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Whataburger still uses it for the Large and the What-a-size drinks and i think some if not all the McD’s uses them for their Large too. But, yeah, we pretty much almost completely cut styrofoam out of the food industry.

is a state by state thing i think MCds here has plastic or Wax paper cups and the LARGE is only 20 oz now NOT the 32 and 44 oz that I miss from my childhood. Even 7-11 doesn’t serve the 64 oz double gulp anymore.

I remember the Mc DLTs. You had the hot side and the cool side. You opened up the Styrofoam container and slapped the two side together and there was your ready-to-eat burger.

Except the “cool side” was sitting on a toasted bun. So many things wrong with the McDLT… (I started working at the local Micky D’s shortly after the introduction of the McDLT. I was only there a few months, but long enough to see it cancelled.)

Several small shops still use styrofoam food packaging for to-go meals.. particularly my favorite; Yang’s Teriyaki (local to Monmouth, Oregon)… and many of the taco shops and taco trucks indeed use the same packaging. Styrofoam cups on the other hand… almost completely extinct. All the electronics companies uses styrofoam packing for consumer electronics, and the mailing/parcel businesses have semitruck loads of the hated styrofoam packing peanuts.

In many major cities I’ve been to, styrofoam has still been a common thing used for takeout orders. At least most places I’ve found in California at least.

Well if that doesn’t illustrate Californian hypocrisy I don’t know what does.

I’m in Pennsylvania. Same thing here.
I’ve never been to a chinese take-out that doesn’t have styrofoam containers, for instance.

I used to live in a town, near new york city. It made us separate our recyclables like mad.

My sister, living in California, visited.

I asked her- dont you recycle like this? + she said: “No, we dont have to do that at all.”

[Grumble, grumble, grumble.] :D

I’m old enough to remember when Styrofoam became a thing used by fast food. It was all paper before then. I remember when TV was just radio! Meaning all the programs you heard on radio later moved to TV. We got our TV when I was 8 years old in 1953. Most daytime TV shows were acted live before a camera and lasted about 15 minutes each. TV stations signed off the air between 11PM and Midnight depending on the station and played the National Anthem before signing off.

Styrofoam is still big in my part of the world (Southeast Asia). It’s cheap, it’s easy, and half the population smokes like chimneys so it’s not like we’re that health-and-safety-conscious ?

Correcting myself: the data says that it’s consistently 10-20% of the population across Southeast Asian countries, but it certainly felt like half when I was a kid.

Correcting myself again because I read the wrong chart (number of deaths attributable to smoking ?)

Statistics for adults who smoke in my country (Indonesia) is currently 37.6%

Sorry I got onto a side tangent about smoking. This was meant to be about styrofoam.

We still use a lot of styrofoam, but also a lot of really cheap, thin plastic for bringing home, say, street food. Stuff that’s meant to be really bottom of the barrel, but still alright for holding stuff for a few hours.

Not that I have any first-hand info on that but from what I’ve heard, 37.6% seems like an amazingly low figure for Indonesia. Guess you can’t just extrapolate from articles about chain-smoking children.

It’s, of course, still a really, really high figure. Stop killing your lungs, people.

Kroger deli uses styrofoam where I’m at. I’m not sure the main alternative, basic plastic, is much better, and it doesn’t work as well, so…

Montréal is in the process of banning single-use plastics. Will take-out restaurants revert to paper? Or find something else? How will soup fare in paper?

In Germany, fast-food soup is sometimes sold in carton. Same as gazpacho or drinks etc. That works well, too. When sold in the supermarket, the different layers make the material difficult to recycle, too. And paper is still one of five groups of materials that require a lot of energy to produce.
Most circular option might be a container rent-out system (e.g., with deposit). It works for bottles, it might work for food containers, as well.
When there is buffet, I like to bring my own (foldable) bowl. You never know when there is free and tasty food to ‘rescue’. It works when you can either serve yourself or can ask to eat-in, they clean the dish, and you package the rest. not so easy at fast food stand. they need to monitor hygiene, so your boxes are not allowed in the kitchen, and the serving habits are very ingrained.

We used to take TV styrofoam packaging to the creek and use it as makeshift boats to float down the bent, with cans of beer – poor kid’s raft, more stable than inflatable boats, and very microplasticky.

With regard to the “rent out” system I can remember when there was a deposit on glass soft drink bottles. I can remember spending a Saturday afternoon searching for coke bottles to turn in for the deposit. Five or six bottles would raise enough cash for a soda and a candy bar.

