91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#231

Post by TimesOldRoman » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 7:19 PM UTC

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #19

The Plastic recycling process as a whole is an incredibly succesful cost externalization for the petro-chemical and packaging industries. Governments and consumers need to get serious with these lobbies: - Ban ALL single-use plastic (except for medical supplies). - Heavily tax plastic packaging - Tax breaks for glass and paper packaging - Force plastic return deposit schemes at supermarkets _payed for by manufacturer…

AGREE. Nothing worse that trash like those disposable stir-sticks that get maybe 20 seconds of use, yet will live in the ecosystem for thousands of years. Multiply that one tiny product by several orders of magnitude, daily, and we are burying ourselves in unusable cinders.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#232

Post by ouid » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #221

ouid wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your napkin math says this? So it must be right then... Surely all that is required for such a decision on the scale of every human doing this every year is some napkin math.

Napkin math is better than your complete lack of anything that resembles a number.

No, it's not. Napkin math is utterly useless here, and I think you don't understand utility.

Ultimately, all utility functions (strategy space to R), when integrated over the rest of time, produce either a finite value, or an infinite value. Trying to figure out which, for a given strategy, is in general undecidable.

Numbers sort of break down at this point. Or at least numbers as linear constructs. Humanity lives in a dynamical system, and as long as that dynamical system is stable enough (eigenvalues all near 1), we know from observation that evolution (in the biological sense) is capable of maintaining the invariants required to sustain human life and civilization. I will call this the flight envelope of life on earth.

This is an extraordinary gift. If I can prove that Humanity's strategy preserves these invariants, I can count on evolution to extend our presence more or less indefinitely, at least up to the point where the sun runs out of hydrogen or we are struck by some very large celestial object.

The squandering of this gift, by failing to maintain these invariants, has a literally incalculable cost. If we voluntarily exit the flight envelope of life, it is impossible to tell what will happen as a result, but it won't be as good as whatever we can get by staying in it. So my back of the napkin math says that the correct price to place on disposal of plastic into the ocean is "don't". There is no world in which the marginal utility of 50 trillion plastic bottles is greater than staying in the flight envelope.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#233

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 8:29 PM UTC

ouid wrote: post #232

Dylan16807 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Napkin math is better than your complete lack of anything that resembles a number.

No, it's not. Napkin math is utterly useless here, and I think you don't understand utility. Ultimately, all utility functions (strategy space to R), when integrated over the rest of time, produce either a finite value, or an infinite value. Trying to figure out which, for a given strategy, is in general undecidable. Numbers sort of break down at this point. Or at least numbers as linear constructs. Humanity lives in…

They don't last forever, the econonmy is not going to be in its current form for even a few hundred years, and if we're going with current methods the oil will run out too.

And you didn't even give a reason that plastic would kick us out of the flight envelope if we ignore those flaws in the argument.

So your very last line is true but you have done basically nothing to demonstrate that we have to choose between the two.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#234

Post by jay_kyburz » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

lopmotr wrote: post #200

jay_kyburz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax just makes things more expensive, and is very slow to elicit change. Taxing plastic bags while grocery shopping just makes your groceries a tiny bit more expensive. If you ban plastic shopping bags altogether they disappear overnight. update: I agree that trying to define "single-use" is difficult, instead I think governments should just choose an item that has good alternatives and ban them.

My country banned single use supermarket bags, which they defined by the thickness of the material and whether they had cut-out handles. So a supermarket that used to charge 10c for one of those bags replaced them with 20c bags of slightly thicker plastic with attached handles. For me, the extra cost was negligible so I just bought the more expensive bags and threw them in the rubbish. They don't offer them anymore,…

Here in Australia the thin bags were free and people used to use _a lot_ of them. Now they sell bags that are thicker and re-usable, but a lot of people bring their own bags.

I read a study that suggested the total plastic usage has gone down, but not by as much as you would think.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#235

Post by ouid » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 10:48 PM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #233

ouid wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it's not. Napkin math is utterly useless here, and I think you don't understand utility. Ultimately, all utility functions (strategy space to R), when integrated over the rest of time, produce either a finite value, or an infinite value. Trying to figure out which, for a given strategy, is in general undecidable. Numbers sort of break down at this point. Or at least numbers as linear constructs. Humanity lives in…

They don't last forever, the econonmy is not going to be in its current form for even a few hundred years, and if we're going with current methods the oil will run out too. And you didn't even give a reason that plastic would kick us out of the flight envelope if we ignore those flaws in the argument. So your very last line is true but you have done basically nothing to demonstrate that we have to choose between the…

You don't understand. The invariant to be maintained is the (amount of plastic in the oceans). Failing to maintain that invariant is a bad idea SIMPLY because you are failing to maintain it. Increasing the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a bad idea even if we have no conception of global warming.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#236

Post by Dylan16807 » Wed, Sep 16, 2020, 11:32 PM UTC

ouid wrote: post #235

Dylan16807 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't last forever, the econonmy is not going to be in its current form for even a few hundred years, and if we're going with current methods the oil will run out too. And you didn't even give a reason that plastic would kick us out of the flight envelope if we ignore those flaws in the argument. So your very last line is true but you have done basically nothing to demonstrate that we have to choose between the…

You don't understand. The invariant to be maintained is the (amount of plastic in the oceans). Failing to maintain that invariant is a bad idea SIMPLY because you are failing to maintain it. Increasing the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a bad idea even if we have no conception of global warming.

