It's practically impossible to avoid plastic without great effort. I think even if we collectively don't do much towards that goal, each of us should think about it while we go about our daily lives.
For instance, there are times where the choice is wholly ours. Eggs, for instance, often come in plastic or cardboard, so aside from taking a few extra seconds to consider the kind of eggs we want, that's easy. If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic.
But there's still so much we can do. When we know that a store puts plastic utensils in an order without asking, and/or gives us our purchase in a plastic bag, it's simple to ask them for neither. It's also simple to carry a reusable bag or two, or a travel mug, et cetera.
Spending just a little energy can easily reduce default plastic use quite a lot. This story is a good reminder that perfect should never be the enemy of good, so at very least we should try where we can.
Cardboard and glass packaging used to be a lot more common. The key to reducing to use of plastic is fiddling with the economics. It's cheap for companies to use plastic as long as they don't have to worry about cleanup or recycling. As soon as you start charging them for the privilege of mass polluting our world with their cost savings, they can adapt pretty rapidly.
In the Netherlands, there are some discussions about going back to using cardboard packaging for dairy products. That was basically all there was when I grew up. Before cardboard, glass was very common for this stuff. But In recent years, a lot of plastic bottles were used for milk. But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled, that just got a lot less attractive. Plastic is only convenient if you don't have to recycle it.
Same with plastic bags. At some point those stopped being free (in most of Europe at least). And then people started pushing for paper bags. Problem solved. There are a lot less plastic bags now. I actually carry a nice foldable plastic bag made out of recycled plastic in my backpack these days. Fits behind the laptop compartment. So, I rarely need to buy paper bags.
Note that cardboard for liquid packaging often has a plastic lining, aluminum cans have plastic/epoxy lining, glass containers have plastic seals in the lids, etc.
Yep, otherwise they don't work. Cardstocks don't hold milk, sterile. Pure aluminum cans dissolve into food contents. Glass lids can't seal tight enough.
Food producers and public health authorites has food poisoning lawsuit and human safety at higher priorities than environmentalism. So they just make it all packaged up in plastics.
Doesn't mean some sort of waterproof inner wall coatings can't be made in the future, though. Maybe if we substitute PE with engineered PLA made from agri wastes and made sure to burn it, that could make sense someday.
truly this. you start deconstructing packaging only to e.g. realize they've glued LDPE into the inside of an otherwise fully recyclable item to make it look slightly better in stores for longer due to moisture.
This is true. But it's worth noting that in terms of mass, it's a lot less than regular plastic packaging as these are very thin coatings. But you are right that this is not a perfect solution. I'm guessing there might be some biodegradable alternatives though for some of these things.
At least cans are being recycled in parts of Europe now. You pay a little deposit when you buy cans of beer/soda and you get that back when you return it. I'm guessing the plastic just burns off when they melt the metal. Even regular cans without a deposit that go in the trash are being separated out probably and recycled.
The amount of plastic in junk mail. Maybe instead of stamps, we sell envelopes without a window.
The concentration of plastics in receipts. Maybe we replace those printers with photographable screens, and have a separate lane for people desiring print. Receipts expose you to far more plastic than more-emotionally-attentive items like shampoo.
Even with deposit schemes for recycling of plastic as well, the industry prefers plastic as it's cheaper to recycle than reuse of glass bottles. So you still need to dictate or tax plastic use extra. There are also environmental tradeoffs until renewable use for transport and industrial use are at sufficient levels.
It doesn't make sense when your energy is dirty enough. When your energy sources get clean enough you eventually reach an inflection point where glass bottles are less environmentally harmful.
Tire dusts are also a factor, for example. Plastics aren't always non-renewable either, some like PLA can be made from sugar cane wastes.
No way it's ever going to be environmentally good thing to source extra 2 gallon-water worth of energy per 1 gallons of water just to move the bottles around. Burning shredded corn meal bottles using some sort of smart home electric kiln is going to make a lot more sense.
The question will be what leaves more undestroyed plastic waste, not whether or not it is non-renewable, but if we can get to a point where using biodegradable plastics works for bottles, then that would change things significantly. Burning is insufficient, because people will keep dropping bottles outside the home; it needs to biodegrade fully without that kind of heat.
EDIT: There are potential hazards of bioplastics even when they are degradable. Not saying it might not become a solution, but it's not yet clear.
Is it energy/waste effective? Washing a glass bottle might be more expensive (due to unpriced negative externalities) but still be better for the environment or human health. (I genuinely have no idea, to be clear.)
Car dominated societies inevitably will expose their inhabitants to micro plastics through synthetic tire rubber dust. There is basically no possible way to avoid them without regulation.
Plastic is too perfect to stop using. Honestly we need to find some miracle plastic that is completely biodegradable after say 10 years. The byproducts of the biodegradation process should be completely harmless as well.
I know people are going to say that we already have biodegradable plastic but the key point here is degrade more or less around 10 years, not earlier.
Just implement better recycling programs, and develop better technology for recycling (so "contamination" isn't a problem, etc.). This might not work so well for societies where it's socially acceptable to just throw your trash on the ground and have trash littering the landscape though.
If no new plastic was available, maybe we could recycle better, but at a very high energy cost. Even Japan, famous for its recycling where end users clean and sort their plastic in great detail, burns a lot of their plastic for energy.
Not all plastics can be recycled and there may not be any financial incentive to do so. Most paper in my state that goes into the curbside recycle bin ends up in the trash.
Recycling is hard because different plastic molecules don’t always play nice together - and the same goes for metal.
So you need to sort everything carefully. This is hard, slow, and way too imperfect.
I wonder if a better approach could one day be to burn it and then use some future catalyst or reaction to convert the smoke into something useful, or to chop the raw plastic up and feed it to a vat ful of special bacteria.
