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.