111–120 of 528 posts
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Not sure how the "it's to late to do anything about it" is supposed to contribute to this debate. It's also factually wrong. The production of new plastics could be drastically reduced through regulation of both the production itself and its use cases. Most food and drink containers could be made from non-plastic materials. I've built a house that uses maybe 5% of the plastic that is common in construction where I li…
Most people have microplastics in their body, and even babies in the womb are being exposed ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016041202... ). The most remote, otherwise pristine environments have microplastics due to atmospheric transport ( https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36868287/ ). It is too late.
Microplastic pollution in the Himalayas
I have travelled a fair bit and I think the days of describing the Himalayas as remote | pristine are long past.
The area suffers from blow in micro plastics to be sure .. but as your linked article notes:
Additionally, Himalayan region draws many domestic and international tourists throughout the year, resulting in generation of massive and unmanageable volume of plastics wastes and finally ending up in the open landscapes covering forests, river streams and valley. Fragmentation of these plastic wastes can lead to microplastic formation and accumulation in the Himalayas.
Southern Ocean coasts and beaches are far more remote in terms of fewer feet on the ground, they, of course, have volumes of washed up micro plastics.
https://www.curtin.edu.au/news/media-release/the-worlds-most...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-08/new-research-disturbi...
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Good points. Minimalists saving the planet should add one more: 10. Eat plants. Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/31/avoiding... If the world adopted a plant-based diet we would reduce global agricultural land use from 4 to 1 billion hectares (and free an area as big as Africa for wildlife/reforesting) https://ourworldindata…
11. No pets. Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car. 12. Less or no children. All of the above, combined.
The study found that, to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times and a cotton tote would have to be used an astonishing seventy-one hundred times. “How many of those bags will last that long?” Franklin-Wallis asks. Walker-Franklin and Jambeck also note that exchanging plastic for other materials may involve “tradeoffs,” including “energy and water use…
The problem with these sort of equivocations is that they conveniently side-step the categorical argument. One something like; do not surround yourself with trash.
realshadow has rule 7, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36503179, "quality over quantity". That is a value argument, not an efficiency argument. Only arguing from efficiency is essentially internalizing the logic of the machine. If everything is evaluated whether it minimized/maximizes one metric or another, quality of life will, inevitably, decline. In this case, surrounded by plastic trash, ingesting, drinking plastic trash.
Plastic bags must die. Why? Because they are trash. That's the value system I would love to see in this world.
I became a minimist to save the planet as much as i could. Its easier than any one could think you know. Here is what i have been doing for a decade and would receommend 1. Reusing plastic bags (i love cotton bags but not ideal). Fold and keep one or two in your pocket before you leave home 2. Support and use light software so you dont need to upgrade your gadgets (12y laptop i use) 3. Prepare and eat home cooked mea…
I’ve spent a lot of money on numerous steel and plastic water bottles. They all break and good luck recycling them. Most likely they end up in landfill.
PET bottles use less raw resources, are cheap, lightweight, extremely durable, and when they reach end of life they’re easier to “recycle” (downcycle is probably more accurate).
Modern PET bottles shouldn’t leach into your water. You can at minimum use them until the expiry date on the bottle. If you’re concerned about leaching, don’t take my word and do your own research.
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> 5. Collect rain water and/or use less water Not sure about that -- With modern pollution rain water is not likely to be safe to drink (depends on your location) > 9. fuck sugary drinks Massive yes! Amazing for your own health too.
At my parents' house rain water was collected in a well and that was used for things like flushing toilets and watering plants. This was already in place 30+ years ago mainly cause it's "free water" (apart from the cost of building the well and the pump)
So not really "free" at all, and rather expensive enough that nobody does it...
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Leather shoe soles have worse grip than plastic ones. Switching will increase the number of deaths and serious injuries from people slipping and falling on hard surfaces. Leather soles also wear out much faster.
Are you kidding me? Even if that were true there are probably 500 ways of making leather soles equally grippy to plastic soles that would either eliminate or drastically reduce the use of these materials. There are also other biodegradable alternatives to plastic that could be used. Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be. These are cheap excuses that are quite transpare…
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11. No pets. Your pet is more harmful to the environment than your car. 12. Less or no children. All of the above, combined.
Thanks for the courage to express 12. Absolute anthropocentrism can’t continue indefinitely and we already see boomerang effects.
IMHO the best way to limit our negative impacts is
- stop exploiting other countries (there are almost no poor countries, only overexploited ones)
- urbanization ( https://i.redd.it/fl28yusb1r5b1.jpg )
- abandoning fossil fuels (so far we're not making a dent https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/renewables-growth-di... )
- stopping animal agriculture (destruction of the environment, biodiversity, pollution, overfishing ...)
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Leather shoe soles have worse grip than plastic ones. Switching will increase the number of deaths and serious injuries from people slipping and falling on hard surfaces. Leather soles also wear out much faster.
Are you kidding me? Even if that were true there are probably 500 ways of making leather soles equally grippy to plastic soles that would either eliminate or drastically reduce the use of these materials. There are also other biodegradable alternatives to plastic that could be used. Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be. These are cheap excuses that are quite transpare…
>Most plastic-based shoes are worn out much quicker than quality leather shoes would be.
True, but there's tradeoffs here. For hiking boots, for instance, some people swear by "sturdy" hand-made leather boots, but the problem with these is they're much heavier than modern boots made with synthetic materials. For a lot of hiking, you don't want heavy weights on your feet, and the shorter-life tradeoff is worth the performance improvement. I'm sure the same goes for most other sports. Just look at the shoes that professional athletes wear: they're probably plastic-based, and it's not because of cost, it's because it's better to have something that's as lightweight as possible and performs as well as possible, even if that means throwing them away after one competition.
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Yup, and although correct about coppers antimicrobial effect it only kills bacteria on contact. So I suspect a majority of any bacterial contamination in the water, will never come in close enough contact with the copper walls for it to have any real effect.
Water bottles, if not cleaned properly with a soap and brush on the inside, will be coated with a bacterial "lawn". Copper prevents that. Lots of bacteria need such a lawn to propagate, only some can multiply without a substrate. So even if the "free" water part won't be desinfected, copper has an overall positive effect on the bacterial content of your drinking water.
You can usually tell if the water in your bottle is going bad / filled w bacteria..
