Pepsi shortage?

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

From Google... And this is just in the USA...

"16% of plastic waste is recycled to make mew plastics, while 40% is sent to the landfill, 25% to incineration, and 19% is dumped.... The way plastic is currently recycled is more of a downward spiral than an infinite loop. Plastics are usually recycled mechanically: they are sorted, cleaned, shredded, melted and remoulded ..."

[Leo Enticknap]

Recyclable vessels for drinks are pretty straight forward: Just force the manufacturers to recycle their packaging. Quite a few countries have been effectively recycling those bottles for years by charging a small deposit on every bottle that you can get back if you return your empty bottles.

California supposedly has such a system, but it is for all practical purposes broken. You are charged the CRV surcharge for recyclable containers, but in most of the state, there is simply nowhere within a reasonable distance that will accept your used containers and refund you their CRV. There was a place that did in the parking lot of one of the local supermarkets until a couple of years ago, when it went out of business. The state tried to solve this by requiring supermarkets themselves to accept CRV containers they sold back again and repay their CRV to customers, but they quickly discovered that the fine imposed on them for refusing to do this was significantly lower than the cost of administering the system. This, combined with China now refusing to accept imported waste products for recycling, means that, I suspect, most plastic bottles used here likely end up in landfill.

[Randy Stankey]

In Boston, when I was going to college, there, more than thirty years ago, there were vending machines that accepted empty cans and gave you back your nickel.

You'd slide your empty can down a chute where it would land on a pair of rollers that rotated the can. There was a barcode scanner under the rollers. When the bar code rolled toward the scanner, it accepted your can and gave you back your nickel. The can went into a mini compactor and fell into a bin, inside the machine. If it was a non-acceptable container, it fell out of the chute at the bottom.

We need to see more of those!

[Leo Enticknap]

That machine sounds far too sensible to ever be allowed in California.

[Jim Cassedy]

I just learned from the owner of a local convenience store that part of the reason for the Pepsi predicament
is that the roof of a major Pepsi warehouse facility in Indianapolis collapsed during a storm there back
in late June or early July, destroying tons of product and halting bottling operations there for a while.
PepsiRoofCollapse.jpg

I remember reading back in 2017 about an entire Pepsi warehouse in The Soviet Union collapsing ,
releasing several million gallons of fruit juices that flooded the surrounding town. You can read
about it here ☞ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepsi_Fruit_Juice_Flood
(there are some great videos & pix of the flood online if you search a bit)

While that's alotta liquid- - nobody got seriously hurt, unlike in the Great Massachusetts Molassas
Disaster of 1919, in which a giant tank containing several million gallons of hot molasses burst,
flooding the nearby town & killing 21 people and 12 horses, knocked a locomotive off its' tracks,
and collapsed several houses. Now THAT was a major food flood! I read a really good book
about it several years ago after seeing a documentary on TV.

[Ed Gordon]

PET: The World’s Most Recycled Plastic

PET is the ultimate packaging and recycling material! But did you know it is also the world’s most recycled plastic? Between the United States and Canada, almost 2 billion pounds of PET plastic were collected for recycling in 2018.

From: https://www.recyclingcounts.com/2021...ycled-plastic/

I have been told that Trex decking is made primarily from plastic milk bottles. I did not find any confirmation of this at the Trex website.

Regardless, I believe most plastic can not be recycled today....

[Randy Stankey]

There is a lot of spin going on with the publicity around recycling PET plastic.

If you want to use recycled PET to make new plastic soda bottles, you can not use more than about 10% recycled plastic or else the results won't come out right. That 10% considers new, unused or pre-consumer material.

I worked in a plant that made PET bottles for food and drinks. There were three large machines, as big as a school bus, that pumped out 25,000 bottles per hour and sent them down a conveyor line to be inspected and palletized before shipping. There was a scale, a metal detector and a machine vision camera system that inspected every bottle that came through. If any bottle failed any one of those tests, it was blown off the line by an automated air jet and it landed in a large bin for collection, about the size of a cubic yard.