Yeah, that's why I said we should develop better recycling technology, because what we have today isn't that good. The bacteria idea is a good one I think. We already have microorganisms that can eat plastic, so it seems like it should be possible to genetically-engineer better plastic-eating bacteria for this purpose.
Eggs are such an interesting example to me. I'll speak mostly to the US here, but a good chunk of the population could absolutely raise their own chickens for eggs I'd they really were interested in an easy way to reduce impact. A flock of 6-8 hens don't require too much space, and ideally you can use them as bug control and fertilizer replacement in their lawn.
I live in an area with quite a few commercial chicken houses. Its an absolutely disgusting industry today, from how the animals are treated to the nasty conditions workers have to deal with. Getting rid of plastic and styrofoam packaging would be a nice win, getting rid of at least a portion of the market for industrial bird operations would be the real win in my book.
It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve built a system to motivate change by distributing money, and that system fails flat when it comes to plastic use.
In a healthy society, avoiding plastic would be both cheaper and more convenient.
How could avoiding one of the greatest, most versatile materials humans have ever invented be "more convenient and cheaper"?
Plastic is a literal miracle material, it is one of the most important ingredients to industrial society. Removing plastics is unthinkable, for most of its applications there are literally no alternatives.
It is amazing. And essential. And has gigantic external costs that either nobody is paying right now or that the government is picking up the bill for. I.e. the true cost is not being priced in
It is interesting you complain about money distribution and then your next statement talks about being cheaper. The reason paid is so prevalent is because it is cheaper and more convenient. I'm not sure what you mean by "healthy society" but the reason money is distributed is to try to make something else cheaper and more convenient. But that takes time and money.
I think you missed my point. The high level role of money is to direct people’s energy to activities beneficial for society. You come to work and help someone achieve their goals, you get paid back.
If we collectively agree that plastic production and waste needs to stop, we ought to reflect this decision in our money distribution. In practice, it could mean government incentives and penalties.
I have been wondering why do some governments ban single-use utensils, straws, shopping bags, but not plastic bottles. They are perfectly replaced by superior (fully recyclable, etc.) glass, and yet not only are they not banned but, in fact, water or drinks in glass are so difficult to find in supermarkets.
There can be an argument that banning avoidable use of plastic would mean more expensive packaging, and unless the government subsidizes it (which it probably does not want to spend money on?) then those costs will be passed to the consumer, so some products may become more expensive. Naturally, some of us could just buy less (and be better off), but 1) some perhaps could not afford it, and 2) general reduction in consumption is supposedly bad for some economy metrics.
A more cynical argument is that there inevitably is a lot of interest from powers that be, invested in oil and plastic, to maintain the status quo and thicker margins.
It seems not that there is no solution, but that there perhaps is not enough motivation to enact one.
Glass is massively inferior. It is much heavier, broken glass is a mess to clean up and it does not just magically come into existence. Instead it is very energy intensive to produce and transport, much more so than plastic.
> Instead it is very energy intensive to produce and transport, much more so than plastic.
Have you checked how much energy it takes to produce plastic? You can start with sourcing and refining oil. Economies of scale help it be cheaper, but so they would for glass.
Have you checked recyclability of plastic? It can only be recycled a few times, and it degrades every time becoming unsuitable for use in, say, food packaging much earlier. Glass, on the other hand, has virtually infinite uses, which if factored into the cost brings it down even further.
For transportation, sure. I have made the same argument, if it is more expensive to transport then it will cost more. However, many products are not transported large distances and are made somewhat locally, and even if I only look at products (e.g., drinks) made in the same (pretty small) country still 99% of them are bottled in plastic.
> broken glass is a mess to clean up
You beat me here, (micro/nano) plastic definitely isn’t a mess to clean up.
Did you read it? I did, in fact I remember encountering it back when it was originally published.
Article’s conclusion is that glass “may be equally as detrimental to the environment as plastic”, not “plastic wins”.
Their primary sources are something about regulation-violating mining of silica in India, and a UK paper that seems to claim glass may be more harmful because it takes more energy to produce and recycle (their “environmental impact” includes “potential to deplete fossil fuels”, I suppose they didn’t consider that green energy can be used). Funnily enough, even by such standards the UK paper admits on page 59 that glass bottles would be less harmful than plastic if they were reused (which single-use plastic bottles simply can’t be) in addition to being recycled.
Glass can be reused. In various countries customers pay a deposit for the bottle, and only pay for the drink itself onwards. The bottles are washed and reused at the bottling plant. Much greener than plastic.
A few milk brands still reuse their bottles in the US. Here in SF high-end organic milk brands have a $4 deposit for the bottle, which is exchanged or returned at the grocery store.
If you are making and selling something that is falling in demand, you are forced to sell it cheaper, which eats at your margins. As the price falls, eventually you sell at a loss, but you are motivated to wrap that business up and start making something else long before.
The gap down to where most oil fields are no longer profitable is huge, so while that would eventually happen, reduced plastic use is not likely to bring us there.
The amount of plastic used for packaging that can be replaced with something else is also huge. Case in point: this article. Also, it is probably not an exaggeration that every item in every supermarket that I personally lay my eyes on uses plastic, a lot of it avoidable.
As oil becomes less in demand as fuel, we should be aware that manufacturers would do their best effort to promote any other uses of it they can find, including plastic packaging, vinyl records, etc. To not do that would be stupid on their part.
Having toddlers I've thrown out multiple larger plastic items over the years - think things like diaper bins and stools. I now look towards the plastic slide they've since grown out of and feel only despair. For some items there are opportunities for donation, but everything else gets walked down to our building's trash room and I fucking hate it. Companies who bring such items into the world should bear some of the responsibility for their disposal and certainly shouldn't get to walk away as they currently do.
