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91% of plastic isn't recycled (2018)

nationalgeographic.com

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

#241

Post by DoingIsLearning »

xadhominemx wrote: post #230
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Single use plastics are a tiny fraction of our carbon footprint ... And a Lion's share of the microplastic calamity contaminating our oceans, our ground water and our food supply. Not everything is about CO2 emissions. With a single business decision, Humans have managed to contaminate the whole water cycle with micro-plastics all the way up to alpine glaciers. [0] Single-use plastic is outstandingly great for sell…

How much of the microplastic contamination is from consumer goods packaging from western countries? The vast majority is from fishing nets and illegal dumping of household trash by developing countries.

We can never pressure other countries to do it unless we do it first.

In addition, regulating plastic means that for multi-national corporations the path of least resistance is to operate under the most restrictive standard instead of maintaining multiple packaging solutions.

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

#242

Post by xadhominemx »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #241
xadhominemx wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much of the microplastic contamination is from consumer goods packaging from western countries? The vast majority is from fishing nets and illegal dumping of household trash by developing countries.

We can never pressure other countries to do it unless we do it first. In addition, regulating plastic means that for multi-national corporations the path of least resistance is to operate under the most restrictive standard instead of maintaining multiple packaging solutions.

You have no idea how consumer packaged goods supply chains work. And Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian policy makers are not going to care at all if we ban plastic soda bottles. And how high would this be on our list diplomatic priorities. Think about this for 4 seconds.

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

#243

Post by ouid »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #240
ouid wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You cannot measure "actual" harm, because the system is dynamical.

You wanted a definition of externality, I gave it to you. There's a function that gives you the upper bound on the cost of an externality, which for lack of a better term, we can call the clean up function. This is the cost of returning the system to its original state.

You don't need a magic list, you need a way of demonstrating that certain actions are within the flight envelope of the environment, ie, there is some corrective force within the environment that maintains the invariant for you, and a policy of denying all actions that do not come with such a demonstration. The list can expand as scientific understanding expands, and we are allowed some leeway by the intrinsic stability of the system. If evolution could not absorb some unexpected perturbations, we wouldn't exist in the first place, but we should treat this as a finite resource, for which we do not have an amount.

Evidence that we don't do this at all is just you being in denial about the terribleness of the human strategy.

Imagine, for metaphor, that you are in some (solar powered) alien plane, and the pilot dies. You go into the cockpit, knowing that you just have to keep the plane flying. You make a mental note that all of the instruments on the panel are fixed, and the position of all of the controls. You decide that you want to fly faster so you fiddle around with the contrls until you can tell that the landscape is going underneath you faster than it was before. You note that some instrument on the panel is increasing. Do you A) ignore it, or B) return the controls to their original state?

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

#244

Post by R0b0t1 »

ouid wrote: post #243
Dylan16807 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You cannot measure "actual" harm, because the system is dynamical. You wanted a definition of externality, I gave it to you. There's a function that gives you the upper bound on the cost of an externality, which for lack of a better term, we can call the clean up function. This is the cost of returning the system to its original state. You don't need a magic list, you need a way of demonstrating that certain actions…

If you can't measure it how do you know it exists? That is at least half of my point, the other half being you can't assume a specific course of action is necessary and proper without demonstrating the harm actually occurred. That you think harm might occur is not enough, you need to show it has occurred (and can probably use proof of past harm to show that inevitable harm will occur).

Your example is disingenuous because a cockpit instrument by definition monitors something you want to pay attention to. We can measure and record many things, most of which are probably irrelevant to many problems and their solutions.

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

#245

Post by lopmotr »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #234
lopmotr wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I though they weren't banned for their amount of plastic usage, which was surely negligible compared to the packaging of the products people put in them, but for their tendency to blow away and end up in the environment. Thicker bags might not be so easily blown away so maybe it's OK if we all use them? I don't know really because nobody actually analyses this stuff - the decisions are made in response to public outrage.

