That’s not what half-life means. Half-life comes from radioactive decay and is the time for half the atoms in a sample to decay. After half the atoms have decayed it takes another half-life for half the remaining atoms (a quarter of the original sample) to decay. There’s some fancy maths you can do to convert a sample size of 85 million with a half-life of 75 years into the time it takes for the last atom to decay but at an estimation of about 27 half-lives that’s 2025 years.
Maybe that’s the real problem with boomers: their multi-thousand year lifespan!!
In citrus fruits sometimes ripe fruits will turn orange and then turn green again (either all over or in patches), it’s called regreening. It’s usually due to either chilly night temperatures or high UV exposure, so the same tree might produce completely orange or orange and green or completely green ripe fruit all in the same year.
Kumquats are taxonomically weird and may or may not be citruses, so I’m not sure that’s what’s happening in the OP, but I would guess it probably is.
It wasn’t as much the color as the shape I was commenting on. OP’s looks like a ball, but I’ve only seen them oblong (I’ve heard that “quat” means something like “pear shaped”).
Nivea Cream used to come in aluminum cans, then they changed to plastic. Recently they announced that they would come back to aluminum. We can still buy in plastic, though. I think it depends on the market.
Not only that, they advertised recycling to push public opinion that it was okay to switch to plastic, because plastic is recyclable. But they didn’t tell us, it’s never going to be economicaly viable to recycle plastic toothpaste tubes.
Yeah, but those metal tubes were awful. I have been brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine for decades, and I remember how much I hated those metal tubes. They always split open weeks before the tube was empty and then they’d leak and make a mess and I inevitably wasted a lot of product. When Tom finally sold to whatever corp and they switched over to the plastic tubes that don’t leak and let me use all the toothpaste I paid for, I danced a little jig.
Your comment made me have a flashback to my dad getting irritated at me for squeezing the middle of the toothpaste tube.
You’re only supposed to squeeze the far end of a metal tube – pushing product from the very end to the opening. Then as it gets empty you fold/roll up the flat bit at the end. You can even even buy “wringers” designed to assist with that.
But it’s not that simple. Back then no one recycled the can and all too many wouldn’t now. The can itself was heavier and not as effective. Plastic truly is a wonder material for packaging / it does a better job of keeping things fresh, is more convenient, and saving that weight, saving the energy going into making a can, saving the weight for shipping, is all a benefit of a plastic. We don’t have anything that works nearly as well
We all need to face the idea that convenience items like pudding probably shouldn’t be sold at all, especially with how easy instant pudding is
The group think around here is so crazy. Should we be using less single use plastic, especially the thin films? Absolutely. But the environmental impacts of mining all that metal and making all that glass to replace plastic with, plus the added energy for transporting the heavier packages and the cost of increased spoilage and product lost to dented cans and broken bottles, dwarfs the negative impact of the plastic replacements.
Also, I haven’t seen enough research on where environmental plastic comes from. While they’re are some benefits to just using less plastics, less packaging where we can, it would be much better to focus on the larger sources
Realistically what I’ve seen for larger sources of microplastics is:
industrial waste
tire dust
clothing
I already have a lint trap on my washer outlet and see there are a few filters meant to trap much of the manmade fibers that come off in the wash, to dispose of in the trash rather than back into the environment with treated wastewater. I have no idea whether that would actually be helpful but the filters aren’t that expensive, and it’s one of the few options under my control.
Increased standards on industrial waste cleanup are always a good idea. However a lot of this may be in undeveloped countries
If laundry is a significant source of micro plastics in the environment, we need to figure that out and add filters or something
We really really need to figure out something with tire dust, since it will continue to get worse as more people can afford personal transportation. I did read one article about filtering runoff near roads making a big difference but it was light on details and I’ve only seen something like that once
I actually work in the wastewater industry and from what I’m reading, a properly functioning sewage treatment plant already captures a very high proportion of microplastics. This widely cited study noted above 98% removal efficiency at one plant.
We’re already at approaching 2 log (99%) removal without actually trying to. It doesn’t seem improbable to me that with a few relatively modest tweaks to the system we could get 3 log removal (99.9%). Getting to 4 or 5 log removal is likely where things will get really expensive and challenging. But for now, a 2-3 log removal is probably good enough to focus on other sources like tire fragments/dust that typically pass directly to receiving waters with no treatment at all.
Pudding in cans was the best, it just tasted better. Juice in glass containers was also amazing. Plastic changes the taste and leaches microplastics into our bodies.
I’m really hoping we as a society get plastic out of our products.
You unlocked a core childhood memory. It must have been sometime around the late 1980s pudding started being sold in plastic containers and I forgot they had ever been in cans.
Also, in the army it was the pouches of fruit salad or pears. If you lucked out and got that in your box, you could trade for a lot to the poor sap who got cherry pie and “lung in a bag” isn’t doing it for them.
Oh ! I misunderstood the post. I thought it was about powdered pudding being most variety in the stores. There is still canned pudding and fruit coktail in France but also some in plastic.
Tbf Del Monte distributes all sorts of fruit/veggie related stuff, at least nowadays (In the United States). Used to go nuts for their peach cups when I was a kid lol
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