We have done a lot of work trying to price the societal cost of carbon emissions into the cost of doing business... Why haven't we done the same with things like plastic waste?
- plastic packaging, single use plastic stuff, tend to be mostly needed in cities and cities only. That's simply because in dense cities people keep moving from residential buildings (used less than half a day), to other buildings (offices, commerce etc, also used for less than half a day in mean), in a continuous very short-range commuting, getting continuous non-block-able ads (shop windows), so they tend to eat on the go, buy small stuff they have to carry around etc, also smaller residential emplacements demand small stock at home of anything, so more packaging;
- plastic it's not only packaging, large slice of tissues are plastics, menstruation related products are plastic, electricity cables insulation is plastic, windows joint, many plumbing materials, cars tires and many cars elements, ... are all plastic of some kind.
So to say: we can't being plastic free on scale, simply because when we was it was another era with less humans on earth and much more resources needed for personal wellbeing even if we have had much less back then. Yes, we can have natural fiber dresses, BUT not for anyone, we can make cars without plastics (almost) but they would be much more expensive and energy consuming and so on.
What we can do is AVOIDING living in dense cities, witch is appropriate for many reasons, also to reduce single use plastics. Cities are NOT green at all despite finance capitalism propaganda.
It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article.
Everything will get recycled eventually, and the majority of plastics are inert --- which is why they're used in the first place. People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again.
Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere.
Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications --- and if you're worried about carbon emissions from shipping, all that extra weight and volume should make you ponder.
Thing is- We’re only now starting to realize how bad plastics really are, because we only recently acquired the tech to measure this.
Unexplained fertility decline in the last 40 years? Probably plastic. They found that humans had 3x higher concentration of plastics in their testicles than their pet dogs, and that pet-dogs have a dose-dependent reduction in viable sperm count inversely correlated with the plastic concentration.
Have a plaque in your blood vessel body with high plastic concentration? Since this year we know it has a 4x (!!!) increase in a new heart infarct in the next year compared to when there is less plastic.
It’s starting to show that it is really bad, and it’s virtually everywhere in our body, most likely causing a ton of issues.
Unexplained fertility decline in the last 40 years?
The most common plastics have been in wide use for nearly a century. It's not "unexplained"; the fetility decline is a product of many variables that include diet and lifestyle changes, and especially as it correlates with population growth, this could be another feedback loop. Pointing to one of the most widespread materials which have been in use for much longer is nothing but fearmongering.
Might as well ascribe the "unexplained life expectancy increase" to plastics too. /s
and that pet-dogs have a dose-dependent reduction in viable sperm count inversely correlated with the plastic concentration
Correlation or causation? Or just a variant of the old "IN MICE!"?
Add that to the widespread phenomenon of p-hacking and a lot of this "research" is just politicised junk optimised for engagement rather than truth.
Plastic is a miracle material that should be reserved for when it's actually necessary. Plastic egg containers, for example, are insane when recycled cardboard does a fine job.
"Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere."
Germany has a wonderful system to reuse glassware. Wear rings determine when it is time to discard a bottle. Vending machines accept bottles and dispense the deposit. I totally admire it. However, the weight of glass is about twice the weight of aluminum cans.
I think that's fundamentally untrustable argument since a very similar one was used to justify slavery. "It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid 'anti-slavery' mentality bandwagon when they probably own their entire existence to slavery and other forms of forced labor. Abolishing slavery will lead to societal collapse."
Just because it's true - much of modern life is utterly dependent on plastics - that doesn't justify a continued high dependency on plastics.
> Everything will get recycled eventually
And we're all dead in the end.
That "eventually" is hiding a lot. Like, what of the plastic in the water. How will that eventually be recycled? What effect does the plastic trash have on sea life, including discarded ("ghost") plastic fishing nets.
Given your indefinite "eventual" time-frame, you'll need to estimate the net future value of continuing with a lot of single-use plastics, vs. that of switching to another solution, where the overall advantages across a century may justify a decade-long expensive transition.
> People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again.
That's one-sided optimism. Flip it around, and people in the future will surely find a way to eliminate the need for single-use plastic.
> Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications
We also know the history of "why" depends on cheap petroleum and ignoring the cost of waste management.
Like, we know why Freon (or HCFCs in general) replaced older refrigerants, only later to learn about the high cost due to ozone depletion.
We know the history of why plastic grocery bags mostly replaced paper, but the cost to the store didn't factor in the full cleanup costs or environmental impacts.
How disingenuous. The argument against slavery wasn't that it is economically non-viable and has long term negative consequences. The objection was purely on moral grounds, which should completely supersede economic or environmental factors.
Plastic use should be weighed between harm and gain at each occasion of use. The same just isn't true for slavery, the analogy is terrible. There is appropriate use for plastics, there isn't appropriate use for slavery. You can not discuss both of them in the same manner.
One of the arguments for slavery is the correct observation that even the abolitionists "probably owed their entire existence to slavery", and the correct observation that abolition would collapse society.
As such, any argument along similar lines, like "you owe your existence to [single-use] plastics" and "society would collapse" should they disappear, is inherently incomplete and untrustworthy.
The argument is incorrect for slavery and correct for plastic. That is what you don't get.
Slavery is wrong whether or not it benefits people, because it is immoral as such. Plastic use is not immoral and therefore you need to weigh the benefits of plastics against the issues with it.
The comparison is just idiotic.
Also, plastics are far more widely used, far more useful and far more beneficial than slavery ever was. Abolishing plastics as a whole means the total collapse of industrial society, every single production process somewhere depends on it. And again plastic use isn't inherently immoral, so the argument is categorically different from slavery as you can not object to the use of plastics on purely moral grounds.
I pointed out that userbinator's perplexity in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41135861 used a reasoning that is not trustworthy, given how slave-holders used similar arguments to express perplexity about abolitionists.