Every night, we would wheel back several bins of rejected bottles to be shredded, melted down and recycled into new bottles. Every tech and engineer in charge of the recycling had their hands full. They constantly had to check and analyze the shredded scrap to be sure that the mixture of virgin to recycled plastic was right. If anything was off, they would have to add things in to adjust the mixture but, if there was too much recycled material in the mix, the whole batch would be scrapped.

There were three lines and each one produced about five or six yard-sized bins per shift. That's one to two dozen cubic yards of bottles. (Pre-shredding) If there was a screwup on the line an operator could easily end up standing knee deep in defective bottles. Whenever that happened, the guys in charge of in-plant recycling all did the face palm because their jobs just got harder.

So...If that's what happens with in-plant recycling, I have a hard time to imagine what a nightmare recycling post-consumer plastic bottles must be like.

Collecting, sorting, cleaning and shredding those bottles is just the tip of the iceberg. Remixing the recycled product back into the virgin material is hard enough when using pre-consumer materials. Using post-consumer materials might be a nightmare!

Even with all that in mind, PET plastic has a finite lifetime. It can only be recycled two or three times before it has to be disposed and new plastic has to be made.

All the talk we hear about recycling plastic bottles is mostly bullshit.

I'd rather see more aluminum be used.

PET plastic is gas permeable, hygroscopic, subject to attack by chemicals and it is sensitive to temperature. That means that the carbon dioxide will eventually leak out, even if it takes a long time, it will. It will absorb water from the product inside the bottle or from the environment outside the bottle. Depending on what's inside the bottle, the contents might attack the plastic. Plus, hot drinks don't work very well in plastic bottles.

Aluminum, on the other hand has a virtually unlimited recycling lifetime. It is almost impermeable. It is less subject to chemical attack. It can handle higher temperatures. Plus, it takes a lot less energy to recycle aluminum.

Like I said above, it peeves me off when manufacturers understand that using plastic is unsustainable yet they keep on pumping the stuff out like there's no tomorrow. They KNOW that recycling is bullshit yet they keep talking like it's the consumer's fault that plastic isn't getting recycled.

[Van Dalton]

In Boston, when I was going to college, there, more than thirty years ago, there were vending machines that accepted empty cans and gave you back your nickel.

You'd slide your empty can down a chute where it would land on a pair of rollers that rotated the can. There was a barcode scanner under the rollers. When the bar code rolled toward the scanner, it accepted your can and gave you back your nickel. The can went into a mini compactor and fell into a bin, inside the machine. If it was a non-acceptable container, it fell out of the chute at the bottom.

Yeah, we had those machines in southwest Washington, mostly at the end of Fred Meyer parking lots. They were run by a Portland company called "Aluminium CanBank" ("We Crunch Cans Into Ca$h!"™) and were about the size of a shipping container. IIRC the company went out of business around the same time Freddy's were acquired by Kroger in 1998. Once that happened they went bye-bye. TMK there hasn't been a program like that on this side of the river since. My grandad had Diet Pepsi and Sprite flowing through his veins so he made heavy use of them.

Oregon, of course, has their thing (and because of it I routinely have to evict bums and scrounges from the skips behind work, and more than a few times, have the coppers escort them out in cuffs) but the law of diminishing returns makes the difference between the cost of gas to get across the river and the $1.50 you might get back from your bags of Pepsi and Sprite cans accumulating in the garage impractical. So they just go into the kerbside bin and that's the end of it. Unless you work out all the numbers like Newman and Kramer, and even then it's a losing gamble.

Oh well, it was great while it lasted.

