It's interesting how we've come full circle on disposable, single-use plastics, particularly with respect to the plastic ban reversals in the age of COVID. I am curious to see if this will lead in years to come, greater single-use items, or less.
I don’t know that anyone’s minds have really changed regarding disposable products. The situation is what changed, so that we now tend to think disposable products are okay for the moment given the pandemic.
It took years of nudges and eventual laws to seriously reduce a lot of single use plastics. Do you want to be the politician basically requiring the use of reusable plastic bags again? Or getting back into things that were always silly like plastic straw bans? It will be a decade before you reverse the switch to plastic bags.
In many places the switch has already occured back to disposable plastic bags i.e., it's getting them to switch back again to reusable is the question. How long will the public etc. accept the continued use of disposable? It could be years..
Reusable bags aren't even allowed in Massachusetts. I'd be surprised if that changed anytime soon and who knows if the laws requiring you to pay for "multi-use" plastic bags in some locales if you don't bring your own will "ever" end up being reinstated.
The other side of it is that single use plastics are reasonably well accounted for in North America, so many parts of the bans are more emotional than pragmatic.
I get frustrated with the attention that gets paid to trifling amounts of plastic consumption, relative to consumption of other petroleum products.
Gasoline weighs ~6 pounds a gallon. How many pounds of plastic does a moderately conscientious person place into waste streams in a month? How many miles do they drive?
Gasoline doesn't get tossed in the ocean and break down into ever smaller particles. It gets burned up in the atmosphere, creating a completely different kind of problem but at least it doesn't leave visible trash for people to rally around.
Neither does plastic that I put in the trash. It goes into a well managed landfill.
I can't be certain about what happens to plastic I recycle (but it's sorted and marketed, so I think it ends up in products that use recycled plastics).
Or it gets shipped to Asia, where it's manually sorted outdoors, at in-situ, un-regulated dumps by what is essentially slave labor. And then the unwanted low value stuff (most of it) is left to end up wherever the weather may take it.
I don't understand why they would buy it from the recycling center, ship it to Asia and then dump most of it in the environment.
When I say it is sorted and marketed, I mean they bale up plastic by type and sell the bales. There's some possibility that the bales, which are 99% the same material, are then shipped to China and sorted for value, but not really.
What you describe is the exception, and not the norm. It's also what usually gets shown as an example in the media, but isn't entirely honest. Some industry with uniform waste streams (zero net waste plants, etc) might do what you describe, but it's not common for municipal programs, who might have 2-4 different bins for dozens of different plastics.
And keep in mind, for most materials, and especially plastic, the recycling center pays for someone to take the material. Metals used to be a big exception, and could be used to offset the cost of recycling the other materials, but even they have greatly decreased in extractable value recently.
And even bales like you describe might need to be re-sorted for cleanliness, color, type of contaminate, or anything else. Most municipal programs are not producing "ready-to-recycle" bundles of plastic, unless it's being used solely as a filler.
With that in mind, dumping the stuff of lower value in Asia makes sense, where people can pick out individual things of value, or things that might have value after getting washed in the local river.
My description is of a small municipal recycling center.
I've seen the baling done.
I know the person that markets their output. The recycling center gets paid for the output. If they don't get paid for something, it goes in the landfill they are located at.
I’ve always thought the plastic bag bans were a bit silly. Those are definitely one of the more reusable and recyclable of the disposable plastic items.
Recyclable? No. The recycled plastic bag market has collapsed. The price of recycled plastic bags has dropped significantly. For many municipalities (ie: handled by "Waste Management" company), the company has decided that cleaning out plastic bags from conveyor belts is more costly than the price of recycled plastic.
I'm hopeful for multi-use plastics that can be sanitized. I own a gas mask (over the top) and a washable face mask, both obviously allow for multiple uses with some cleaning and maintenance.
Something that can survive being washed with hand soap for example should be more than good enough for most people in terms of sanitation.
What? We have multi-use plastics. Have you never seen plastic Coca-Cola cups? But who wants to work in a dish pit washing hundreds of dishes every day and splashing germy dish water all over themself right now? Furthermore, if you’ve seen how dishwashing works in your average pizza place, you probably wouldn’t want to put your lips on a multi-use plastic cup pandemic or not.
The way dishwashing works in your average pizza place: someone loads racks, and slides them into the dish machine. Inside the dish machine, recycled soapy water blasts them for maybe 40 seconds, and then they are sanitized with extremely hot fresh water for maybe 20 seconds. Then the operator opens the machine, slides out the tray, and puts them away.
(Source: I've washed dishes in 5+ commercial kitchens, though not a pizza parlor. But I've seen these machines and setups in several pizza places.)
Source: I'm a pathologist who runs a clinical lab, including microbiology, and I work with my local public health authority. I was also the electrical officer on a ship and had to help troubleshoot the ship's dish machines.