Yes, of course there's a cost-benefit analysis for plastic, which doesn't apply to slavery. But that's a different topic than perplexity.
userbinator then pointed out that there are reasons why single-use plastic was chosen over other methods, and optimism that the future would figure things out. I do not believe that is a valid cost-benefit analysis.
I replied that the historical switch to single-use plastics used a cost model which we now consider incorrect, similar to how most uses of Freon and leaded gas have been made illegal after we learned about their negatives. I also pointed out that long-term optimism should also be used to consider the cost to switching to alternatives.
The linked-to NPR piece specifically deals with single-use plastics ("for seven days, I challenged myself to avoid buying any new single-use plastics") and my comments all included the qualifier "single-use".
That does not mean "abolishing plastics as a whole", as you seem to think my comments concern.
>Yes, of course there's a cost-benefit analysis for plastic, which doesn't apply to slavery.
Which totally invalidates your analogy. Slavery wasn't wrong because the cost benefit analysis came out against it, even if the cost benefit analysis was positive it would have still been wrong.
That is why the argument that you need a cost benefit analysis is valid for plastic, but not for slavery. The analogy totally falls apart at that point.
>That does not mean "abolishing plastics as a whole", as you seem to think my comments concern.
If your analogy had gelt any water it would have. If plastic use was inherently immoral global plastic abolition would be the only moral choice, as has happened with slavery, which is now near universally condemned and outright ceased to exist on much of the globe.
Instead of the slavery example, consider how a white man in the 1950s could be perplexed that another white man would want to share civil rights equally with women and blacks. After all, both white men were brought up in a system which benefited them over others - why change?
Or how a native born citizen could want to allow more immigration, when another native born citizen could be perplexed about how that can reduce the opportunities for native born citizens (eg, "they will take our jobs").
My argument concerns the reasoning behind the perplexity. Since you don't understand the perplexity in the first place, you must not understand the reasoning either, which means your comments have no bearing on the topic, why is why you think I'm not making sense.
Given that plastics manufactured today will exist for thousands of years and microplastics have found their way into everyone's blood, you could definitely make the argument that frivolous plastic use is absolutely immoral.
Yes, I am rude. Because talking to a person who doesn't understand the difference between something being wrong as such and something which has negative consequences.
Eliminating plastic use is impossible 100% of industrial processes depend on it. In fact eliminating plastic use is immoral.
This is all speculative. You hope everything will get recycled and you hope that people in the future will find a way to use what's in landfills. I hold the opposing view. Most of what is produced today is not recyclable and I have no faith in people to find ways to empty landfills.
As long as society doesn't regress and collapse due to this radical environmentalism, we will find a way. Several hundred years ago, we did not know what to do with the dark oily substance oozing out of the ground. ;-)
> It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article.
That's quite a large straw man you have there.
I expect there are some people who want to eliminate all plastics. I think they're a small minority.
Speaking for myself, I understand that there are many important jobs that can't be done without plastic.
That doesn't stop me from trying to reduce my use of non-essential plastics.
I'll choose the cardboard egg carton over the plastic almost every time, and it has no negative impacts on me.
Ditto with making my own sandwich bread - I keep it in plastic containers so it stays fresh, but those containers last way longer than the single-use bags at the store.
The list goes on and on.
Yeah, we need plastics until materials science produces usable semi-stable alternatives, and maybe we'll never get rid of them entirely, but we can absolutely use fewer of them.
Plastics certainly is one of the most useful materials known to humans. It is incredibly versatile and cheap.
Any area of life has been significantly effected by the use of plastics as a material. I think articles like this are laughable, the plastic use of individuals in their daily lives is just a tiny, tiny peak of the iceberg. Beneath there sits an industrial society which could not exist without it. No, you can not live "plastic free".
The first and most important questions these people have to ask is: how do you make anything without plastics?
It's practically impossible to avoid plastic without great effort. I think even if we collectively don't do much towards that goal, each of us should think about it while we go about our daily lives.
For instance, there are times where the choice is wholly ours. Eggs, for instance, often come in plastic or cardboard, so aside from taking a few extra seconds to consider the kind of eggs we want, that's easy. If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic.
But there's still so much we can do. When we know that a store puts plastic utensils in an order without asking, and/or gives us our purchase in a plastic bag, it's simple to ask them for neither. It's also simple to carry a reusable bag or two, or a travel mug, et cetera.
Spending just a little energy can easily reduce default plastic use quite a lot. This story is a good reminder that perfect should never be the enemy of good, so at very least we should try where we can.
Cardboard and glass packaging used to be a lot more common. The key to reducing to use of plastic is fiddling with the economics. It's cheap for companies to use plastic as long as they don't have to worry about cleanup or recycling. As soon as you start charging them for the privilege of mass polluting our world with their cost savings, they can adapt pretty rapidly.
In the Netherlands, there are some discussions about going back to using cardboard packaging for dairy products. That was basically all there was when I grew up. Before cardboard, glass was very common for this stuff. But In recent years, a lot of plastic bottles were used for milk. But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled, that just got a lot less attractive. Plastic is only convenient if you don't have to recycle it.
Same with plastic bags. At some point those stopped being free (in most of Europe at least). And then people started pushing for paper bags. Problem solved. There are a lot less plastic bags now. I actually carry a nice foldable plastic bag made out of recycled plastic in my backpack these days. Fits behind the laptop compartment. So, I rarely need to buy paper bags.
Note that cardboard for liquid packaging often has a plastic lining, aluminum cans have plastic/epoxy lining, glass containers have plastic seals in the lids, etc.
Yep, otherwise they don't work. Cardstocks don't hold milk, sterile. Pure aluminum cans dissolve into food contents. Glass lids can't seal tight enough.
