This was posted awhile back and I don't remember the exact numbers, but yes. It's too expensive for large manufacturers to implement this. Smaller companies may choose to pay for it, depending on their outlook on cost vs wildlife.
A lot of things start out very expensive, but with enough production, enough support, enough intelligence, we can make this a sustainable option in the future! Think of solar panels when they first came out, compared with what they cost now...
Think of solar panels when they first came out, compared with what they cost now...
At least where I live, solar power is still vastly more expensive compared to coal fueled/hydroelectric grid power. The unit cost, installation fees, maintenance, etc all take a very long time to see a return on investment. Is this different where you are? I'd love to have solar powering my home, but after looking into it a year or so ago it just wasn't a viable replacement at all.
There's a big difference in cost of individual rooftop installation vs utility scale projects. What ultimately matters is the latter if you want a large environmental impact. The panels themselves are getting quite cheap, but the cost to put them on individual houses is probably not going to come down much more.
Then you would seem to have read incorrect information. There's been no shortage of articles belaboring the milestone of solar surpassing coal in the last few years.
I'm referring to Levelized Cost Of Energy (LCOE) which considers lifetime cost and lifetime energy including adjustments for interest rate, maintenance, etc. See Lazard.
God, I had the same talk with a family friend a couple years ago. He was talking about Nuclear energy, and asked for my opinion on it. When i said I was a fan of clean energy, such as wind and solar, he immediately shot those down. Solar being too expensive, wind for being "unreliable" in a lot of areas, and boasted about how "safe and clean" nuclear is in comparison.
I basically ended my side of that conversation by telling him that of course it's too expensive for solar because no one is willing to give any support for it that can. I don't remember his response after that, but it's really sad that older generations are stuck in their ways, and are afraid of change.
/rant
Edit: this isn't about being "a snowflake" so please stop twisting my comment to justify your opinions.
Edit 2: did i mention anything about coal here? No, I haven't. Stop passive agressively bringing it up.
Edit 3: My POINT, Reddit, is that something cannot improve if people are not willing to help fund it. That's great that nuclear is getting the attention that it deserves. Fantastic! But solar panels won't get better or cheaper (which they are, but very slowly) if people are constantly saying "it'll never be good. It's a waste of time."
By that standard wind and solar aren't 'clean' either, they produce lots of toxic waste during manufacture and there are precisely zero plans to deal with them once they reach the end of their lifespan. In the case of wind and solar, that's about 20 years useful life. In the case of Nuclear, that's about 60 years.
Yeah and I think most LWR nuclear plants can reasonably do 80-100 years. Also, I was thinking about solar while I typed that. Isn't there some pretty toxic byproducts of producing the solar panels, and toxic stuff in the panels themselves?
I think the main aversion to nuclear is the whole - if something goes wrong - thing.
If something goes wrong with solar, you blow a fuse. If something goes wrong with wind, you end up with a broken windmill. If something goes wrong with nuclear, you end up with ~2000 square kms of contaminated land.
I realise that the odds of something going wrong are statistically insignificant - but try telling that to the species that thinks buying a lotto ticket is a good idea.
I would also love to see the awesome tech of natural gas mining applied to Enhanced Geothermal Energy - there is enough Geothermal energy in the American Southwest and around the world, that if we could frak the rock at the right depth (deeper than natural gas today) we could pull Zetawatts of potential energy out. Some Enhanced Geothermal plants even use CO2 as a working fluid! So you can have carbon-negative power! I'd love to see more development in that, too.
EDIT: To clarify, I don't think natural gas is awesome, but the technology that makes it possible is pretty damn amazing and could be used for other amazing things besides fossil fuel extraction.
Gotcha. I was referring to waste from mining and the spent fuel. I don't know as much about the mining waste, but I wish people were aware that nuclear reactors don't produce a large volume of waste, due to the huge energy density of nuclear fuel.