[Jim Cassedy]

I recall seeing a couple of those "reverse-vending" machines someplace a couple of years ago.
A friend who has family in Japan, where they have vending machines for EVERYTHING, tells
me that they are not uncommon over there.
☞ . . and I was easily able to find a picture of one on the interweb.
CanRecycleMachine.jpg

[Marcel Birgelen]

Those "reverse vending" machines are also all over the place over here. Many of them also have a door where you can insert a crate, even partially filled ones, as long as the bottles inside the crate are all the same. Once you're finished feeding the thing, you get a credit slip, which can be redeemed at checkout. Most of those "machines" aren't standalone machines, but behind them is a room with a belt on them that pre-sorts the bottles. The logistics behind them are pretty minimal and most operations are outsourced to the recycling companies. The machine scans the bottles and/or crates at high speed. It doesn't actually check for the barcode, as even bottles without label still work. It scans the shape of the bottle and apparently also the transparency. It also rejects half-full bottles.

Every store that sells recyclable bottles or cans is required to accept them in return too. There are even monetary incentives for stores to do this and this way, about 87% of all bottles actually get returned and re-used. Apparently, a recycled bottle is about 60% cheaper and uses about 70% less energy to produce, even if it's completely molten and re-cast,

Some suppliers re-melt the plastic into new bottles, others actually clean the bottles and refill them. Those bottles are usually of a thicker PET material and are easily recognizable by the scratches on the outside due to processing.

This system clearly works. It solves only a small part of our garbage problem, but there is no reason not to implement it all over the world. Even better, because right now those systems are islands. I can't redeem a bottle I bought in Germany or Belgium in the Netherlands for example. Although their systems are similar, they're not compatible...

[Scott John]

When I was first making my theatre I sent a letter to Pepsi and a letter to Coke. "Setting up a movie theatre, come and talk to me."

Three days after I mailed the letters the Pepsi salesman was ringing my doorbell.

Five years later the Coke salesman showed up.

We just went with Pepsi because Coke wouldn't respond to any emails or calls. The Pepsi folks have been awesome and will be replacing lines, servicing the machines, providing display fridges, etc all because they are hungry to get our business.

[Martin McCaffery]

When I got here in 1985, we were Coke, had always been Coke and being the south, everyone was Coke. Then the local bottler got taken over by a big regional bottler. They made a decision early on that they didn't want any of the small accounts, and so basically quit serving us. After a few months of abuse, and telling them if they don't show up I'm switching to Pepsi, I did. I called Coke several times to come and take their dispenser, which sat in our lobby for a few weeks. Finally had to call them and tell them if it wasn't gone by 6:00 it was going in the dumpster. They arrived at about 5:55.
Pepsi has been good to us for what must be 30 years.
For awhile, I was asking every business I saw that had Pepsi why they sold it, and they said that Coke made if very clear they were not interested in servicing their account.
We still get the occasional whiners wanting Coke (including my assistant), but Coke has never given me a reason to switch back.

[Randy Stankey]

...being the south, everyone was Coke.

A common conversation overheard at a restaurant in the south:

Waitress: "What would you like to drink?"
Customer: "Coke."
Waitress: "What kind?"
Customer: "Orange..."

I called Coke several times to come and take their dispenser, which sat in our lobby for a few weeks. Finally had to call them and tell them if it wasn't gone by 6:00 it was going in the dumpster.

When I was a kid, my father owned a bar with a pool table. After having to handle too many fights over the pool table, my father decided to get rid of it.

He called the vending company where he leased it from and told them that he was done but, after a couple of weeks of repeated calls with no response, he and a few guys picked it up and carried it outside and left it in the parking lot. My father called them back and told them that their pool table was in the parking lot.

It was less than an hour before the truck rolled in to pick it up.

[Buck Wilson]

Another shortage right now are central air conditioning compressor units... Mine went out in my apartment and the landlord brought in a portable unit that I had my doubts about for a place this large. But it's actually cooling the entire three bedroom place pretty well, and the replacement compressor unit that goes outside is about month off..

Yeeep. Mom just had her whole setup replaced but couldn't go variable speed because they said there was months long backorder on those

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Update on ours... It was replaced yesterday (Friday) and is working great again. They brought one in from Oklahoma of all places. I guess you get them from where you can find them...