U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#211

Post by [deleted] » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

edoceo wrote: post #174

Causality1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could restrict yourself to dry lake beds that don't flood in winter, which are nearly as lifeless as Mars, and still have enough landfill area for centuries of waste. The average American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day at an average one third of a gram per cubic centimeter. Assuming that holds steady, and we use a normal landfill depth of 400 feet, and the US population doubles over the next century, we nee…

Using standard units: - 1589g of trash per day! - 4767 cm3 to store it (3cm3/gram) - 130 m3 per lifetime (75yr) - 300,000,000 lifetimes. - 78 km3 storage allocated - 39 km3 required ~~We're gonna need a bigger boat.~~ Neat!

[deleted]

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#212

Post by gnicholas » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:29 PM UTC

acjohnson55 wrote: post #100

carstenhag wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way most people in Germany would solve this (we need a potty for some months) is buying it 2nd/3rd/4th hand. Is that not common where you live (I guess USA)?

In the middle class and upward, it's not common, outside of folks who are particularly frugal. The post-WWII American culture is extremely consumerist / materialistic.

My experience is different. Almost everyone we know gets most of their baby stuff secondhand. They get a bunch of stuff when the baby is born, from older friends with kids. Then they get specific items off NextDoor/Facebook/Craigslist.

I don't know that we'd get a potty used, but we did get used infant bathtubs, which is about the same from a hygienic perspective.

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#213

Post by SavantIdiot » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

carstenhag wrote: post #86

im_down_w_otp wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Single use stuff seems easy enough to fix. What seems less obvious to me is what I experienced when shopping for a potty chair for our youngest there were dozens of options at just a single store for a big hunk of plastic that's only useful for a period of months. We ended up not buying one at all. I had a similar experience the last time I was at CES and was deep into the "South Hall" where there's kiosk after displ…

The way most people in Germany would solve this (we need a potty for some months) is buying it 2nd/3rd/4th hand. Is that not common where you live (I guess USA)?

I was working with a guy from Israel and he asked why the cuffs of my jeans were turned up. I said because I bought them used and they were a little long. He was aghast that I would wear someone else's pants. I was like, "Dude, they're 1/3rd the price of new jeans and they're already worn in, and they are washed!"

I have another friend that would never buy a used car. He's convinced all used cars were totaled and are a scam, despite the fact it is all I've ever owned and they've been fine.

Something about being "used" really freaks some people out. It's this weird purity thing, I dunno.

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#214

Post by HalcyonicStorm » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:31 PM UTC

pharmakom wrote: post #124

carstenhag wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way most people in Germany would solve this (we need a potty for some months) is buying it 2nd/3rd/4th hand. Is that not common where you live (I guess USA)?

The problem with 2nd hand is convenience. Maybe I can save a few bucks browsing eBay etc. but it’s not worth the time spent compared to ordering new. I hate doing it though.

I want to plug my company, GoodBuyGear, which is trying to solve this very problem

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#215

Post by brandonmenc » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:32 PM UTC

katbyte wrote: post #201

frosted-flakes wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to remember that paper bags are close to single-use plastic bags, but still use more energy to produce and also require wood pulp. Paper bags can easily be recycled, but "single-use" plastic bags can easily be re-used as household trash bags, or otherwise. So it's a toss-up.

> re-used as household trash bags this is what i do, and if they were banned i'd be using some sort of bag and then purchasing trash bags separately using maybe twice the resources?

This is exactly what I've been doing since moving to Austin.

I get paper bags at the grocery and throw them out immediately after a single use, and now I have to also buy plastic garbage bags for under the sink, which I never used to do.

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#216

Post by yesenadam » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

edoceo wrote: post #174

Causality1 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could restrict yourself to dry lake beds that don't flood in winter, which are nearly as lifeless as Mars, and still have enough landfill area for centuries of waste. The average American produces 3.5 pounds of trash per day at an average one third of a gram per cubic centimeter. Assuming that holds steady, and we use a normal landfill depth of 400 feet, and the US population doubles over the next century, we nee…

Using standard units: - 1589g of trash per day! - 4767 cm3 to store it (3cm3/gram) - 130 m3 per lifetime (75yr) - 300,000,000 lifetimes. - 78 km3 storage allocated - 39 km3 required ~~We're gonna need a bigger boat.~~ Neat!