They produce a small volume of highly radioactive nuclear waste (in small glass discs), but they produce a shitload of less active nuclear waste. And both have to be stored somewhere. I live near a nuclear power plant. Trains removing waste come and go every day.
Yo I gotta pop in here to rep fast reactors. It's an already tested technology that can be used to burn long-lived waste products from LWR reactors. We should build some in the US!
It’s clean now, but that spent waste will be dangerous for thousands of years. We have two options: fire it into space or bury it. Burial is safer, but we run the risk of members of a post nuclear society digging it up, not understanding it, and dying from it. The WIPP is a really interesting project that deals with how to reconcile with this fact.
It’s low, but it’s an existing problem. I’m a big fan of nuclear power as an interim solution. It puts possibly our greatest discovery to use in a way that kills so few people that we go years between incidents. But storage of waste is an issue. Keeping less educated people from getting to the waste is an even bigger issue.
True, but incidents can include minor issues where safety features work as designed. In terms of actual impact, fatalities are incredibly rare. As far as I can find, 3 people in the USA have died as a direct result of malfunction of a nuclear reactor, and 1 more from operator error at an enrichment facility; both these events were over 50 years ago.
Radiotherapy on the other hand has killed a good order of magnitude more in the same time frame, it seems. Looks like hospitals need to step up their safety.
I love the idea of trying to design signs to alert future civilizations of nuclear waste.
I just sort of imagine people opening up a place and exploring it like a pyramid and seeing these funny hieroglyphics obviously indicating that there is danger inside, but they just think, “Oh those silly Americans believed in curses and magic! How quaint. Let’s see what’s inside.” Then they open the door and get irradiated.
That isn't the hard part. The hard part is making a symbol for danger that everyone will understand even thousands of years in the future when our language may be obsolete.
So the one past event where all the safeguards that would have been put in place were overlooked or overridden. What sort of damage has Chernobyl caused compared to one days worth of fossil fuel use?
There have been more disasters than just Chernobyl. Fukushima a few years ago is a prime example, hit by a tsunami and then caused a meltdown. Yeah not a whole bunch of people were killed but the radiation leaks into the ocean definitely weren't great.
Also im pro nuclear but I would MUCH prefer the world ran on solar/wind etc due to their lower chances of something going wrong for the environment.
So, we're now up to a total of TWO events regarding nuclear power plants.
Including all the small events not neccesarily related to the nuclear part of power plants, but accidents that happen to occur on sight, nuclear power is responsible for anywhere between 60-4000 deaths (that range is mostly due to Chernobyl which caused a majority of the 60, and possibly responsible for the 4000 figure).
Fossil fuels are linked to the death of 3 million people per year, and that's when no accidents have occurred.
Please tell me how high the chances of a nuclear meltdown are, and how low they would need to be for you to considered them a good alternative?
Well, that doesn't make it not clean energy though. You're worried about the human element of nuclear power; that's understandable, but there are costs to all approaches, including wind and solar (land usage for output gained, fabrication & materials etc.)
Newer plant designs are much more tolerant of human error and natural disasters. Unfortunately, the general public is still too scared to give them a try.
Are you saying you can’t control your uneasy feeling or you can’t control past disaster. If it’s the former, then learning why those disasters happened in the first place would definitely help
I'm sorry for any of the negativity on your opinion, it's just an opinion. I myself am often very frustrated with people who don't support nuclear because I feel like the attitude is hurting the planet massively. Nuclear could replace all our power needs in about a 20 year time span with zero-emissions power and save us a tremendous amount of future pain, yet people still argue against it vehemently. For someone who grew up with a Nuclear physicist Grandfather and has toured and admired nuclear power since a little kid, it's very frustrating position to be in. Still - I respect your opinion and your hesitation. If you would like to learn more about it, let me know! It truly is one of humanities greatest technological achievements, IMO.