Many US states have deposits on beer & soft drink cans & bottles. That includes plastic bottles. When I lived in Michigan in the 70s and 80s, it was 5¢ for reusable bottles – your Coke bottles, heavy long neck beer bottle, and 10¢ for any other container. Some states even have deposits on the large bottles that juices come in.

It’s just that this isn’t all states, and varies by state as what is included.

In Denmark we’ve run a deposit system ever since 1942, where most drinkables are sold in bottles or cans with a deposit of 1 DKK (app. 15 US-cent). Of course it helps that the Danish breweries have agreed on some standard designs for beer and soda bottles, so that there isn’t a lot of work in sorting out which bottles have to be returned to which brewery.

Technically there is no such thing as single-use plastic… It’s all recyclable.

We just…. Don’t.

That is incorrect. The recycling labels show which kinds can and can’t be recycled. Although recycling might well be a total scam anyway. I’m not sure who to believe at this point.

I’m pretty sure that, theoretically, every kind of plastic COULD be recycled into SOMETHING useful. But it is, indeed, mostly a scam–it’d be cheaper to just pay to clean up the garbage than to recycle, in most cases. Recycling plastic seems great, but then we burn gas to transport it and coal to power the plants that process it, not to mention toxic chemicals used in the process–what an achievement.

I’m really not a fan of just dumping items because it is more “cheaper” and “cost effective”. It gives off the impression that the fate of the planet can be superseded by the interest of the dollar and somehow, the Earth can just deal with it and we’ll all be hunky-dory anyway. It’s a very pedantic way to think and shows just how much we’ve become too obsessed with capitalistic interests than the mutual survival of the human race.

Recycling glass bottles uses more gas to transport it, because they’re heavier than plastic ones.

Only if they’re transported byba petrolrum truck. That’s a problem that can be fixed. Further poluting our world with ever more microplastics is a problem that we don’t even fully understand yet, let alone have a solution for.

Most plastics are “down-cycled”, ie made into something more basic and less valuable, if they’re recycled at all. My personal guide to whether or not recycling makes sense is simple: if someone will pay you, it probably does, but not if they charge you for the service of taking it away. Most metals are endlessly recyclable, which is why you can sell steel, aluminum, copper, etc. But making used plastic into anything valuable is much harder, so you’re lucky if they accept it without a fee. The good news is that this does show some promise of changing. Newer, more advanced plastics show signs of being easier and more economical to reuse.

I see Styrofoam all the time, it is used for packaging still way too much. True many companies have switched to cardboard and paper type packing, but Styrofoam is still used a lot. A lot of products that have to be shipped cold are also packed in Styrofoam coolers and were I work we have a company that picks up our Styrofoam for recycle every few weeks.

I vaguely remember McDonalds still being in the styrofoam containers, but I was still pretty young when they made the transition to cardboard.

While I do not remember the Time before Video Games, I do remember the times when video games had a specific channel on the dial to play said games (in Australia, channel 3).

Ummm. Go to any grocery store and buy a pound of hamburger or some pork chops. Those are sitting in black Styrofoam these days. A lot of restaurants use Styrofoam “to go” containers still.

There was a time when styrofoam was touted as a solution to littering since it eventually degrades in sunlight. Or maybe not. I wonder how much of the microplasics could be dated to the 70’s.

If you buy (a) cheese cony(s) at Gold Star Chili where I live it comes in a styrofoam container. I don’t know if their more popular competitor Skyline Chili does the same.

People don’t remember styrofoam, black & white TVs and times before video games???

IT’S A BAD OMEN!!!!! WE’RE ALL GONNA DIIIIIIIIEEEEEE!!!!!!!

Styrofoam containers still exist in countries like Brazil. Where progress is slow and the production costs of such stuff is very low.

The word doesn’t move at the speed of US.

Styrofoam isn’t as prevalent as it used to be but it I still used and sold. And as much as people are claiming that paper is better, many paper products minimize recycled materials because of potential cross contamination. Is it perfect? No, but then anything that seems perfect probably is a lie, or as some people put it: “tomorrow’s problem.”

Remember when you’d be riding down the highway and you’d see a family of five just throw all the empties out on the road? That’s where Big Chief Cries Alot got a bunch of his traction from. Then overnight most municipalities passed no littering laws with $500 fines (that was A LOT of fncking money then) and littering seemed to stop overnight.

I dunno, my pizza old pizza place uses those for anything that needs a non-pizza box still. Must be a regional thing of it being phased out, but I do notice it’s not at McD’s anymore though.

Is true, I turned 30 this summer and the NES was out for quite some time by the time I came around. Heck, the SNES was out by the time I was born and it features in some of my earliest memories.

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