I don't know about the "recycled soapy water" bit. All the systems I've seen use fresh water on each use. The cost of dishwashing is trivia for a restaurant compared to the refrigeration systems, so I would be somewhat surprised if there was a collection tank, plumbing and valving to recirculate water from. That seems like it would occupy a lot of room and cost a pretty penny. Have you actually seen such a set-up?
> Dishes in your home are gross in comparison
Ah, yes and no. Hot soapy water is definitely effective. But the commercial systems are meant to sanitize, not clean. There are frequently things stuck to the dishes (lettuce comes to mind) that a) don't come off in water cycles, and b) may not get hot enough, long enough to kill everything to the deep surface of the lettuce, gunk, whatever.
By comparison, the dishes at home may not get to as high a temperature but you personally have the opportunity to inspect the dish before you re-use it. In a restaurant, the food is prepped to plate or serving dish before it comes to you.
In either case, I would anticipate most any swabs of the dishes would fail to grow on culture. In fact, in some commercial kitchens, like hospitals, we do environmental cultures. So this is a fairly known thing, at least as far as the design performance of the sanitization machines go. So, gross, stuck-on lettuce, yes. Sterile, yes. If your local deli isn't using the machine as intended, not much I can say about that.
It has a tank at the bottom, for the wash water. As fresh water comes in for sanitizing, some of the wash water goes down the drain -- 3/4 gal/cycle, per the brochure. We would drain the tank at the end of each day, and fill fresh in the morning.
> So, gross, stuck-on lettuce, yes. Sterile, yes.
The rule we were taught was: when it comes out of the machine, if it looks clean, it is clean. Which is to say, if there was still lettuce or other things on a dish you needed to spray them off and run it through again (and do a better job spraying before loading).
Its hard to get dish washer detergent with phosphates these day however its still available for commercial operations. The phosphates make the dishes much cleaner but can cause algae and other problems in the sewage systems. At home we don't use the dish washer much these days but it used to do a pretty crappy job until once I added a little bit of TSP (tri-sodium phosphate) to the detergent.
Fryer boil out cleaner is the same phosphate-filled formula as the old phosphate dishwasher detergent. It's a bit more expensive, but you no longer need to buy a rinse agent.
I washed dishes professionally once. Literally once, I worked at a golf course (typically picking up golf balls). Something happened in the kitchen and they didn't have a dishwasher that night... so they switched me over to dishwashing.
> Inside the dish machine, recycled soapy water blasts them for maybe 40 seconds, and then they are sanitized with extremely hot fresh water for maybe 20 seconds.
These two steps were a pipeline in the setup. The recycled soapy water was one "station". You pull down on a lever, and it goes up a bit later. You slide the tray to the right, pull a 2nd lever (for the 2nd station) for the very hot fresh water.
I don't know what temperature the "hot water" was, but by touch I'd describe it as "burning hot". Lots of steam, and the plates basically dried off by themselves in just minutes because it was so hot.
---------
Honestly, commercial dishwashing systems are significantly superior to the home stuff. If anything, my time as a professional dishwasher (as limited as it was) taught me that commercial systems care far more about sanitation than home systems.
Ironically, home dishwashers suck because of onerous EPA manufacturing regulations. If they weren't so terrible, people probably wouldn't use as many disposables at home.
On the other hand, washing things is always resource and energy intensive. Making dishwashers better would likely make it more environmentally friendly to use disposables than wash reusables.
That is true in places that have an dish washing machine, which tends to be true of more upscale or commercial kitchens. In your typical pizza joint it's very likely that they just have some guy in the dish pit and it goes like this: 3 second scrub in the soapy water, dunk in the fresh water, dunk in the sanitizer water. Source: I delivered pizza at such a joint and my little brother was the dishwasher. When things got backed up I often helped him catch up.
I was talking in context of the coronavirus, specifically plastics that are used to avoid contact with the virus. Obviously they exist, I am being hopeful that they become used.
> Furthermore, if you’ve seen how dishwashing works in your
> average pizza place, you probably wouldn’t want to put
> your lips on a multi-use plastic cup pandemic or not.
Right, but most things people are single-using are not things that touch their lips. It's going to be masks, bags, gloves, etc. If designed correctly, these can easily be multi-use.
In terms of cups, I actually quite like Germany's process of standardized glass bottles. I think glass in general is also easier to clean and worst case can be melted and re-formed.
Why haven’t they invented good biodegradeable plastics yet?
It’s not like there is a plastics lobby telling everyone not to switch to biodegradeable plastics like there is with smart guns because of the NJ law...
How can you make something that is biodegradable and at the same time strong? I have tried to use biodegradable bags and they literally biodegraded in a week.