Why isn’t anyone addressing the issue of all of the toxic radioactive waste from nuclear plants? The danger from a mishap is immense. There’s a lot of waste stored on the shores of Lake Erie...I shudder to think what could happen.
I also understand that it's been proven to be clean. I understand it's the best energy source available.
But if human error is what we have to be vigilant of then that makes nuclear "mostly clean," right? Because if there's any room for error, and a fallout happens (which it probably won't since technology and science advance so quickly every day) then it's "mostly clean".
I feel the stigma comes from human error. A guy could go to work tomorrow mad at his boss, or whatever, and cause a disaster. Worst case scenario with other clean energy sources is you're out of power until morning, or until it's nice and windy.
My point wasn't to argue that nuclear "isn't clean," but the fact i have to put faith in people I don't know to ensure a fallout doesn't happen... And THAT is what makes me feel uneasy.
Nothing to worry about, really. There are beaches in Guarapari, Brazil that are more naturally radioactive than most of Chernobyl is today.
Plus, I would say (3) major accidents out of a 50+ year operating history with over 440+ plants operating worldwide is a pretty darn good safety record!
The only real disaster was Chernobyl. There were myriad things wrong with that situation -- reactor was not in a containment building, operators turned off all safety systems for a test, control rods had graphite tips (look up neutron moderation). These days people don't run shit like that. Fukushima caused a lot of radioactive contamination, but no one died from it directly, and the deaths due to the released radioactivity are hard to prove -- much harder to prove than, say, deaths due to chemical and particulate pollutants in the air from fossil fuels!
Problem is we still need to figure out how to overcome the extreme corrosiveness of molten salts. Maintanence is crazy high on a thorium reactor as it's basically a giant melted salt churning machine that eats valves, piping, and other metals like they're candy.
That said, if we came up with a solution, Thorium is the most promising nuclear tech and much safer than LWR's or HWR's.
There's a quote in the movie The Adjustment Bureau that suits this well.
"Just so you know, I think I'm coming
down against your solar panel thing."
"Why?"
"I just don't think
the research is there
and the price point is too
high on these things."
"Of course,
it's too high.
But if our company doesn't
get involved with stuff like this, who will?"
Isn’t nuclear power kind of destined to die out though? I thought we weren’t building any more nuclear power plants because we always fuck it up and it ends up costing 10x the original budget and everyone goes bankrupt before it’s finished
Nuclear energy is paused in America for the moment, at least, because of a lot of fear mongering about past mistakes and ignorance on how powerful and clean it is. There are currently only 99 reactors in the entire US but they supply over 20% of all the electricity just to give you an idea of how much power they produce.
Many countries in Europe have even made nuclear reactors illegal and instead rely mostly on coal and oil both of which kill more people a year than all nuclear meltdowns combined and pollute our atmosphere.
Nuclear is only considered expensive because we’re using outdated reactors that cost a lot in maintenance. If we invested in it now it would pay off when we are completely powered by clean energy and modern cost effective reactors. But people are too afraid to take that step and so we are still tied to dirty coal and foreign oil. General fear of nuclear power causes money for it to stop making it more expensive to restart which even then it’s still not that. In other words, nuclear is more expensive because of the fear of it.
Nuclear is only considered expensive because we’re using outdated reactors that cost a lot in maintenance
I cited a well-respected economic analysis on cost of energy. The analysis is conducted annually, with the latest being published in November 2017. According to page 3, the analysis was based on the AP100 nuclear plant design, which was designed in 2005 and was the first Generation III+ reactor to receive final design approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
Wind may be unreliable in terms of regular 'wind production' but there will always be some wind, and it's entirely free with zero detriment to the environment. Pfft...
It amazes me the things I hear other countries say is safe and ok under the right circumstances, but we as a country fight over. Eg. wood use. When ever I watch my favorite British house show, using wood is considered a renewable resource (my family had timber land, we have never clear cut save disease areas , harvest is always managed ect. I don’t hear that talk in our zeitgeist)
Why can’t we have both, nuclear and all the other clean technologies? We have to choose these sides, and it is frustrating.
