It's inconvenient as soon as you need to get something from the bottom of the fridge, kitchen layout does not change this one at all. And I grew up in a home with multiple chest fridges in addition to a shelved ones so I know the hurdles.
They are good to store something you're not accessing all the time though, like frozen berries etc.
Yeah, my in-laws literally stand around the fridge with it open for multiple minutes while they shuffle food around to get to things they've tetrised into the back, and then to re-organize once they've gotten what they need.
They periodically live with us because they're quite old at this point, and my wife and I have already discussed replacing our fridge/freezer combo with a standalone fridge and switching solely to a chest freezer in the mudroom just so they stop doing this with the freezer, too.
The freezer is almost entirely for things already in boxes anyway. Frozen wontons, frozen ice cream cones, microwaveable meals, frozen blocks of fish. It's all easy to organize in a chest freezer.
I'd never considered a chest fridge before, and if I didn't have a wife and kids, as of today I'd be seriously considering it. As it is, can't trust kids not to make an inaccessible mess of something like that, and wife wouldn't like the kitchen arrangement becoming wonky. Though the fridge's current position makes it clear a previous owner didn't understand anything about kitchen layouts when they remodeled a MCM home.
Maybe I could put a chest fridge there with cabinetry above (gap between), and then some place we currently have cabinets all the way to the floor, remove the bottom and put in another chest fridge.
Might be something to consider once we've fixed all the supreme fuckups previous owners did.
That must be something you have changed, because if I have capslock enabled, it shows the capslock icon in the input field and the key is pressable to disable it for me.
I just checked out a video. I don’t think it’ll do it for me. What I liked about Sparrow is it made email feel more like Messages or Twitter. Going back and forth in email didn’t feel so formal. I didn’t see that in Spark. They also seem to be leaning really hard into AI, which is a bit of a turn off.
The thing with chess, even if you don't know the rules, you can still play and (potentially) lose the game. If you don't know some random american trivia, you're stuck forever.
i am able to program but hell no i will start to crunch numbers programmatically unless it's something a basic spreadsheet can't do. i use spreadsheets exactly because i don't need to code and create something from scratch.
but while this is not for me (no interest in learning vim), i'm pretty sure many other people will find this useful
I know these Japan stories for Americans might be awe-inspiring, but man if there isn't crap loads of waste from all the products they sell here. Yesterday during my grocery shopping each individual glass container product got its own separate paper bag, meat was given a plastic bag even thought it was already wrapped in plastic and my juices got another plastic bag. Even the wines I got were given this plastic wrap, just not to hit each other.
I get that compared to the US the recycling here might be better (and yeah, I do need to separate my trash), but this is pure "oh so mysterious and oriental Japan so great" article. What help is recycling for if you're producing insane amounts of unnecessary waste.
Our World In Data sites a 2015 study [1] which in turn cites an 2012 World Bank report [2] for some of its data, including the numbers for Japan. This then in turn cites OECD data without a solid link, but a search and some digging leads us to [3]. This data is acquired through questionnaire (there's some info available in the data explorer), so the trail runs cold there.
I did cross-check with the numbers of the Central Bureau of Statistics of the Netherlands, and the overall waste production matches: an average 532 kg of waste per capita, ~17 million people leads to about 9000 million tons of waste per year.
However, I cannot find the fraction of plastic waste on the OECD site anywhere. If I use the Dutch CBS data (counting "Kunststof verpakkingen", "PMD-fractie", and "Harde plastics"), the Dutch fraction of municipal waste that is plastic-related seems to be only about 4%, which is 5 times fewer than the World Bank report lists.
How is that counted? The last time I was in Japan they still separated "burnable" and "non-burnable" waste. So if you burn the plastic, does it still count as waste?
IMO plastic is not that bad if it gets recycled or used as fuel source in power plants instead of becoming landfill.
Maybe we have more industrial plastic waste than Japan? My experiences in Japan are that they use many times more plastic packaging on products than we jse in the US. I find this data extremely hard to believe.
If I had to guess, it’s probably we (as in the US) consumes more. One takeout meal for my family is probably more plastic in weight than your grocery runs. My plastic foldable table is probably your annual amount. While it seems wasteful, plastic bags are very minimal compared to other items.
Although I agree that Japan uses lots of plastic everywhere, I can see how the sheer size of stuff in the US can easily offset for that. The average American man weighs 50% more than the average Japanese man (200 lbs vs. 135). The average househould trash container in the US is the size of a garbage truck in Japan (being dramatic with this one, but less than you'd think).
The trash cans I have seen in Japan are roughly the same size as the ones I see in the US. The garbage trucks are smaller (to fit on smaller roads).... but they have a lot more of them!
Go to Costco in Texas and watch the literal pallets of bottled water the people cart into their trucks. They make up for entire Japanese towns probably.
People in the US go through a lot of individually bottled water bought in large quantities--including in many many areas where the tap water is perfectly fine.
On the other hand there are vending machines for various drinks (not all in plastic admittedly) on almost every other Japanese street corner. So I'm not sure how it averages out.
I have as Christmas gift items but not sure I ever have for day to day.
There's also a huge amount of plastic kitsch in Japan.
We probably are seeing more plastic-wrapped fruits and vegetables in the US. Part of it is probably there a certain amount of pressure to make everything barcoded for quicker checkout--especially at self-checkouts.
In the west, when we see plastic, we think of litter. And we should, because there's way too many coffee cups, cigarette butts, and fast food wrappers lying on the ground in our towns and cities.
But in Japan people don't litter. So when they see plastic, it's associated with clean new products. The trash still ends up in the ocean, but they don't see it happen - out of sight out of mind.
The amount of overpackaging in that country is absolutely insane. But counterintuitively, they're going to have a hard time getting rid of it. Here, there's a decent amount of public consent for paper straws, biodegradable packaging materials, etc, thanks to the cultural guilt we have because we're surrounded by litter. Over there, people "do their part" by simply not littering - but that's not good enough.
Huh? As you say, Japan doesn't litter. And AFAIK Japan incinerates most/all of its plastic waste. They don't exactly have the land to landfill. So very little, if any, is ending up in the ocean.
They are good to store something you're not accessing all the time though, like frozen berries etc.
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