> - 39,000,000,000 km3 required

I think something went very wrong there!

4767 x 75 x 365 = I get 130,500,000 cm³/person/lifetime. You got 130,000,000,000,000,000.

There are 10¹⁵ cubic centimetres in a cubic kilometre, not 10⁶. I think all your numbers are for m³, not km³, a factor of a billion out, so your final figure should be 39 km³.

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#217

Post by SequoiaHope » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:36 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #93

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, I don’t think it matters who we blame. The problem isn’t the multinational corporations that do this, it’s the system that lets them. We need a better system.

Which is the system at fault here? Capitalism?

Capitalism is just an idea. The actually existing system is a complex self-contradicting hydra that is hard to describe. But yes as another commenter said it comes down to governance. How do we as people want to govern human action? I am way more in favor of decentralized governance. I’d say that a lot of our problems come from having a powerful centralized government that can be influenced by the wealthy. That’s not “capitalism” in a libertarian sense at all. It’s more like an oligarchy in practice. Tho many tend to refer to our system as capitalism, which can lead us down all manner of arguments over terminology. What I really care about is power and how it is distributed. I believe in more directly democratic systems. I think oligarchy tends to lead to problems like plastic waste because the wealthy rulers can basically insulate themselves from any problems they cause, while the rest of us have the choice of buying plastic trash or spending more resources to avoid plastic. The third option of zero waste grocery stores (food as one example) could lead to a life without extra burden on the more conscious consumers and without excess plastic trash. These are common in some other countries, but a country flooded by the plastic producers’ public relations machine, US consumers are all to happy to buy more and more plastic trash. A big question on my mind lately is why we allow public relations to manipulate us in to believing these falsehoods. We’ve surrounded ourselves with megaphones of corporate endorsed pseudoscience, as happened with disposable plastics. Sociologists know public relations works, but we’ve allowed the public relations industry to convince us it’s benign. I think we need to think hard about who that industry serves.

By the way, Noam Chomsky uses the phrase “really existing capitalism today” to talk about the system we’ve ended up with.

https://youtu.be/_uuYjUxf6Uk

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#218

Post by SavantIdiot » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

dfxm12 wrote: post #93

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk, I don’t think it matters who we blame. The problem isn’t the multinational corporations that do this, it’s the system that lets them. We need a better system.

Which is the system at fault here? Capitalism?

I don't think he intended for it to be named. It's just a system. E.g., The system that lets companies pump water out of aquifers from states in drought and sell it back to people marked up 1000x while seeding misinformation that all tap water is evil. That's the system that is at fault: the deliberate exploitation of both consumers and natural resources for extreme wealth.

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#219

Post by rsynnott » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:37 PM UTC

hereforphone wrote: post #37

This might be the case, I don't necessarily dispute it. But with this sort of thing always keep in mind that the US (and other Western countries) tend to be more compliant with reporting actual facts than say.... China (who somehow is ranked 107 in the world for covid-19 cases, despite their huge population).

> China (who somehow is ranked 107 in the world for covid-19 cases, despite their huge population).

I’m always a little surprised that people are so quick to jump to conspiracy here. China is an authoritarian country with recent prior experience of dealing with epidemics, which took extremely aggressive measures against covid, some of which would not fly in a democratic country. You’d _expect_ it to have a low rate.

Would you also assume Australia’s lying about this? Up until a month ago it followed a pretty similar pattern to China, based on somewhat less aggressive tactics.

Re: U.S. generates more plastic trash than any other nation, report finds (2020)

#220

Post by soperj » Sun, Aug 01, 2021, 10:38 PM UTC

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #207

yaitsyaboi wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even setting aside the importance of principles, every spoon OP doesn't use is a spoon that doesn't end up in a landfill.

And my point is that it's like saying I didn't fill up my tank with gas today: it didn't stop oil refineries from producing gasoline.

If enough people do it, it adds up. If you continuously tried to push it at least a couple more days before using your car, over a year that would add up to a couple less tanks of gas. In a nation of 280 million cars, that uses about 340 million gallons of gasoline a day, you could easily carve off a couple of weeks there. Might not seem like a lot, but that's 56 million tons of CO2 not released into the atmosphere.