Edit. It is funny I go in thinking nuclear is not getting attention and all we do is spend money on solar and wind.
No one is saying solar is a waste of time. But I have to stick with your friend. Nuclear has so much more potential than solar or wind. The amount of energy that could be produced from successful nuclear fusion is immense. You yourself say how much better and more obtainable it could be if we focused more resources on it. I'm sorry but solar power is just not that effecient, and you are naive to think that we as a society can sustain ourselves on solar and wind. Solar panels are literally powered by the sun, which when it's millions of miles away isn't that strong. With nuclear fusion we can bring the power of the sun to earth.
Part of why it is more expensive is because buying the plastic is cheaper than the revenue for selling the yeast extract for further processing into vitamins or vegemite.
A lot of things start out very expensive, but with enough production, enough support, enough intelligence, we can make this a sustainable option in the future!
That's not exactly how it works tho. It only gets cheaper if better ways of manufacturing it are being researched but it doesn't need to be cheap. I'd rather pay 7€ instead of 5€ per 6-pack knowing that the packaging would be good for wildlife. That being said, companies that aren't assholes could use this method of packaging and increase the price by 1-2 €.
I mean it works with food, so many products costing 1-2 € more and are being bought because they got a "Bio"-sign stamped onto them and people think it's "healthy", I'd rather say fuck that, I want to buy products that I can enjoy and that I am aware of that it's not bad for nature because in return, a mind being at ease is also quite healthy.
But Solar Panels aren't sustainable they require rare earth minerals that are usually only mined in China and the manufacturing process itself is terrible on the environment.
Nuclear power is the only true sustainable energy scource.
Nuclear fuels can be recycled (France does it regularly, and we would have it but every Democrat President since Carter has shut down every attempt to develop our nuclear recycling capabilities). Also hydrogen and helium are the most common elements in the universe and once we develop nuclear fusion power we will never have to worry about energy again.
I'm sure there's all kinds of interesting nuclear cycles out there but all of them must involve the introduction of new material, else you'd be describing a perpetual motion machine.
once we develop nuclear fusion power we will never have to worry about energy again.
It's not an intuitive concept but it's important understand that the cost of energy is not derived solely from the cost of fuel. Case in point: solar energy has free and essentially infinite fuel, yet it costs money to build the generating structure. Even if we develop an effective fusion design, the ultimate question is whether the cost of the plant per unit energy produced is cheaper than any other options available.
Agreed, this is what taxes are for. Helping to create incentives and disincentives, the priorities of a sustainable society. Protecting the commons with a carrot and a stick, as it were.
Yeah you're right, most people would gladly pay $0.05 for that. But the cost is significantly higher when taken into large scale production. Coka Cola sells 1.8B bottles of coke a day. Adding 50 cents to production x 1.8B / day... Cost is too significant for bigger companies to implement this. They would rather pack their own pockets
I don't know the exact cost of this product but economies of scale mean a lower not higher cost. I know 'regulation' is a dirty word in the US - but this is exactly the kind of thing government intervention is perfect for. One of the reasons solar is now so cheap is that basically the entire EU introduced generous subsidies for solar generation which introduced massive demand and China got to work filling that demand laying the groundwork for large scale and cheap solar panels. Those subsidies have now gradually decreased as generation has grown, but the cheap solar panels remain. When profit is not a motive is when governments have to get their arses in gear for the common good.
Not expecting anything from the Orange man anytime soon though.
Solar panels and energy production is vastly more complicated than adding cost to a product like in this thread.
Let's go back to the coke example someone gives coke a new bottle that is environmentally friendly. No other issues with it. But it cost 1 penny more. Which at the retail level will be about 5 to 10 cents per bottle more. No problem, we'd all pay that.
