Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–318 of 318 posts

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#311

Post by wffurr »

seanalltogether wrote: post #29
wffurr wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No high quality source of hydrocarbons goes unexploited for long.

The carboniferous period lasted 60 million years. We probably have some time to work with.

Locked away in geologically stable layers in a time of cataclysmic climate change. Maybe there's something to that and the oceans will acidify too much for bacteria to evolve to eat the plastic, and there will forever be a "plastic layer" in the geological record to mark this era.

I was thinking more that the plastics in question are free-floating in a soluble medium and thus ripe for digestion by an opportunistic microbe.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#312

Post by asteli »

lawlessone wrote: post #249
bradly wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The bag is also plastic..

It's a nylon (polyamide) mesh. It's not going to spew microfibers in the same way that a polyester fleece would. For reference, I found you some micrographs of the materials we're talking about:

poly fleece: https://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/wp-content/uploads/201... nylon mesh: https://assets.fishersci.com/TFS-Assets/CCG/product-images/F...

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#313

Post by dcbadacd »

marcosdumay wrote: post #152
dcbadacd wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one thing to consider, but it's ignoring a major aspect - biodegradability. Yes, a plastic bag is in some ways more efficient per ton than a cloth bag but doesn't decompose safely and fast, cloth usually does.

What's worse, adding some inert foreign molecules to the environment, or adding some CO2, excess nitrates, and excess phosphorous, taking down a bit of native vegetation, and revolving some more soil? I really don't know the answer, but I bet everybody on the anti-plastic crusade doesn't know either. I would really like if somebody cared to do some unbiased studies on this (not the ones full of flaws reinforcing the…

How do we know that microplastics and other particulate in say human bodies or foods are somehow "inert"?

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#314

Post by dmritard96 »

real_cost wrote: post #310
dmritard96 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. There should be a mitigation cost associated with all plastics. Nothing more frustrating than buying a container for some food that will last for millennia meanwhile the food was consumed in a couple minutes... More generally, I hope more will push for taxes on all things we want to discourage as means of weening off. Oil, coal, plastic, high impact animal products. All of them have huge external costs, none…

This is called a Pigovian tax. I believe that Pigovian taxes are not a good solution for plastics and other multifaceted environmental issues because of the complexity in calculating the total environmental cost of all the externalities of a product. I think consumers would change their buying behavior if they knew the real cost of their purchases. For that reason I believe there is a big opportunity (and chance to s…

Thanks real_cost.

I have been thinking this way for a long time but was unaware of a formal name for this idea/system. Glad to have a name to put to a concept and signed up for your mailing list.

In general, I do think we can price things, after all, we already do, just poorly (existing taxes). I really do agree that we have a pricing problem but I'm an optimist that worse case, we can calculate mitigation costs and then work backwards from there - not to suggest that is the right/best way to do it - just that it is one simple way to do it.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#315

Post by kpil »

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.

I think it's actually because of tsunamis and storms more than just negligence.

An event like the Tōhoku tsunami creates massive amounts of garbage.

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#316

Post by kpil »

pq0ak2nnd wrote: post #208
flattone wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

4 months ago took a car to beaches up and down the west and east sides of a Oahu. No hotel / high traffic beaches considered here: bits of plastic across all beaches. A specific light blue tube plastic material never longer than a couple inches was spoted many times on both sides of the island, felt very like vacationing a sand trap for the world's trash.

Visit Cyprus: their south-coast beaches are the worst I've ever seen in the Mediterranean: cigarette butts & plastic caps uniformly distributed in the sand to a depth of about 30cm. Oddly, just to the East, Crete's beaches were spotless, so it must be due to cleanup and not currents. Guessing.

Maybe the Cypriots just litter more. Cigarette butts and bottle caps seems locally generated...

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#317

Post by schiffern »

marcosdumay wrote: post #288
schiffern wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>inert foreign molecules Problem is they're often not inert. The polymers may be, but the bisphenol plasticizers, UV stabilizers, dyes, brominated fire retardants, mold release agents, etc may not be, and they leach out over time.

Do they become reactive inside of living beings? Or just outside due to UV catalyzed hydrolyze?

The molecules I'm speaking of are already reactive. Again it's not just the bulk polymer, there are a bunch of "special ingredients" added to most plastics, plus contaminants introduced during recycling.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Plastics_additives

Re: Tiny Plastic Is Everywhere

#318

Post by [deleted] »

bacon_waffle wrote: post #301
J-dawg wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to believe that materials like wool are the answer, but I fear they're not. Raising animals is carbon intensive, and all those sheep need somewhere to graze. If people switched to wool clothing on a big scale, it would probably lead to mass deforestation.

I agree that it's not the answer, but I think one of the main lessons we should be learning is that monocultures are not the answer either. Here in New Zealand, much of our agriculture has shifted from sheep to dairy cows. There's a growing fear (I don't know how justified it really is) that synthetic milk, or even meat, will become a reality and wreck the traditional dairy industry. So, in our situation, maybe more…

[deleted]
Post reply on HN