Food producers and public health authorites has food poisoning lawsuit and human safety at higher priorities than environmentalism. So they just make it all packaged up in plastics.
Doesn't mean some sort of waterproof inner wall coatings can't be made in the future, though. Maybe if we substitute PE with engineered PLA made from agri wastes and made sure to burn it, that could make sense someday.
truly this. you start deconstructing packaging only to e.g. realize they've glued LDPE into the inside of an otherwise fully recyclable item to make it look slightly better in stores for longer due to moisture.
This is true. But it's worth noting that in terms of mass, it's a lot less than regular plastic packaging as these are very thin coatings. But you are right that this is not a perfect solution. I'm guessing there might be some biodegradable alternatives though for some of these things.
At least cans are being recycled in parts of Europe now. You pay a little deposit when you buy cans of beer/soda and you get that back when you return it. I'm guessing the plastic just burns off when they melt the metal. Even regular cans without a deposit that go in the trash are being separated out probably and recycled.
In USA, I hope we can talk about:
The amount of plastic in junk mail. Maybe instead of stamps, we sell envelopes without a window.
The concentration of plastics in receipts. Maybe we replace those printers with photographable screens, and have a separate lane for people desiring print. Receipts expose you to far more plastic than more-emotionally-attentive items like shampoo.
Even with deposit schemes for recycling of plastic as well, the industry prefers plastic as it's cheaper to recycle than reuse of glass bottles. So you still need to dictate or tax plastic use extra. There are also environmental tradeoffs until renewable use for transport and industrial use are at sufficient levels.
Glass bottles weigh as much as its content. Aluminums and plastics are more like few percent.
Tripling energy expended for transport of liquids don't make sense. That's one of reasons why glass bottles are on a long phaseout.
It doesn't make sense when your energy is dirty enough. When your energy sources get clean enough you eventually reach an inflection point where glass bottles are less environmentally harmful.
Tire dusts are also a factor, for example. Plastics aren't always non-renewable either, some like PLA can be made from sugar cane wastes.
No way it's ever going to be environmentally good thing to source extra 2 gallon-water worth of energy per 1 gallons of water just to move the bottles around. Burning shredded corn meal bottles using some sort of smart home electric kiln is going to make a lot more sense.
The question will be what leaves more undestroyed plastic waste, not whether or not it is non-renewable, but if we can get to a point where using biodegradable plastics works for bottles, then that would change things significantly. Burning is insufficient, because people will keep dropping bottles outside the home; it needs to biodegrade fully without that kind of heat.
EDIT: There are potential hazards of bioplastics even when they are degradable. Not saying it might not become a solution, but it's not yet clear.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/06/230601160216.h...
If the plastic recycled properly, why is it a problem?
Is it energy/waste effective? Washing a glass bottle might be more expensive (due to unpriced negative externalities) but still be better for the environment or human health. (I genuinely have no idea, to be clear.)
Because not all of it will be.
> But with the requirement to give people money for returning those to be recycled
Statiegeld! I really liked this scheme there for beer bottles.
When I lived there most milk came in tetra pak though. I thought it was recyclable?
Car dominated societies inevitably will expose their inhabitants to micro plastics through synthetic tire rubber dust. There is basically no possible way to avoid them without regulation.
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Plastic is too perfect to stop using. Honestly we need to find some miracle plastic that is completely biodegradable after say 10 years. The byproducts of the biodegradation process should be completely harmless as well.
I know people are going to say that we already have biodegradable plastic but the key point here is degrade more or less around 10 years, not earlier.
Just implement better recycling programs, and develop better technology for recycling (so "contamination" isn't a problem, etc.). This might not work so well for societies where it's socially acceptable to just throw your trash on the ground and have trash littering the landscape though.
If no new plastic was available, maybe we could recycle better, but at a very high energy cost. Even Japan, famous for its recycling where end users clean and sort their plastic in great detail, burns a lot of their plastic for energy.
Not all plastics can be recycled and there may not be any financial incentive to do so. Most paper in my state that goes into the curbside recycle bin ends up in the trash.
Recycling is hard because different plastic molecules don’t always play nice together - and the same goes for metal.
So you need to sort everything carefully. This is hard, slow, and way too imperfect.
I wonder if a better approach could one day be to burn it and then use some future catalyst or reaction to convert the smoke into something useful, or to chop the raw plastic up and feed it to a vat ful of special bacteria.
Yeah, that's why I said we should develop better recycling technology, because what we have today isn't that good. The bacteria idea is a good one I think. We already have microorganisms that can eat plastic, so it seems like it should be possible to genetically-engineer better plastic-eating bacteria for this purpose.
Just don’t let them loose!
We have lots of buried plastic pipes and cables.
Does that actually matter or is it yet another PR campaign where we shift the blame from companies to consumers?
>If we want yogurt, though, we basically have little choice beyond considering the packaging that wastes the least plastic.
Ceramic and glass containers are quite available in my area, i just think that's really big waste.
It they were reusable it would be one thing but we are talking about 4g of plastic vs 100g of glass...
Yogurt is fun and easy to make at home. And pickles. And beer. And bread. The only drawback is it takes time.
Eggs are such an interesting example to me. I'll speak mostly to the US here, but a good chunk of the population could absolutely raise their own chickens for eggs I'd they really were interested in an easy way to reduce impact. A flock of 6-8 hens don't require too much space, and ideally you can use them as bug control and fertilizer replacement in their lawn.
I live in an area with quite a few commercial chicken houses. Its an absolutely disgusting industry today, from how the animals are treated to the nasty conditions workers have to deal with. Getting rid of plastic and styrofoam packaging would be a nice win, getting rid of at least a portion of the market for industrial bird operations would be the real win in my book.
For yogurt, milk and so on there is glass - no need for plastics.