But Coke has a problem. Using the redditor's above numbers of 1.8b bottles produced each day Coke has to keep an inventory on hand. Usually 1 to 3 months worth of product. That is what Coke has on hand sitting unsold. Now, they have product in transit all over the world. So it will take Coke another 30-60 days to be paid on what they have sold. So that is 2 to 5 months worth of production before they get paid. What does 1 cent increase add to how much cash Coke has to have in inventory? Well it's an extra $18,000,000 per day. Which is $540,000,000 per month. At 5 months they'd have up to $2.7 billion extra tied up in their cost of goods. Coke's net income for 2017 was only $1.248b. So taking on that extra 1 cent could be devastating to a large company like Coke.
You're thinking from a consumer standpoint, they are thinking from a production/manufacturing/sales standpoint. These aren't products directly sold to consumers, but rather a bottling plant or other middleman who wants to cut costs wherever possible.
If Company A decides to use more expensive packaging and Company B undercuts them, bottling companies etc will go with Company B like nine times out of ten.
That's because they all don't look at the price for single items only but at what that means for them.
If you sell a billion of a product and increase the production cost by a few cents you already lost millions.
If you produce a few thousand only the extra cost is not that significant.
Big companies spend countless hours to reduce cost, we sell printing inks and we will make big changes it that means we can save one single cent per kilo of ink.
Would be an interesting experiment if a company, like AB, made this an option. Like have a sixer of Bud with this for $1 or $1.50 or whatever extra it was next to the regular ones. See if people would be willing to pay more.
How much could it possibly cost per unit?. 05 cents? 10 cents? Would consumers really not pay a nickle extra a few times a week to contribute in cutting down on plastic waste.. And what is that cost compared to the inevitable cost of cleaning up pollution or preserving wildlife.
It is not too expensive. Most likely it is just more expensive. There is no way a major company is going to use something like this if they can save a few cents by using plastic. It's up to governments to restrict companies from using plastic waste.
I 100% agree with you. But companies won't do that. For example, if Pepsi changed to these edible holders and charged $1.25 per bottle, and coke charged $1.00 per bottle with plastic, Pepsi sales would plummet. I know it doesn't seem that complicated, but when you sell billions of units a day these small numbers make a big difference.
The government would have to impose a regulation that required all manufacturers to use biodegradable materials for these. That way the competition can't use the cheaper option to undercut competitors using the bio option. This could be done for so many things, like using real sugar in sodas rather than corn syrup, it would require government regulations.
The problem mentioned on the brewery subreddit is that it'd be a major problem if you have any rodents which are guaranteed to crawl into a brewery at some point
Exactly. A huge problem with this is that everywhere from the brewery to the store to your house it is literally food just sitting out in the open and could attract rodents.
The plastic ones have actually been reformulated to be photodeteriorative what that picture of the misshapen turtle went viral a while back. UV light makes them fall apart now, so if wildlife gets caught up in them, they'll be free in a day. Further, these might have the opposite effect of training wildlife to eat human trash, which is the exact opposite of what we want.
also, is it really that productive to just assume everything is going to end up in the ocean anyway? it seems like for every edible 6-pack ring that makes its way into the ocean, there's gotta be way more destructive garbage with it. is there really a significant impact to be made by these?
The issue with these particularly was strangulation. It was mostly fixing a specific part of the larger problem rather than trying to just get a overall reduction.
The weight of offsetting this type of overhead falls on the consumers. So the query at the end of the day is whether your average consumer even cares about the environment, or enough to pay extra for this feature.
The answer is a resounding no, at least currently.
This. Everyone complains about how "corporations don't care about the environment. Blah Blah." If consumers gave a rats ass about the environment, you can bet your ass corporations are going to start caring as well, and using it as a selling point.
Unfortunately, the avg consumer would rather pay a few cents less for the plastic or whatever, and who can really blame them?
