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Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

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Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#141

Post by alwaysdoit »

orthecreedence wrote: post #135
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you? That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.

Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would ra…

Does the animal's lifespan matter? Intuitively it seems like killing something that will only live for a few days or weeks at most matters less. So I'm not sure it's all due to "cultural worth" (though I don't disagree that's part of it).

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#142

Post by orthecreedence »

notpresident wrote: post #126
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I try not to kill flies, no. The only exception is for multiple flies that won't go away. Ditto for ants. It's a bit strange that violence toward insects is fine, but violence towards dogs is not. Ever killed a dog because it annoyed you? That said, doing it for science at least has a justification.

Tangentially related and I expect a 50% chance to be punished for this but it is really interesting and I think it deserves some thought: It always surprises me how a number of HNers worries about killing insects, even for science - all while supporting the killing of unborn children.

Perhaps I can answer your question. I catch flies and bring them outside when they are in my home. I also regularly go for walks outside. In doing so, I will step on ants, caterpillars, various plants, etc. Some of them surely die. In other words, I will show kindness to animals, but only to the point where it doesn't completely impede my life or my ability to find happiness.

When I think of abortion, I don't think of it as killing babies. I think of it as killing a collection of cells that some day perhaps might be a child. But it is not one. I don't see how one can say that a clump of 64 cells is a child, given that it has the potential to be one, but not also take issue with their sperm not fertilizing an egg. Isn't every sperm a potential child as well? On what point of the scale to you draw the line and say "this is now a child" vs "this is a collection of biological material that may become a child if proper conditions are met?"

I think the first trimester is a fairly decent cutoff.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#143

Post by jschwartzi »

notpresident wrote: post #127
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Probably a bad one. I agree that killing insects is fine if there's a reason. But I was reacting to "I kill things because they annoy me." Which is valid, but always frustrating. My parents used to flip out and kill caterpillars, spiders, etc whenever they saw them. More than once I'd notice one and corral them outside while my parents weren't looking. There's just no point in killing something because it simply exis…

At home it was my Dad who told me to be nice to spiders. :-)

Mine too! He would tell me that the spiders are helpful because they kill other bugs, and to leave them alone or put them outside. The more I think about these things, the more connected even the small things in our world are.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#145

Post by okreallywtf »

tuna-piano wrote: post #49
fenwick67 wrote: post #44

I am skeptical that any sort of bacteria/insect based plastic decomposition project will address the problems with plastic waste. The biggest problem with plastic is not with the products that make it into the landfill, where bacteria could be used. The problem is with what happens when they don't make it into a landfill, and they end up as basically permanent pollutants in the water.

I, for one, have never understood the problem with landfills. There's tons of unused space left, and landfills take up a tiny fraction of that. Who cares if we make a trash hill somewhere and styrofoam sits there for a million years?

Part of the problem is it is not just the expected trash that is buried there. I've seen people taking plenty of old electronics, batteries and all kinds of other toxic stuff and nobody is really checking a lot of what makes it in there (especially when you haul in a trailer load of demo stuff and just dump it off).

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#146

Post by pepve »

Falling3 wrote: post #133
notpresident wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially related and I expect a 50% chance to be punished for this but it is really interesting and I think it deserves some thought: It always surprises me how a number of HNers worries about killing insects, even for science - all while supporting the killing of unborn children.

This is a ridiculous oversimplification of the issues and a guaranteed way of hijacking this for a completely unproductive argument.

To be fair, this thread started with someone describing the killing of maggots as "disturbing". It was never going to be a productive argument.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#147

Post by orthecreedence »

alwaysdoit wrote: post #141
orthecreedence wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I advocate for animal rights on this forum, it's met with downvotes and people huffing and puffing about the benefit to humanity and science. Your argument is sound...flies are animals. They have exoskeletons, six legs, and compound eyes but they are animals nonetheless. However, our cultural "worth" of flies is much lower than that of dogs, so even people who supposedly value logic above all else would ra…

Does the animal's lifespan matter? Intuitively it seems like killing something that will only live for a few days or weeks at most matters less. So I'm not sure it's all due to "cultural worth" (though I don't disagree that's part of it).

Yeah, I've thought about that too, actually. And certainly, I feel better about killing any animal that I perceived to have had a "full life" (dogs included).

I tend to think that lifetimes are measured in lifetimes (relative scale) by various animals. So where a fly might live four of our weeks, to that fly, perhaps it was perceived as a good 60 years time if it was on our scale.

So to me, lifespan doesn't factor into it too much, although perhaps you're right that that is another piece of data used by people to measure an animal's "worth."

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#148

Post by philipkglass »

This is scientifically very interesting but pretty much orthogonal to solving problems with plastic pollution.

The worms can't live in landfills. If you could separate the plastic before landfilling to feed it to worms, then you could just burn whatever separated plastic can't be recycled. (Yes, that releases CO2, but so does having worms and bacteria eat the plastic.) The problem with plastic as waste isn't that it is super-toxic or impossible to destroy. The problem is that it's mixed in with a lot of other kinds of waste. We don't need new ways to destroy polyethylene. We need ways to separate it from mingled waste streams or prevent mingling in the first place.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#149

Post by omginternets »

philipkglass wrote: post #148

This is scientifically very interesting but pretty much orthogonal to solving problems with plastic pollution. The worms can't live in landfills. If you could separate the plastic before landfilling to feed it to worms, then you could just burn whatever separated plastic can't be recycled. (Yes, that releases CO2, but so does having worms and bacteria eat the plastic.) The problem with plastic as waste isn't that it…

Arguably, you could breed worms in a landfill, provided the detritus weren't packed so tightly; Living creatures are usually pretty good at finding foodstuffs among non-edibles.

Re: Caterpillar found to eat shopping bags, suggesting solution to plastic pollution

#150

Post by greenshackle2 »

Chris86 wrote: post #90
Goronmon wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the biggest issue people have with landfills is that it's basically banking on the things being dumped there not having an adverse effect on the environment, ground water, etc over a long period of time. Even if no one really knew/knows/ensures what is entirely safe to dump.

Yeah, I'm not sure why anyone would think burying waste underground is an okay solution. It made sense when most household waste was fabrics, wood, old food etc but nobody stopped quick enough to evaluate the impacts when our waste got more and more toxic and non-biodegradable. I've recently move to the Netherlands from the UK and was amazed to discover they don't recycle household metal items (e.g. soft drinks cans,…

A modern landfill is not like a landfill back then either, there's a lot of engineering that goes into it, it's not just a hole in the ground. You make it sound like no thought was given to the problem but municipal solid waste disposal is an entire science and engineering discipline.

There is room for improvement but I'm pretty ok with modern landfills. Methane capture IMO is the biggest lack. It's such a waste to let it pollute the atmosphere (at 30x the GHG potential of CO2) when you can capture it, scrub it and burn it for energy. Google says landfill gases account for about 10% of global GHG emissions.

(That's in North America, probably most of the world has woefully inadequate waste management solutions.)

It's clear there's not enough thought and resources going into preventing environmental problems but IMO landfills are not at the top of the list.

> I've recently move to the Netherlands from the UK and was amazed to discover they don't recycle household metal items

Wikipedia says metal cans are separated from regular trash (at the plant) to be recycled. It also says recycling in handled by municipalities so YMMV.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recycling_in_the_Netherlands

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