It’s a bit ridiculous that we’ve built a system to motivate change by distributing money, and that system fails flat when it comes to plastic use. In a healthy society, avoiding plastic would be both cheaper and more convenient.
How could avoiding one of the greatest, most versatile materials humans have ever invented be "more convenient and cheaper"?
Plastic is a literal miracle material, it is one of the most important ingredients to industrial society. Removing plastics is unthinkable, for most of its applications there are literally no alternatives.
It is amazing. And essential. And has gigantic external costs that either nobody is paying right now or that the government is picking up the bill for. I.e. the true cost is not being priced in
It is interesting you complain about money distribution and then your next statement talks about being cheaper. The reason paid is so prevalent is because it is cheaper and more convenient. I'm not sure what you mean by "healthy society" but the reason money is distributed is to try to make something else cheaper and more convenient. But that takes time and money.
I think you missed my point. The high level role of money is to direct people’s energy to activities beneficial for society. You come to work and help someone achieve their goals, you get paid back. If we collectively agree that plastic production and waste needs to stop, we ought to reflect this decision in our money distribution. In practice, it could mean government incentives and penalties.
I have been wondering why do some governments ban single-use utensils, straws, shopping bags, but not plastic bottles. They are perfectly replaced by superior (fully recyclable, etc.) glass, and yet not only are they not banned but, in fact, water or drinks in glass are so difficult to find in supermarkets.
There can be an argument that banning avoidable use of plastic would mean more expensive packaging, and unless the government subsidizes it (which it probably does not want to spend money on?) then those costs will be passed to the consumer, so some products may become more expensive. Naturally, some of us could just buy less (and be better off), but 1) some perhaps could not afford it, and 2) general reduction in consumption is supposedly bad for some economy metrics.
A more cynical argument is that there inevitably is a lot of interest from powers that be, invested in oil and plastic, to maintain the status quo and thicker margins.
It seems not that there is no solution, but that there perhaps is not enough motivation to enact one.
>which are perfectly replaced by glass ones
Are you kidding? No. Glass bottles aren't a suitable replacement. Plastic bottles are far superior in basically every aspect.
> Plastic bottles are far superior in basically every aspect.
The only way in which plastic is better than glass is thicker margins for manufacturers. In every other way glass is better for me as a consumer.
Glass is massively inferior. It is much heavier, broken glass is a mess to clean up and it does not just magically come into existence. Instead it is very energy intensive to produce and transport, much more so than plastic.
> Instead it is very energy intensive to produce and transport, much more so than plastic.
Have you checked how much energy it takes to produce plastic? You can start with sourcing and refining oil. Economies of scale help it be cheaper, but so they would for glass.
Have you checked recyclability of plastic? It can only be recycled a few times, and it degrades every time becoming unsuitable for use in, say, food packaging much earlier. Glass, on the other hand, has virtually infinite uses, which if factored into the cost brings it down even further.
For transportation, sure. I have made the same argument, if it is more expensive to transport then it will cost more. However, many products are not transported large distances and are made somewhat locally, and even if I only look at products (e.g., drinks) made in the same (pretty small) country still 99% of them are bottled in plastic.
> broken glass is a mess to clean up
You beat me here, (micro/nano) plastic definitely isn’t a mess to clean up.
> have you checked
Yes, and plastic wins: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230427-glass-or-plastic...
Did you read it? I did, in fact I remember encountering it back when it was originally published.
Article’s conclusion is that glass “may be equally as detrimental to the environment as plastic”, not “plastic wins”.
Their primary sources are something about regulation-violating mining of silica in India, and a UK paper that seems to claim glass may be more harmful because it takes more energy to produce and recycle (their “environmental impact” includes “potential to deplete fossil fuels”, I suppose they didn’t consider that green energy can be used). Funnily enough, even by such standards the UK paper admits on page 59 that glass bottles would be less harmful than plastic if they were reused (which single-use plastic bottles simply can’t be) in addition to being recycled.
Glass can be reused. In various countries customers pay a deposit for the bottle, and only pay for the drink itself onwards. The bottles are washed and reused at the bottling plant. Much greener than plastic.
A few milk brands still reuse their bottles in the US. Here in SF high-end organic milk brands have a $4 deposit for the bottle, which is exchanged or returned at the grocery store.
Glass is inconvenient, and only becomes better once a sufficient proportion of your energy comes from clean sources.
It's a discussion worth having again as renewables rates increases, but it's not a straightforward tradeoff.
Banning avoidable plastic would drastically reduce demand for oil, accelerating move to renewables.
Reducing demand for oil would reduce it's price, which might well slow the move to renewables. It's rarely so simple.
If you are making and selling something that is falling in demand, you are forced to sell it cheaper, which eats at your margins. As the price falls, eventually you sell at a loss, but you are motivated to wrap that business up and start making something else long before.
The gap down to where most oil fields are no longer profitable is huge, so while that would eventually happen, reduced plastic use is not likely to bring us there.
The amount of plastic used for packaging that can be replaced with something else is also huge. Case in point: this article. Also, it is probably not an exaggeration that every item in every supermarket that I personally lay my eyes on uses plastic, a lot of it avoidable.
As oil becomes less in demand as fuel, we should be aware that manufacturers would do their best effort to promote any other uses of it they can find, including plastic packaging, vinyl records, etc. To not do that would be stupid on their part.
If we charged companies the true cost of plastics we'd have a perfectly adequate biodegradable alternatives by now
Having toddlers I've thrown out multiple larger plastic items over the years - think things like diaper bins and stools. I now look towards the plastic slide they've since grown out of and feel only despair. For some items there are opportunities for donation, but everything else gets walked down to our building's trash room and I fucking hate it. Companies who bring such items into the world should bear some of the responsibility for their disposal and certainly shouldn't get to walk away as they currently do.