I have biodegradable single use cutlery made from corn starch. It's stronger than it's cheap plastic single use counterpart. And ten times more expensive. Wood is also biodegradable. I recycle some of my chopstics.
I just saw the most obvious and brilliant invention - it's a dispensing bottle of hand sanitizer on a stand - you press a pedal at the base and a gearing presses down and dispenses a dollop. it solves so many issues !
There are automatic battery-operated (probably infrared?) dispensers posted in public places in my area. The whole thing is smaller than a tissue box, so the logistics are probably a lot simpler than they would be with dispensers the height of the distance between the ground and people's hands.
Most of the time they were just empty. These days they're stocked with soap and batteries. You already need a person to come by and refill it so I really don't think the small electric one is at that much of a disadvantage.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. A simple pedal on the floor seems perfectly acceptable. Doesn't need batteries to replace. Nothing wrong with that. Not everything needs to have "tech" applied to make it functional
there are lots of people who don't have the physical ability to use a floor pedal (wheelchair, elderly/using a walker, etc) for whom a simple sensor dispenser works great. Checking the dispenser once/a few times a day wouldn't be a big hassle.
It's not even tech, it's just off the shelf junk that any shop can buy for an extra $5 over a manual dispenser.
Exactly, that's the point I was trying to make. (I'm not sure why I got downvoted though --- I see something like that being possible with 1920s technology as a good thing. I recall foot-operated refrigerator doors being marketed in 1930s ads.)
They have had these for years in OR suites to dispense surgical scrub soap. They use an air bulb and tubing rather than mechanical link since that is much more durable and cheaper to replace. These obviously present an accessibility issue in public places that don't generally apply to ORs. I think the hand operated or IR is the good enough solution in most cases though.
I’ve had more than one experience where you go to use a hand operated and it’s empty. Then you wonder who touched that thing before you and what did you pick up.
I despise the hand operated ones now. Same with mechanical faucets in a public bathroom. I don’t want to turn it off once my hands are clean...
I've never understood this about public bathrooms. I don't need my soap dispenser to be automatic since I only use it when I'm going to be washing my hands already.
It's weird to see automatic soap dispensers but manual "hand pump" paper towel dispensers.
The soap dispenser is automatic because in theory it reduces the amount of soap used. Except for the ones built into the sink which try to shoot soap at you while you’re rinsing, and it becomes a game to dodge it.
In N Out in California has ones like this. You just squeeze this rubbery piece and it causes the sanitizer gel to come out, then you just use it on the entirety of your hands after. No big deal.
Except for those bathrooms with hand dryers which are supposedly environmentally friendly and hygienic, and not like an easy way for the facilities to skimp out on paying for paper towels and their disposal. I have a suspicion that they are probably worse since they are high-wattage when actually used (instead of people just wiping their hands on their pants) and they blow germs everywhere, and if the Dyson ones really loud and accumulate nasty-looking water inside of them, but I have never been able to rigorously test this.
On cruise ships they have been working this out for a bit. There's a bin by the door. You grab the handle with your towel, put the towel in the bin while holding the door with your toe, and then exit. Ship's health propaganda points out that this will be the case.
Shoes or not most diseases cannot infect through skin. They need mucous membrane. Washing hands after touching the feet is enough to keep the worst stuff out.
It's not a major vector. We don't always wear gloves either.
The difference between feet and hands is that hands frequently touch mucous membranes, where feet don't. So if you can move a contaminating activity from the hands to the feet this easily reduces infections by an order of magnitude for that vector.
I’ve also seen restroom doors with vertical pull bars that have a gap at the top, so you can sling them open with your wrist without putting your hand on it.
I'd love to find something cheap, like maybe some kind of lever device you could step on, that would open the doors mechanically without the need of using hands.
I have been trying on and off to come up with just such a device for decades. Leverage and profile are the big problems - and a door that opens inwards is a bugger.
I wonder if there are other, cheaper ways to give people a manual option to open the door without touching it. Maybe some mechanical device you could step on to open a door?
Unless, according to code, there isn't enough room in the outer area, or opening outwards would create a hazard. This is often why many public bathroom door open inwards, and yet passed code inspections.
The very first sentence of the paragraph in your link's section on this subject mentions these exceptions.
My post includes the clause "under certain conditions". I was trying to inform the OP of fire code regulations that might impede this design. I'm not sure why this was responded to so negatively.
What problem does it solve? Consider a normal hand sanitizer bottle with a pump. Pressing the pump with your hand may make your hand dirty (theoretically) but you can immediately disinfect it with the drop of sanitizer you just dispensed!
Assume that's true, what if you knew 100% that the person who touched the sanitizer pump seconds before you has COVID and has snot on his hands. What's the problem? You're going to disinfect that, right?
If you knew that, you might choose to avoid the area because the disinfectant probably isn’t 100% effective (not to mention you don’t want to be breathing the air right around where an infected person was just breathing). That’s not really a contradiction.
