211–220 of 272 posts
There's also a company working on a plastic replacement for mushroom grow bags. It would be biodegradable.
Ooh - do you happen to have a link?
Plastic like bags that are made from cassava and dissolve in water - https://www.onegreenplanet.org/news/company-makes-cassava-ba...
And also, cellophane is biodegradable too.
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What about biodegradable plastics? If regular plastics were made illegal or heavily taxed, wouldn't industry quickly come up with biodegradable alternatives?
Biodegrading plastic releases CO2, landfill-buried plastic does not. Apart from that, what problem are you trying to solve with this innovation?
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The countries which are the most preoccupied with recycling plastics, such as the US, are also the least likely to throw they trash into the ocean. Plastic bags do no harm buried in the landfill, and we’re not running out of land.
I see plastic bags on the beach. I walk along the creeks nearby, and I see plastic bags and plastic garbage. I go for a hike in the sierras, and I find plastic garbage. I bike along the roads in town, and I see plastic bags in the gutter. I look down the incline beside the road and there are plastic bags in the trees. Is the USA as bad as Morocco? No. Is plastic waste a problem? Yes.
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What about biodegradable plastics? If regular plastics were made illegal or heavily taxed, wouldn't industry quickly come up with biodegradable alternatives?
Current biodegradable plastics are an industry smokescreen. The biodegradable portion is generally plant starch used as a binder. The “plastic” is just that, a very stable long lived micro/nano plastic. The big chunks break down, and the plastics continue to move through the environment and bioaccumulate. The work towards truly biodegrade plastic is generally from the other end; identifying or making organisms that c…
Granted the biodegradability of many formulations is still far too long and requires unrealistic circumstances to happen in the wild (hot composting for example).
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I believe plastic recycling is not motivated by oil use primarily. I believe it is motivated by trash accumulation in oceans and the food chain (microplastics). There are a ton of areas of the world where plastic just piles up.
The countries which are the most preoccupied with recycling plastics, such as the US, are also the least likely to throw they trash into the ocean. Plastic bags do no harm buried in the landfill, and we’re not running out of land.
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That's horrible, if true. Do you have a source for that? A quick Google search didn't get me anywhere. At least here in Austria the glass bottles are actually cleaned and re-used.
There isn't really any systematic reuse of glass bottles in the U.S. The only such thing I've encountered is some very niche arrangements between boutique dairy companies and boutique grocery stores, where you can return your $10 quart bottle of milk for the bottle to be reused.
You’re misrepresenting the price substantially – that’s 5 times what Whole Foods charges and while they’re upscale they’re more mainstream than boutique these days.
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I think we should recycle plastic if we can, or better yet, switch to other materials that are easier to recycle. For example, glass bottles can just be sent back to the factory, washed and reused. This is already done for beer and wine AFAIK. It could be done for milk and every other kind of drinks as well. However, if we fail to recycle plastic, isn't burying plastic in a landfill, in a way, a form of carbon captur…
My mother used to say this happened with milk. They'd deliver it daily and collect the used bottles to be washed and reused.
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There isn't really any systematic reuse of glass bottles in the U.S. The only such thing I've encountered is some very niche arrangements between boutique dairy companies and boutique grocery stores, where you can return your $10 quart bottle of milk for the bottle to be reused.
> boutique grocery stores, where you can return your $10 quart bottle of milk for the bottle to be reused. You’re misrepresenting the price substantially – that’s 5 times what Whole Foods charges and while they’re upscale they’re more mainstream than boutique these days.
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The solution, bags-wise, is reusable bags. I carry around several of the convenient, pack-into-a-ball variety. They're plastic, but they'll last me many many uses. When they eventually wear out, they should probably be incinerated. But in the meantime, I'm using plastic's advantage, it's long life, in my favour - rather than having it haunt me as waste.
Cloth bags are even better. I can put them into the washing machine if they are dirty, they can be easily stored and so far (I have and use some of both types that are over 10 years old) none of them degraded.
Both are good sturdy canvas and can easily be patched and repaired by anyone with basic sewing skills, some thread and a scrap of additional fabric.
Between those two bags and a military surplus canvas shoulder bag, I can take care of 99% of my shopping on foot or by bicycle (baskets and panniers are wonderful inventions), and I haven't had to buy a plastic bag in years.
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Although you are right, I don't think it is that people don't know this. Recycle is easy, through it in the blue bucket. Reduce requires a complete re-imaging of our society. This won't happen without substantial taxation on plastics and single use packaging. But that is a bad way to get re-elected and how will we get next day shippping?
To go a bit further, I feel like "reduce" just isn't really in the vocabulary of living organisms. Once any particular cat is out of its bag, it's not going back in (though I'd love to hear some examples to the contrary). It seems like our best bet really is an ever more Rube Goldberg-ian stack of attempted fixes for the problems we create.
There are success stories such as the sharp reduction of CFCs and acid rain contributors, or the reduction in coal pollution once it cost more than alternatives, but we can see the opposite in, for example, the way the oil industry successfully captured a significant fraction of a major American political party and got enough people to believe climate change wasn’t real to avoid a carbon tax for decades we could have used to transform the economy less sharply than will now be needed.