161–170 of 253 posts
It is deeply ironic that many people who advocate for better plastic consumption, probably own yoga pants, which are made of plastic. Kind of off topic, but, my point is it is more than just Coca-Cola driving the plastics industry.
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> - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). This is just naive and irrational. What if I really need a single use plastic thingy because for example, it is a wire buckle, and making it multi-use would make it effectively expensive single-use wire buckle? Banning ALL is rarely a good solution. Just tax it and that's it. And it doesn't matter, if it's single use or multiple use, because eventually all…
Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco. This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plast…
>The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology.
That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer research the real trade off isn't uranium baby powder or regular baby powder, it's uranium baby powder or oncology".
I pretty much stopped using my recycling bins... except for aluminum.
I still don't get how bottled water became a thing. It wasn't a thing when I was a kid, and somehow the industry convinced us to buy huge quantities of an inferior product for more money, and it pollutes the environment to boot. Insane. The least you can do is use a refillable container. 10+ years ago Google switched from bottle water to giving everyone a container. And that was a great move. Yet people complained, a…
I am fregan for environmental reasons, among others. I get much of my food out of dumpsters. I don't buy any clothes, like, ever, only hand-me-downs. I don't ride in a car unless it's already going that way. Several years ago, I paid a couple hundred bucks to get my municipal water (large U.S. city) tested in a lab. After seeing the results, I almost never drink tap water, and I buy a gallon of spring water (in clear…
I think many workplaces also have filtered water, including every place of worked at (although not everyone uses it).
The "water cooler" was a really good solution!
Germany has some recycling plants with modern sorting machines, almost entirely automated, it’s quite impressive to see it working. https://youtu.be/I_fUpP-hq3A I was checking for details a few days ago, they announce on their website 53% of their input recycled, and 47% used for “energy recovery” (which is newspeak to say they burn it for the cement and steel industry). I was surprised by the fact that they burn so…
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They lied about the recycling potential to encourage widespread adoption of plastics. I don’t think consumers are blameless, but you can’t get everyone in the world to change their purchasing behavior without regulation, which is necessary when lower prices are subsidized by huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large.
>huge externalities that have negative consequences for the world at large. What are these negative consequences? The only ones I can think of are related to improper disposal (eg. littering), and would be present regardless of whether the material was recyclable or not. ie. if we replaced all the non-recyclable plastic bottles with 100% recyclable aluminum cans, the littering problem would still be there.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). This is just naive and irrational. What if I really need a single use plastic thingy because for example, it is a wire buckle, and making it multi-use would make it effectively expensive single-use wire buckle? Banning ALL is rarely a good solution. Just tax it and that's it. And it doesn't matter, if it's single use or multiple use, because eventually all…
> This is just naive and irrational. Ignoring the unnecessary ad hominem, this is as irrational, as baning leaded fuel or asbestos. Plastic will be the defining geological remainder of our human epoch. We are physically destroying the planet and our own healthy for the sake of wire buckles. [0] You claim this to be naive, yet this is the very proposal currently approved by 560 members of the EU parliament, in the new…
It's apples to oranges. Nobody really needs leaded fuel or asbestos.
But single-use plastics has a lot of reasonable applications, like ones I gave above: multi-use things which are effectively single-use.
> You claim this to be naive, yet this is the very proposal currently approved by 560 members of the EU parliament, in the new European Union Single-Use Plastics Directive 2019/904
If MP were really smart people, we would already colonized Mars and other planets. They are just regular dudes who are pushed by voters, by industry and so on.
> However, make no mistake, a ban is coming it is not a question of if but of when
I'm certain of that. And that ban will do more harm then good. Like for example, people might start bying expensive multi-use things for single-use applications.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Separating worthy designs from wasteful ones is essentially impossible. I spent the first ten years of my career designing medical devices and worked with a wide range of suppliers. One of our key vendors also did a lot of work designing airtight containers for chewing tobacco. This is true up the entire supply chain. The same machines that produce barrier plastics for first responders also produce material for plast…
>Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations. >The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology. That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer resea…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Sure, you could hypothetically ban all the "frivolous" applications, but I don't think people fully understand how the R&D for silly things subsidizes, and cross pollinates life-saving innovations. >The real trade-off isn't plastics or landfills, it is landfills vs. modern oncology. That is a false dilemma. You might as well start adding uranium to baby powder because "Uranium Co spends so much money on cancer resea…
I invite you to spend some time in a pediatric oncology unit, look at the mind-boggling variety of single-use plastics consumed over the course of the day, and research their manufacturers and origins. The results will be more illuminating than some dramatic hypothetical.