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Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

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Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#121

Post by DoreenMichele »

exabrial wrote: post #46
WalterBright wrote: post #8

Plastics should be taxed.

Couple of points: Taxes don't work to work to change behavior, or people would have stopped speeding a long time ago, sugary drinks wouldn't sell in Seattle, and people would stop buying coffee in California. They are an unfortunate excuse used by politicians to fool the public into "hey I'm doing something!". Instead, innovation is needed around providing biodegradable solutions that can outcompete their plastic cou…

Taxes don't have some absolute power to control behavior, but they do influence it to some degree.

(I am not taking a position either for or against taxing this specific issue.)

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#122

Post by c3534l »

erulabs wrote: post #104
c3534l wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxes don't work to work to change behavior This is absolute nonsense and flies in the face of established economic theory backed up by empirical evidence. I don't understand why there are so many people in this thread pulling assertions out of their ass like this. HackerNews is better than that.

Unfortunately the planet Earth is not a laboratory, and correlation is not causation. If a tax is added to cigarettes, and the tax is passed by elected officials, and the elected officials are responding to the attitude of the populace, how do we know it was the tax, and not _the attitude of the populace_ that lead to lower cigarette usage? A classic example of this is the Civil Rights Act. Did racism become abhorren…

I mean, there's an entire area of accounting called tax planning where accountants consult with businesses about how to conduct business to reduce their tax burden. Avoiding paying taxes isn't some obscure thing that people do, it's something you can make a six-figure salary doing as a profession. Additionally, there is no shortage of data for changing taxes. There are more than enough natural experiments as well as actual municipal experiments testing how people react to taxes. It turns out that most people avoid spending money they don't have to. People like money and they go out of their way to keep it.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#123

Post by DoreenMichele »

erulabs wrote: post #104
c3534l wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Taxes don't work to work to change behavior This is absolute nonsense and flies in the face of established economic theory backed up by empirical evidence. I don't understand why there are so many people in this thread pulling assertions out of their ass like this. HackerNews is better than that.

Unfortunately the planet Earth is not a laboratory, and correlation is not causation. If a tax is added to cigarettes, and the tax is passed by elected officials, and the elected officials are responding to the attitude of the populace, how do we know it was the tax, and not _the attitude of the populace_ that lead to lower cigarette usage? A classic example of this is the Civil Rights Act. Did racism become abhorren…

You are correct that it is complicated and drawing firm conclusions is challenging. That doesn't mean we can't draw any conclusions ever.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#124

Post by outworlder »

Aloha wrote: post #9

I strongly suspect that within about 50-100 years something will evolve that can digest all of this plastic. Which will probably cause us as a society to move back to glass and metal as storage components.

50 to 100 years is a very short time.

For millions of years, nothing had the capability to eat dead plant matter. See the carboniferous period.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#125

Post by Johnny555 »

dflock wrote: post #120
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too true. Honestly at this point I wish there was a labelling requirement of the environmental and sustainability consequences of everything. Or that it was priced in to everything somehow. It's far too easy to make a very bad choice with the best of intentions.

A carbon tax is exactly that.

A carbon tax only taxes one small part of the full environmental impact of a product.

A synthetic shirt might have less carbon impact than a cotton shirt, but its plastic waste may be poisoning the oceans.

Or, as a made up example, coconut fiber shirt may have environmentally friendly organic degradable waste and a low direct carbon impact, while the demand for coconut caused millions of acres of native forest to be burnt down and replanted with coconut trees. Or maybe it caused the diversion of rivers for irrigation endangering fish and other ecosystems that relied on the rivers. Or maybe the newly planted trees displace food crops, leading to food shortages.

There are a lot of environmental externalities that are hard to account for, and some may not be known for years.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#126

Post by rhacker »

dflock wrote: post #120
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Too true. Honestly at this point I wish there was a labelling requirement of the environmental and sustainability consequences of everything. Or that it was priced in to everything somehow. It's far too easy to make a very bad choice with the best of intentions.

A carbon tax is exactly that.

Are Carbon taxes really effective? Democrats get in, carbon taxes come with them. Republicans get in, carbon taxes leave with the democrats. I don't think taxes will ever solve this unless both sides see the issue.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#127

Post by bradly »

asteli wrote: post #79

Re: microfibers making it into water systems: This is a con to synthetic fibers that I hadn't been considering before. Recently I learned that cotton has a pretty high environmental footprint (land use, highest pesticide use of any crop, high water consumption) [1], and thus started moving some of my clothing purchases toward polyester-blends (trades the cons of cotton for petrochemical and energy use). Does anyone h…

You can put your microfiber clothes in a specialized bag when washing to help prevent the fibers from making their way into the water systems. Here is one example of a bag: https://www.patagonia.com/product/guppyfriend-washing-bag/O2...

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#128

Post by qbrass »

subcosmos wrote: post #2

With 15 minutes of effort typing commands into a large bioinformatics database, you too can convince yourself that these contaminants may be behind the Diabetes epidemic. https://medium.com/@InfinoMe/diabetes-time-to-resort-to-plas...

Packaging food in plastic containers provides easier access to snackfoods, and allows you to carry them in more places to allow opportunistic snacking.

While the plastic itself may not be directly causing diabetes, the increased availability of food might be allowing people to overeat and give themselves diabetes.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#129

Post by outworlder »

fredsir wrote: post #58
toomuchtodo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is much much harder to consume enough fats to have the same caloric intake as carbs. That’s the whole reason keto works.

That's irrelevant. It's still the fat that causes type 2 diabetes. That doesn't mean keto can't work because it clearly can as long as it doesn't lead to overconsumption of fat. Also there are different kinds of carbs. As long as you keep to whole-food carbs, you practically can't eat too many (except for a few kinds like nuts and seeds and avocados) because you will be full long before it's too much. It's a differen…

I see this copy pasta replicated several times.

What do you mean by "cause type 2 diabetes"? Type 2, you body is simply not making a sufficient amount of insulin to get the desired effect. In many cases, this is because the individual has developed "insulin resistance" but the pancreas is producing what would be an adequate amount otherwise. And this is usually due to "fat", as in, fat stores in that individual. It is not directly related to consumption of fat.

EDIT: This does not take into account other causes of type 2 diabetes and only deals with a single scenario.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#130

Post by stephengillie »

kingkawn wrote: post #107

Personal anecdote; just got back from a trip to Hawaii. Many of the beaches there had significant deposits of pebble sized and smaller visible plastic particles. Presumably there’s exponentially more smaller ones that I couldn’t as easily see. Some of the beaches had plastic floating in the water. Locals said it wasn’t island dumped garbage, it was brought in from currents from the ocean. Horrific to see.

Just got back from a trip asking the Washington State coast, including Westport and Ocean Shores, and Birch Bay near Bellingham.

The beaches were nearly pristine, for the number of people there. I only saw the occasional lost sandal on the various beaches, and a few beer cans near bonfire dugouts. I was surprised at the lack of plastic and debris, given reports like yours.

Is there a state or federal agency that combs America's beaches?

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