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Plastics are poisoning us

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Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#451

Post by Evidlo »

troyvit wrote: post #339
iso1631 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I drop my plastic water bottle I pick it up and carry on. If I drop my glass bottle...

This is me. I'm a clutz and I use mason jars in a little cloth sleeve. I drop like 2 a year and I end up with a wet bag of glass. That sucks but I just buy another $2 jar from a thrift store and I'm back in business.

You use Mason jars for drinking? You could also try kombucha bottles. They have a nice cap and the glass is stronger because it needs to withstand pressure, so it survives falls better.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#452

Post by concordDance »

munificent wrote: post #409
concordDance wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that without labels you're having someone in government decide what risk levels are acceptable to everyone and that simply doesn't work when you have a population that includes upper class suburban mum who is willing to pay for $100 bananas to decrease her lifetime cancer risk by 0.01% and a homeless dude with a $20/week food budget. And guess which one of these groups has actual influence on governmen…

Government regulation often benefits everyone. When a regulation forces all manufacturinng to reach a certain standard, then economies of scale for that drive down the overall price. If you let consumers decide, what you end up with is upper class suburban mums eating healthy bananas, while the homeless dude eats bananas that were grown in a superfund site.

The main criteria for government regulation is that it appears to benefit the upper middle class who influence government (by being the media, by being organized voters/campaigners and by being the actual senior government people discussing and deciding). Where the regulation is low cost and scales well you get an improvement for the poor too. If scale doesn't apply well (e.g. surgery) or if regulation helps and doesn't harm the upper middle class (e.g. the mountain of regulations around housebuilding in the uk) or if the regulation only appears helpful (e.g. the overregulation of nuclear power) then the poor will suffer (e.g. by dying while on waiting lists or being unable to afford housing or having eye watering electricity bills).

Even if you disagree with my particular examples of the above three classes I think you'll be able to come up with something for each of them.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#453

Post by concordDance »

anigbrowl wrote: post #415
concordDance wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that without labels you're having someone in government decide what risk levels are acceptable to everyone and that simply doesn't work when you have a population that includes upper class suburban mum who is willing to pay for $100 bananas to decrease her lifetime cancer risk by 0.01% and a homeless dude with a $20/week food budget. And guess which one of these groups has actual influence on governmen…

I see your point though I think you're overstating it. TBH I think the nutrition facts label works reasonably well, and balances sufficiency with market flexibility.

I agree those labels might work, though it'll be tricky to actually find out.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#454

Post by sgtnoodle »

abathur wrote: post #397
hirundo wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't take your skill in this for granted. It's a gift. I've been using cast iron pans sporadically for four decades, following all of the common advice, and failing magnificently every time. I still use one occasionally to put a crust on a steak ... and then use a small piece of chainmail[1] to defeat the klingons. It's not that I don't believe you. It just doesn't work that way in my pan on my stove with my…

I don't cook enough (and never steak) for you to assign me much weight, but FWIW I've had a (lighter, spun) cast iron skillet for 8ish years. I followed a seasoning procedure available online that involves (IIRC) 3 rounds of applying thin coats of flaxseed oil and leaving it in an oven at a fairly high temp. This process went fine, but I always had to baby the pan (had to be very careful cleaning it with said chainma…

Yeah, when my cast iron skillet starts to act up I'll just lightly scrub it with dish soap and a brillo pad, dry it, then add a very light coating of oil and heat it up on the stove until it smokes. You want some ventilation of course. Then, it's restored to easy fried egg condition.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#455

Post by Retric »

vkou wrote: post #421
Retric wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Teflon Aka Polytetrafluoroethylene cookware represents a health hazard. The stuff contains a great deal of Florine and breaks down at 300C, but that’s not purely binary instead it becomes increasingly unstable as your approach the temperature. Further no manufacturing process is perfect, I wouldn’t therefore assume eating significant quantities would be safe. That said, it’s generally used as a coating rather than a…

> PS: Toothpaste which you should mostly spit out generally contains less than 0.5% fluoride compounds such as sodium fluoride NaF or tin fluoride SnF2, the F in both being Florine. And table salt is made out of Sodium and Chlorine, one of which is explosive when mixed with water, and the other is used to gas soldiers in trenches if you're into committing war crimes. What matters is what effect the particular chemica…

I added that because the first two responses seemed to be confused.

Anyway, uncommon household uses can also be a safety concern. People still do occasionally get poisoned by mixing ammonia and bleach even despite the repeated warnings.