We have done a lot of work trying to price the societal cost of carbon emissions into the cost of doing business... Why haven't we done the same with things like plastic waste?
Have we? Gas is still only 4 USD per gallon and broadly considered a thing the President controls
Few practical observations:
- plastic packaging, single use plastic stuff, tend to be mostly needed in cities and cities only. That's simply because in dense cities people keep moving from residential buildings (used less than half a day), to other buildings (offices, commerce etc, also used for less than half a day in mean), in a continuous very short-range commuting, getting continuous non-block-able ads (shop windows), so they tend to eat on the go, buy small stuff they have to carry around etc, also smaller residential emplacements demand small stock at home of anything, so more packaging;
- plastic it's not only packaging, large slice of tissues are plastics, menstruation related products are plastic, electricity cables insulation is plastic, windows joint, many plumbing materials, cars tires and many cars elements, ... are all plastic of some kind.
So to say: we can't being plastic free on scale, simply because when we was it was another era with less humans on earth and much more resources needed for personal wellbeing even if we have had much less back then. Yes, we can have natural fiber dresses, BUT not for anyone, we can make cars without plastics (almost) but they would be much more expensive and energy consuming and so on.
What we can do is AVOIDING living in dense cities, witch is appropriate for many reasons, also to reduce single use plastics. Cities are NOT green at all despite finance capitalism propaganda.
tl;dr: live like the (early) 19th century.
It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article.
Everything will get recycled eventually, and the majority of plastics are inert --- which is why they're used in the first place. People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again.
Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere.
Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications --- and if you're worried about carbon emissions from shipping, all that extra weight and volume should make you ponder.
Thing is- We’re only now starting to realize how bad plastics really are, because we only recently acquired the tech to measure this.
Unexplained fertility decline in the last 40 years? Probably plastic. They found that humans had 3x higher concentration of plastics in their testicles than their pet dogs, and that pet-dogs have a dose-dependent reduction in viable sperm count inversely correlated with the plastic concentration.
Have a plaque in your blood vessel body with high plastic concentration? Since this year we know it has a 4x (!!!) increase in a new heart infarct in the next year compared to when there is less plastic.
It’s starting to show that it is really bad, and it’s virtually everywhere in our body, most likely causing a ton of issues.
Unexplained fertility decline in the last 40 years?
The most common plastics have been in wide use for nearly a century. It's not "unexplained"; the fetility decline is a product of many variables that include diet and lifestyle changes, and especially as it correlates with population growth, this could be another feedback loop. Pointing to one of the most widespread materials which have been in use for much longer is nothing but fearmongering.
Might as well ascribe the "unexplained life expectancy increase" to plastics too. /s
and that pet-dogs have a dose-dependent reduction in viable sperm count inversely correlated with the plastic concentration
Correlation or causation? Or just a variant of the old "IN MICE!"?
Add that to the widespread phenomenon of p-hacking and a lot of this "research" is just politicised junk optimised for engagement rather than truth.
Humans and pet dogs: https://academic.oup.com/toxsci/article-abstract/200/2/235/7...
Fear mongering?
Most renowned medical journal would disagree my friend: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2309822
4-5 times more chance to have another heart infarction in the next year.
Paper on decreased sperm count over time in the west (prob many reasons, plastic could be one) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6455044/
These things are very bad. We're just starting to learn HOW bad they are.
>Unexplained fertility decline in the last 40 years?
That's why human population has nearly doubled in last 40 years?
No, look at this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6455044/
Decreased sperm count in the west. Could be due to a variety of factors.
But tie it together to microplastics: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38745431/
And you got an interesting result.
Plastic is a miracle material that should be reserved for when it's actually necessary. Plastic egg containers, for example, are insane when recycled cardboard does a fine job.
"Plus, I had to haul a heavy tote bag of containers everywhere." Germany has a wonderful system to reuse glassware. Wear rings determine when it is time to discard a bottle. Vending machines accept bottles and dispense the deposit. I totally admire it. However, the weight of glass is about twice the weight of aluminum cans.
> owe their entire existence to plastics
I think that's fundamentally untrustable argument since a very similar one was used to justify slavery. "It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid 'anti-slavery' mentality bandwagon when they probably own their entire existence to slavery and other forms of forced labor. Abolishing slavery will lead to societal collapse."
Just because it's true - much of modern life is utterly dependent on plastics - that doesn't justify a continued high dependency on plastics.
> Everything will get recycled eventually
And we're all dead in the end.
That "eventually" is hiding a lot. Like, what of the plastic in the water. How will that eventually be recycled? What effect does the plastic trash have on sea life, including discarded ("ghost") plastic fishing nets.
Given your indefinite "eventual" time-frame, you'll need to estimate the net future value of continuing with a lot of single-use plastics, vs. that of switching to another solution, where the overall advantages across a century may justify a decade-long expensive transition.
> People in the future will surely find a way to use what's in landfills again.
That's one-sided optimism. Flip it around, and people in the future will surely find a way to eliminate the need for single-use plastic.
> Now you know why plastic replaced glass containers in a majority of applications
We also know the history of "why" depends on cheap petroleum and ignoring the cost of waste management.
Like, we know why Freon (or HCFCs in general) replaced older refrigerants, only later to learn about the high cost due to ozone depletion.
We know the history of why plastic grocery bags mostly replaced paper, but the cost to the store didn't factor in the full cleanup costs or environmental impacts.
How disingenuous. The argument against slavery wasn't that it is economically non-viable and has long term negative consequences. The objection was purely on moral grounds, which should completely supersede economic or environmental factors.
Plastic use should be weighed between harm and gain at each occasion of use. The same just isn't true for slavery, the analogy is terrible. There is appropriate use for plastics, there isn't appropriate use for slavery. You can not discuss both of them in the same manner.
And you are being obtuse.