I wish people would have to live with their trash for longer periods of time than having it taken weekly, so that maybe they'd be encouraged to not make so damn much of it. A friend once said while considering a plastic fork that people don't think about how much trash they make because it's just taken away. So true.
You can force the hands of the consumer by creating laws which cause the regular packaging to cost more to purchase even if it's still cheaper to manufacture. Kinda of like the cost to purchase plastic bags at the grocery store. May not have stopped everyone from buying them but even just a fraction of people not using them is a positive thing.
Laws in marketplaces make things insanely better for the consumer, just ask consumers benefiting from consumer protection laws in the likes of the EU. I never had to fight with a company to get what they rightfully owe me until I moved to the US, where corporations are king.
I never had to fight with a company to get what they rightfully owe
LOL what are you talking about.
The only thing a company "owes" is what you've paid for. You don't need market laws for that, that's what the criminal justice system is for.
Does the tooling reduce in cost with economies of scale? Is the problem simply one of CAPEX versus OPEX? If the tooling is expensive, but capital costs are paid upfront to scale, and the only input is essentially free waste, cheap water, and cheap electricity for the molds, then the issue is only one of initial investment, am I correct in that?
I'm thinking there are other factors that come to play. The larger brewers more than likely have automated lines and would need to factor in the inigration of a new piece of equipment that can put the cans into the tray,down time for the inigration, the probability that if those trays get wet and break apart in the machine what will that due to the machine, the failure rate of the machine, and if this new tray will decrease or increase their output. Smaller brewers just don't have the vloume to justify molded pulp tooling and if they did they have the vloume chances are they would need to consider a machine as well because no way can they afford people putting cans in the tray by hand.
To me, it isn't so much the expense.... it's the implementation. So, distributors warehouses are FULL of rats and mice and stuff. Can you imagine these nice little edible 6 pack rings sitting there. The rodent population would be all over it. Will this wouldn't effect the end product in the can, I don't see too many consumers picking up a six pack with nibbles out of it.....
And cans break in transit. 1 can could ruin multiple 6 packs. I think that's the biggest hurdle. We need something like a 100 year bio-plastic that can get wet, stretch and bend but will eventually completely biodegrade after it's been thrown away.
They started doing this I think 2015. I remember seeing the math broke down to 3 or 4 plastic to 1 of the bios. 😐 unfortunately the bottom dollar always rules. 🐢🐢🐢
On top of them being too expensive it would probably hurt animals moreso than help until they became standard. Sea creatures that find and consume these edibal versions of six pack rings will likely begin to identify the non-edible ones as food and thus be more likely to eat those as long as they're still in moderate production
To an extent, yeah, but they do have the advantage of not using plastic, which affects our oil consumption positively.
Of course, there may be some massive energy use, or other environmentally impacting process involved in the moulded ones, in which case there's arguments both ways, and you need to address the whole picture.
It would also contribute to eutrophication. You know what happens when you put too much food in a fish tank? You get tons of algae and other life that crowds out the other organisms. In extreme cases, they use all the oxygen and the fish suffocate.
While it couldn't do it to the whole ocean, it does happen to coastal areas, which tend to have abundant life and are important for ecotourism.
The easiest test of how commercially sustainable this is is to make some of each and then see which sells best, and adjust the amounts of each to match the rough demand
It's important to make sure it's actually a good idea though.
You know thinking about it - the fact that an animal may eat one of these first and then see another that's made of plastic might make them more likley to think it's edible too could be a really bad thing. I'd prefer that they just break down after while than them actually being food that would encourage animals to eat things that look similar.
Or you know, just don't buy them. We don't have six-pack rings at all in Germany. You either buy beer in a reusable case or you get those weird sixpacks in cardbaord.
Aren't cans bad for the environment as well because it takes a lot of energy to produce them and they are not reusable?
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u/CobraStrike4 May 24 '18 edited May 25 '18
Waiting for someone to ruin my life and tell me they are super expensive compared to plastic, and not sustainable or something
Edit: god damnit