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

#246

Post by DoingIsLearning »

xadhominemx wrote: post #242
DoingIsLearning wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can never pressure other countries to do it unless we do it first. In addition, regulating plastic means that for multi-national corporations the path of least resistance is to operate under the most restrictive standard instead of maintaining multiple packaging solutions.

You have no idea how consumer packaged goods supply chains work. And Chinese, Indian, and Nigerian policy makers are not going to care at all if we ban plastic soda bottles. And how high would this be on our list diplomatic priorities. Think about this for 4 seconds.

> You have no idea how consumer packaged goods supply chains work

I fully accept that. However I cannot accept that we leave the current status quo as is. We are very literally killing ourselves.

If you have other ideas or better approaches please share them so that they can be discussed.

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

#247

Post by armandhammer »

narwally wrote: post #14

This is for glass recycling not plastic, but I recently found out that my county ships all of their glass recyclables to be dumped in a landfill of a neighboring state. In my state, waste disposal companies are legally obligated to recycle everything they can that ends up in a recycling bin. But with glass it's actually vastly cheaper to produce new glass bottles than it is to make them out of recycled material. So t…

I remember finding out 15 years ago that the moderately progressive well-known "university town" where I lived at the time (Southeastern U.S.) didn't actually recycle anything, they just buried the plastic stuff and the clear vs colored glass in different sections of the landfill, so that it'd be easier to dig it up one day when recycling was actually economically viable. The recycling lie isn't new.

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

#248

Post by armandhammer »

hristov wrote: post #61

As I have said before the solution is compostable plastic. It solves the problem with the smallest net change in behavior of the affected parties. As we have regrettably seen with the coronavirus changing the behavior of large populations is incredibly difficult even if there are dire repercussions for failure to change. The cost of compostable plastic is slightly higher than the usual plastic, so the governments wil…

A lot of "compostable" plastic isn't compostable, at least not under the circumstances that most people consider to be composting... e.g. you can't put it in your backyard scrap pile and expect it to be gone in a few months. It'll still be there years later. One industry rep told me that they estimate their products take 30 years to completely breakdown and that's under perfectly ideal conditions -- bury it in a landfill with no oxygen, who knows how long it'll take. I guess that's better than 1,000 years... but still, it's basically another industry lie.

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

#249

Post by koheripbal »

alistairSH wrote: post #179
koheripbal wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not correct. I'd much rather buy a plastic bottle of water than a heavy glass one.

Water is/should be damn near free in any wealthy nation. There shouldn’t even be a market for single-use water (not on the scale it exists in the USA anyway).

Water is essentially free. You are paying for the container.

Making the containers free will just drive up wastage.

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

#250

Post by diggan »

cheshireoctopus wrote: post #226
diggan wrote: post #6

Fitting, I just started looking into reusing plastic myself by collecting plastic from my own, family and friends trash and remoulding it into something useful. In my quest for this, I found Precious Plastic, an amazing community around recycling plastics yourself and for your community. https://preciousplastic.com/ While individuals plastic pollution is not the biggest emitter of plastic here in the world, we can al…

This is REALLY cool. How can I meet people around me who have already setup a collection point, a community point, or a machine shop? Do you have an onboarding guide for beginners who are looking for low-effort ways to explore what you are doing?

I don't want to give the impression I'm part of the Precious Plastic Community (yet at least) as I'm only playing around.

However, here are some resources for getting started locally:

- Map of all the workshops registered on PP - https://community.preciousplastic.com/map

- Events that are being organized all around the world - https://community.preciousplastic.com/events

- Onboarding guide, read from top to bottom, includes some videos as well, great for getting started - https://community.preciousplastic.com/academy/intro

- And the most helpful, PPs Discord community, tons of channels and even more people, usually very responsive and very diverse - https://discordapp.com/invite/cGZ5hKP

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