Talking about the constituent parts is similarly relevant when you’re heating something to significant temperatures. Many reasonably safe substances really shouldn’t be tossed on a bond fire etc. For other things it’s not the substance itself that’s a concern but impurities from the manufacturing process. People often think of past recalls as companies doing something dumb, but I think we underestimate how difficult it is to get this stuff right.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#456

Post by morsch »

kmmlng wrote: post #303
reaperman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah much of the problem is that people aren't currently willing to change their lifestyle to embrace the "reduce" and "reuse" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" triad. They only know two options: "Paper or plastic?" because the vast majority of people don't want to bring their own bags from home to the store. Or their own cup to Starbucks. Or their own to-go food box to the pizza place. I'm trying to imagine how DoorD…

I'm willing to and I mostly do bring my own bags to the grocery store. Sometimes I forget. Let's say I forget twice a year and opt to buy paper bags in those cases. We have just learned "[...] to have a lower environmental impact than a plastic bag, a paper bag would have to be used forty-three times [...]". Depending on how often I go grocery shopping a year, I have now already come quite close to nullifying any pos…

Note that according to that study, in terms of climate impact, the paper bag is better, not worse, than the LDPE bag. It's worse in terms of "total impact", which considers the categories below and I'm not sure how the total score is aggregated -- I'm sure it's explained in detail, the report has 144 pages.

CC Climate change

OD Ozone depletion

HTc Human toxicity, cancer effects

HTnc Human toxicity, non-cancer effects

POF Photochemical ozone formation

IR Ionizing radiation

PM Particulate matter

TA Terrestrial acidification

TE Terrestrial eutrophication

ME Marine eutrophication

FE Freshwater eutrophication

ET Ecosystem toxicity

RDfos Resource depletion, fossil

RD Resource depletion, abiotic

Water Water resource depletion

They also come to the conclusion that it's always better to incinerate paper bags (at end of life) rather than recycling them, which is interesting? If you intend to recycle your paper bag, you need to reuse it 73 times before you do so, because recycling paper is bad (recycling the plastic bag: also bad!). Again, in terms of "total impact"; I think in terms of climate change they say recycling either is good.

And I'm not sure if the paper bags they looked at were themselves made from recycled paper, which they usually are in stores here and which presumably changes the calculation (in either direction). It's odd because they look at like 5 or 6 LDPE variations, including breaking them down as recycled/non-recycled, but I can't find any mention of the paper being recycled or not. Again, 144 pages, maybe I've overlooked it. They do distinguish bleached and non-bleached paper.

Last but not least, they assume you need two paper bags for each LDPE (reference) bag (not enough weight capacity). The same is, hilariously, true for the organic cotton bag (but not the non-organic one!), not because of weight but because of volume constraints. So if they had chosen a slightly smaller -- or larger! -- shopping trip, lots of numbers would go up or down by a factor of two.

I'm not saying the report is bad or anything -- I'm not qualified to say either way --, turns out lifecycle analyses are complicated and full of judgement calls which inevitably get compressed to single statements like the one in the fine article.

Here's the report: https://www2.mst.dk/udgiv/publications/2018/02/978-87-93614-...

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#457

Post by reaperman »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #276
reaperman wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah much of the problem is that people aren't currently willing to change their lifestyle to embrace the "reduce" and "reuse" part of "reduce, reuse, recycle" triad. They only know two options: "Paper or plastic?" because the vast majority of people don't want to bring their own bags from home to the store. Or their own cup to Starbucks. Or their own to-go food box to the pizza place. I'm trying to imagine how DoorD…

Speaking of pizza, how bad cardboard can be though ?? It's not as light as styrofoam, but then also almost non-toxic, and almost entirely recyclable ?

Right now pretty much any paper product that comes in contact with food is also made of plastics / hydrocarbons. https://civileats.com/2014/11/06/meet-the-chemicals-lurking-...

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#458

Post by lukas099 »

literalAardvark wrote: post #232
lukas099 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said "Even if you use environmentally friendly soap, or no soap, the water coming of the car isn't exactly clean." If the rain is falling on your car it will have the same issue, no?

Not really something you can reasonably address.

I disagree, you can address it by keeping your car cleaned regularly at a car washing business that filters and recycles wash water.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#459

Post by ok_computer »

hospitalJail wrote: post #133

The word 'Plastic' needs to die. Instead we should be more specific on the type of plastic. Teflon, PLA, ABS, resins, foams, etc... are all plastics, but they are so unrelated outside their long chains, its terrible to stereotype them all into one category. You aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon, but rather the manufacturing process. You can eat these plastics as far as I know and you'd be fine. Eat someth…

I thought bio / water degradation of PLA was seen as a feature.

PLA and other acid co polymers are used in resorbable stitches and polymer medical devices where the biproducts are organic acids and carbon dioxide.

I second the ‘I don’t know’ for actual health effects of PLA but wanted to provide a counter point to comparing PTFE (indestructible C-F bond) to PLA (readily hydrolized C(=O)O- bonds)

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#460

Post by xracy »

hospitalJail wrote: post #133

The word 'Plastic' needs to die. Instead we should be more specific on the type of plastic. Teflon, PLA, ABS, resins, foams, etc... are all plastics, but they are so unrelated outside their long chains, its terrible to stereotype them all into one category. You aren't going to get cancer from PLA or Teflon, but rather the manufacturing process. You can eat these plastics as far as I know and you'd be fine. Eat someth…

Yeah, the problem is definitely that the recycling numbers on plastics aren't detailed enough... /s

Bonus points if you can tell me what each recycling number on plastic means without looking it up (it's the internet, so I have no way to enforce this).

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