissions-free than it is to tell them to completely change what they're doing. Admittedly, that does come with the risk of getting stuck in a local optimum. I just think of all that diesel being burned to push wheeled boxes around the country and I'm appalled at the unnecessary waste. Those fossil fuels could just as well have stayed in the ground.

> People do road trips in their cars for vacation in part because it's so convenient to be able to bring a whole carload of food, luggage, and camping gear with you.

On a decent rail infrastructure you can run car-carriers like in the Euro Tunnel between UK and Continental Europe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurotunnel_Shuttle). These things are big enough to accomodate cars and even buses, with people being able to walk around outside of their car.

Another big thing is cleaning - maybe someone put paint thinner, bleach or some acid to their used bear bottle before returning it ?

It could be even an accident (eq. someone turning in old beer bottles found somewhere), but you have to still account for that when cleaning all the beer bottles before refill.

Aluminum is pretty great for recycling. And plastic bottles can work okay, but most types of plastic use are going to end up in the garbage.

> the return logistics are simpler

Umm, explain to me exactly how it is simpler to recycle a set of PET bottles than to transport a crate of glass bottles? It is infinitely more costly and complex, and involves multiple industries.

As for aluminum cans, it's perhaps less of an ordeal, but still you only recycle between 1/3 and 2/3 of the material:

https://www.container-recycling.org/index.php/calculating-al...

I believe you are only thinking about the logistics directly experienced by the end consumer... which is part of the problem with disposable consumption goods.

> toothpaste tubes used to be metal in the 60s and you were supposed to punch a hole on the front of it with the back of the cover cap

I'm definitely too young to remember anything from the 1960s, but you can still buy tomato paste in tubes like that. Neat.

Many medicines have the same tube style.

Anchovy paste too.

Reminds me of the Alka-Seltzer campaign "plop plop fizz fizz." One tablet was enough, but there wasn't any harm in consuming two. So they just told people to take two tablets. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/double-bubble/

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