Honestly my theory here is that my hand is probably clean, but I am disinfecting to reduce harm to others or myself. Once I touch that bottle, standing in a public place for days touched by hundreds of random hands, I think my hand is not merely unclean, but looks a lot like Emil in Robocop after he gets smashed into that green goop at the end of the movie.
I prefer to use the soles of my shoes frankly - and if I prefer it I suspect most others would hence increasing the likelihood of use and so efficacy of the solution.
Problems notwithstanding, I depend on Zoom now. Maybe 100 years from now it will be thought quaint that we flew around in metal tubes to meet people in person.
With the prospect of brain interface development in the next 100 years, it's possible we'll be able to have a meet-in-person perceptional experience while being physically away, virtually wherever.
Meet-in-person perceptional experience implies at least an order of magnitude less latency than Zoom. And such low-latency communication will probably be good enough with traditional video calls, novel brain interfaces will add less value.
And yes, latency physically can't be good enough if users are on different continents. So, interestingly enough, this future synchronous communication tech can have some de-globalization impact.
OP never said they were named after the South. Just implied that having the same name could still be a problem. Github master branches have nothing to do with slavery but they still got rid of the term to avoid any possible connections one may make.
Fair enough. I guess some consider things like this progress, but it seems pretty silly to me. There are still plenty of females out there named Dixie. I guess they should start submitting their requests for a name change just in case, ya know, some ignorant person tries to accuse her family of racism...
Twitter (and "social media" in general [0]) is an extreme outlier.
Cancel culture is real, and a bit of real progress might be happening too, but judging it simply based on twitter is like judging anything based on what the most abrasive drunks throw at each other in pubs.
[0] the big problem of twitter and FB is that really anyone can talk to anyone, just comment whatever their completely unsolicited opinion happens to be. there's no moderation. there are likes, but there's no downvote. at least on reddit each community can set and try to keep their norms. and HN has dang :)
The article states that its a reference to the steadfastness and reliability of Louisiana currency. My understanding is that that's where the term "Dixie" in the South came from. Some people believe that the shared etymology should be enough to cancel the term.
It's a bit tenuous, but it doesn't seem any less tenuous than the association between the "master" branch on git with the subjugation of slavic people.
Dixie was a popular term around this time and has a few different origins. Again, in Louisiana, it was due to "dix" being the French word for 10. It states this in the article you linked. Eventually, Louisiana became known as "Dixieland" and the term ultimately was used to refer to all of the south. Dixie also came to be because of the Mason Dixon line, but this is not referenced anywhere in Dixie Cup's history. Again, they were a northern company.
Sorry I don't know what Dixie Crystals are. Just wanted to point out the shared lineage between Dixie Cups and the confederacy because it seemed topical
Not an american, but I'm guessing they're referring to the fact that Dixie is a nickname for the Southern US, in particular the states that were part of the Confederacy:
EDIT for those on a downvoting spree: I don't mean that the above meaning of Dixie is the origin of the Dixie Cup name, just that that's what I thought the original poster was referring to.
As an American, Dixie cups are dixie cups :) I know, that's no answer but that was my intent, I do not think we use the term everyday and prefer to say paper cups, but if someone said "dixie cups" I would not be surprised, just like in some other places you could "xerox" a document instead of "photocopying" it.
I got a kick out of the inventor's name Lawrence Luellen the last name in particular. I guess people in the US gave up trying to spell the Welsh surname Llywelyn.
Sounds like the person whose name it was also gave up trying to use Cymraeg, otherwise they'd perhaps be CluEllen.
Don't know how long off the boat they were, but often misspellings in UK surnames arise across generations in records. I guess because the family themselves are totally illiterate.
Also, IIUC on immigration to USA officials would record your surname on your papers and that became _the_ spelling, so that might also explain it?
That was something like 80 years after the invention of the dixie cup though, so I doubt that TV show would have helped anybody in America struggling with explaining the name Llywelyn to other Americans in the late 19th or early 20th centuries.
The assumption that Americans anglicized their names did so by accident because they were illiterate is just silly. I'm sure that happened sometimes, but loads of people anglicized their names deliberately in an attempt to conform with local expectations. One of my great-great-grandfathers, a literate German speaking immigrant to America, changed his name from Müller to Miller. Why? Well I can't ask him, but probably because it was the thing to do. This sort of thing was very common particularly during that time period. The later means the same thing, sounds about the same, but crucially would be more familiar to anglophone Americans. And Müller is comparably easy.
(To be clear, my last name is not Miller; I have an non-anglicized but reasonably common Italian surname.)
The Dixie cup ruined the word Dixie for me when I was a little kid because of its use to collect urine samples, before I learned about what Dixie means in regard to the South.