One of the arguments for slavery is the correct observation that even the abolitionists "probably owed their entire existence to slavery", and the correct observation that abolition would collapse society.
As such, any argument along similar lines, like "you owe your existence to [single-use] plastics" and "society would collapse" should they disappear, is inherently incomplete and untrustworthy.
The argument is incorrect for slavery and correct for plastic. That is what you don't get.
Slavery is wrong whether or not it benefits people, because it is immoral as such. Plastic use is not immoral and therefore you need to weigh the benefits of plastics against the issues with it. The comparison is just idiotic.
Also, plastics are far more widely used, far more useful and far more beneficial than slavery ever was. Abolishing plastics as a whole means the total collapse of industrial society, every single production process somewhere depends on it. And again plastic use isn't inherently immoral, so the argument is categorically different from slavery as you can not object to the use of plastics on purely moral grounds.
This is not the argument you think it is.
I pointed out that userbinator's perplexity in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41135861 used a reasoning that is not trustworthy, given how slave-holders used similar arguments to express perplexity about abolitionists.
Yes, of course there's a cost-benefit analysis for plastic, which doesn't apply to slavery. But that's a different topic than perplexity.
userbinator then pointed out that there are reasons why single-use plastic was chosen over other methods, and optimism that the future would figure things out. I do not believe that is a valid cost-benefit analysis.
I replied that the historical switch to single-use plastics used a cost model which we now consider incorrect, similar to how most uses of Freon and leaded gas have been made illegal after we learned about their negatives. I also pointed out that long-term optimism should also be used to consider the cost to switching to alternatives.
The linked-to NPR piece specifically deals with single-use plastics ("for seven days, I challenged myself to avoid buying any new single-use plastics") and my comments all included the qualifier "single-use".
That does not mean "abolishing plastics as a whole", as you seem to think my comments concern.
>Yes, of course there's a cost-benefit analysis for plastic, which doesn't apply to slavery.
Which totally invalidates your analogy. Slavery wasn't wrong because the cost benefit analysis came out against it, even if the cost benefit analysis was positive it would have still been wrong.
That is why the argument that you need a cost benefit analysis is valid for plastic, but not for slavery. The analogy totally falls apart at that point.
>That does not mean "abolishing plastics as a whole", as you seem to think my comments concern.
If your analogy had gelt any water it would have. If plastic use was inherently immoral global plastic abolition would be the only moral choice, as has happened with slavery, which is now near universally condemned and outright ceased to exist on much of the globe.
Why do you think userbinator was perplexed?
Instead of the slavery example, consider how a white man in the 1950s could be perplexed that another white man would want to share civil rights equally with women and blacks. After all, both white men were brought up in a system which benefited them over others - why change?
Or how a native born citizen could want to allow more immigration, when another native born citizen could be perplexed about how that can reduce the opportunities for native born citizens (eg, "they will take our jobs").
No idea. I am still perplexed why you don't seem to understand that your argument is totally invalid, since the comparison does not make sense.
My argument concerns the reasoning behind the perplexity. Since you don't understand the perplexity in the first place, you must not understand the reasoning either, which means your comments have no bearing on the topic, why is why you think I'm not making sense.
>Plastic use is not immoral
Given that plastics manufactured today will exist for thousands of years and microplastics have found their way into everyone's blood, you could definitely make the argument that frivolous plastic use is absolutely immoral.
Are you stupid? This is a specific consequence of the overuse of plastics. Not inherent to plastic itself.
If you can not make that distinction please shit up.
We have a moral need to stop using plastic the way we do. Plus, you are very rude.
Yes, I am rude. Because talking to a person who doesn't understand the difference between something being wrong as such and something which has negative consequences.
Eliminating plastic use is impossible 100% of industrial processes depend on it. In fact eliminating plastic use is immoral.
Which is why no one here, not even me, is calling for eliminating plastic use.
This is all speculative. You hope everything will get recycled and you hope that people in the future will find a way to use what's in landfills. I hold the opposing view. Most of what is produced today is not recyclable and I have no faith in people to find ways to empty landfills.
Not only is it speculative, it seems internally inconsistent.
Somehow future people will figure out how to reuse stuff, but we can’t currently be bothered.
I believe in progress! So we should experiment and figure out how we can improve the current situation.
As long as society doesn't regress and collapse due to this radical environmentalism, we will find a way. Several hundred years ago, we did not know what to do with the dark oily substance oozing out of the ground. ;-)
We didn't invent oil and could've left it in the ground. This is a man made problem that is only going to get worse.
> It's perplexing to see people jump on this stupid "anti-plastic" mentality bandwagon when they probably owe their entire existence to plastics and other advances in material sciences. Trying to reverse these changes will only lead to societal collapse, as somewhat hinted at in the article.
That's quite a large straw man you have there.
I expect there are some people who want to eliminate all plastics. I think they're a small minority.
Speaking for myself, I understand that there are many important jobs that can't be done without plastic.
That doesn't stop me from trying to reduce my use of non-essential plastics.
I'll choose the cardboard egg carton over the plastic almost every time, and it has no negative impacts on me.
Ditto with making my own sandwich bread - I keep it in plastic containers so it stays fresh, but those containers last way longer than the single-use bags at the store.
The list goes on and on.
Yeah, we need plastics until materials science produces usable semi-stable alternatives, and maybe we'll never get rid of them entirely, but we can absolutely use fewer of them.
Plastics certainly is one of the most useful materials known to humans. It is incredibly versatile and cheap.
Any area of life has been significantly effected by the use of plastics as a material. I think articles like this are laughable, the plastic use of individuals in their daily lives is just a tiny, tiny peak of the iceberg. Beneath there sits an industrial society which could not exist without it. No, you can not live "plastic free".
The first and most important questions these people have to ask is: how do you make anything without plastics?