171–180 of 252 posts
I do not understand why more restaurants do not have metal straws They already have silverware and a whole process for cleaning it and whatnot. Why not just also invest in metal straws and re-use ? It seems like it would be cheaper than even plastic straws long term. And of course less waste.
Problem was: they're expensive and people steal them!
But we also live so close to the coast that straws and any other litter in the wrong places can easily wash into storm sewers then eventually the Gulf of Mexico.
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Probably the only realistic way to 'recycle' plastic is to follow something like the fungal approach to 'recycling' durable woody materials, i.e. cellolose and lignin - the slowly break them down all the way to CO2, extracting whatever energy is available along the way. This is why we get a late-season pulse of CO2 in the fall, as fungi do their work, in the northern hemisphere. Under normal steady state conditions,…
> slowly break them down all the way to CO2 Sure, let's turn all the plastic into atmospheric CO2. What could go wrong?
> And banning straws is just plain stupid. Why? We don't have them anymore in germany. People move on and new solutions get invented. Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me.
> Why? We don't have them anymore in germany. Even more reason to use plastic straws. If there is one country I don't want the US to follow, that's germany. > People move on and new solutions get invented. Like toxic paper straws? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31241276 > Seeing a plastic straw is weird to me. What's weird about them?
Yeah, it'd suck if the US had higher life expectancy, more political stability, better civil rights, better healthcare, lower unemployment, lower inflation, lower crime.....
What a nightmare scenario!
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Probably the only realistic way to 'recycle' plastic is to follow something like the fungal approach to 'recycling' durable woody materials, i.e. cellolose and lignin - the slowly break them down all the way to CO2, extracting whatever energy is available along the way. This is why we get a late-season pulse of CO2 in the fall, as fungi do their work, in the northern hemisphere. Under normal steady state conditions,…
> slowly break them down all the way to CO2 Sure, let's turn all the plastic into atmospheric CO2. What could go wrong?
Then, if you buried that plastic (made from atmospheric CO2) in a landfill after use, that would plausibly be removing CO2 from the atmosphere, not adding it. Assuming it doesn't break down in the landfill and leak out as methane or something.
Plastic gets a bad wrap. But it's a pretty dang efficient material. It takes so little energy and material to make something very functional and resilient. I know that CO2 analyses of the replacements to plastic bags and straws has not been very kind to them. I find it commendable to encourage people to consumer less stuff, but the war on plastic straws has been a huge step back - it's done relatively little to actua…
While it is efficient as a manufacturing process, typical lifetime is lower than that of more durable material such as the metal or glass it replaces. The very qualities that make it a good manufacturing material makes it a poor(er) long-term use substitute.
It makes sense to use plastic capitalisticaly speaking, and in some cases it also makes sense to manufacture plastic as an affordable solution (I don't drill nearly enough to justify owning a metal), and the smelting process is far from better than manufacturing the equivalent plastic components.
But when manufacturing disposable garbage, as a species, factoring in the environmental cost, it is not efficient at all.
The example of straws is interesting cause the actual substitute to straws is the absence of a straw. No-one actually need a straw. It is a minor convenience with a ridiculous environmental cost.
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I think we are not in a position to judge what is reasonable to do over hundred or thousand of years with our current technological progression. Plastics where not really a thing 100 years ago. At our current progression I think we should avoid the big catastrophes (Nuclear war), push for developpement of poor places(get more genius) and advance technology as fast as we can. At this speed of advancement in less than…
> At this speed of advancement in less than 100 years I am sure we will have figure out something for the plastic we have generated meanwhile. The problem is that today's plastic, in far less than 100 years, is reasonably likely to be finely divided into small numbers of molecule sized chunks, and spread evenly throughout the entire biological systems of the planet. We find microplastic in ants in the middle of untou…
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We could play this game with almost every product... I am sure there are many things that you use and like to use that I never use, but it isn't fair for me to just say, "Well it isn't important to me so that means it isn't important to anyone". Almost every product we produce, people could 'manage just fine' without... we can always just point to a time before the thing was invented and say, "Look, people managed ju…
Nice try big government, but a tax will only increase prices for end consumers and will disportionately affected poor people while actually doing jack shit to reduce consumption.
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Your implied plan (doing less of what made the problem in the first place) seems like more of a stretch to me. It would be nice, but I can’t see many countries giving up plastic. It’s too useful. I think focusing international collaboration efforts on better waste/pollution management (eg getting more waste plastic into properly managed landfills) seems a lot more plausible.
I may not have explicitly stated it in the parent comment, but it's quite explicit other places. Either a system is sustainable or it's not. If it is, it can continue forever. And, if it's not, it won't. One way or another, it won't, though you can pick the method early on, and later, reality will force it on you. The history of civilization collapse is the history of this reality being forced on groups of people who…