We're failing to maintain a million randomly selected invariants, though. "I can measure it" is a terrible motivating reason to keep something the same, and it would be impossible to maintain every invariant.

So instead we should look at actual harm and/or cleanup cost.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#237

Post by Kluny » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 12:02 AM UTC

replicatorblog wrote: post #152

lightgreen wrote: post #144

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…

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…

Banning stuff is rarely my preferred solution. My take on producer responsibility is that producers should be prepared to take their stuff BACK - meaning, if someone turns up at their headquarters (or some more reasonable location) with a dump truck full of, for example, empty coffee cups, they should be required to accept the delivery and find a way to dispose of it, paying for landfill if necessary, but hopefully something more constructive. I just want the cost of disposal to come straight back to them.

The coffee cup example is contrived, but let's say every producer of plastic zip ties was required to receive returned plastic zip ties each year, equal to the volume that they sold the previous year?

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#238

Post by waterhouse » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #228

waterhouse wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did we watch the same video? "Every tingly spidey sense, every sniff, every whiff, smells like global warming—which they now call climate change, in case they want to go the other way and say it's colder—but it just reeks of fuckin' bullshit to me. And yet, in good conscience, we can't really come out and say it's bullshit, because there isn't enough information to really refute it completely. And there is some infor…

No you don't. Just replace climate change with another established scientific fact that you actually agree with, like the earth being a globe perhaps, and you'll see what you sound like to people outside your bubble. > "Every tingly spidey sense, every sniff, every whiff, smells like global earth—which they now call non-flat earth, in case they want to go the other way and say it's a pyramid or banana-shape—but it ju…

I would actually have serious respect for someone who is in such an intellectually impoverished environment that they think the world is flat, yet they have the intellectual humility to say they're not totally sure.

The video doesn't actually say what Penn's objections to carbon credits are. Googling a bit, Wiki's episode summary for "Being Green" says: "Attacks the concept of carbon credits as a method of profiting off guilt, and compares them to indulgences"—well, is he wrong? I also see comments indicating that he says Al Gore buys carbon credits from a company he owns, which sounds at least like an "appearance of impropriety" which Gore maybe should have avoided.

> Clearly principles get trumped by fossil fuel funding.

Do you really think Penn got funding from fossil fuel companies and ... The steelman is that fossil fuel companies have paid unscrupulous individuals in think tanks that libertarians subscribe to, to write mendacious reports that libertarians believe. That's possible. I wonder if any other group has been fooled by mendacious reports.

I wonder what the best strategy is for defeating mendacious reports in general. Perhaps encouraging everyone engaged in a scientific debate to be as scrupulously honest and precise as they can be—and to recognize dishonest tactics. A failure mode in that is seeing dishonest tactics where none exist, so perhaps one can (encourage everyone to) adopt practices that make it easier for everyone to tell the difference. Things like publishing all raw data, preregistering experiments, and offering rewards for neutral parties to reproduce an experiment, seem helpful.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#239

Post by ouid » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 6:01 AM UTC

Dylan16807 wrote: post #236

ouid wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't understand. The invariant to be maintained is the (amount of plastic in the oceans). Failing to maintain that invariant is a bad idea SIMPLY because you are failing to maintain it. Increasing the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a bad idea even if we have no conception of global warming.

We're failing to maintain a million randomly selected invariants, though. "I can measure it" is a terrible motivating reason to keep something the same, and it would be impossible to maintain every invariant. So instead we should look at actual harm and/or cleanup cost.

The irony of suggesting cleanup cost here, I just don't know. Cleaning up maintains the invariant. You have successfully put the intrinsic price tag on the externality. Well done.

Re: 91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

#240

Post by Dylan16807 » Thu, Sep 17, 2020, 7:42 AM UTC

ouid wrote: post #239

Dylan16807 wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're failing to maintain a million randomly selected invariants, though. "I can measure it" is a terrible motivating reason to keep something the same, and it would be impossible to maintain every invariant. So instead we should look at actual harm and/or cleanup cost.

The irony of suggesting cleanup cost here, I just don't know. Cleaning up maintains the invariant. You have successfully put the intrinsic price tag on the externality. Well done.

Please don't deliberately interpret my comment to be the weakest form.

Looking at what it would cost to clean up doesn't have to mean actually cleaning. But let's remove that part, because the important part is to look at actual harm.

Especially because if you can't tell me the relationship between plastic levels and harm, and you can't tell me how much is too much, what if I decide we've already broken the invariant and there's no point in reducing any more?

I only suggested looking at cleanup cost to get a better understanding of how to handle the harm. Not because we have a magic list of which things must be cleaned up and which things don't need to be.

Because you'd need such a magic list. Otherwise how do we know that we don't need to blow up all our houses because they're violating an invariant, or something similarly crippling? What if Earth can only safely supply 10 million humans in the long term, for a fun possible invariant.