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Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

motherjones.com

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Re: Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

#111

Post by droopyEyelids »

userbinator wrote: post #99

"toxic"? My BS detector is off the scale on that one. Plastics are used precisely because they are inert and nonreactive. If you burn them you can definitely create toxins, but then why not declare wood toxic too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endocrine_disruptor

Chemically pure hydrocarbon polymers may be inert and generally nonreactive, however pure polymers like nylon or polyester are virtually useless.

Plastics only become useful when they're mixed with a vast array of plasticizers, conditioners, chain extenders and other industrial chemicals.

And those chemicals absolutely leach out of the materials we laypeople refer to as 'plastics', even before you consider environmental factors that cause the materials to decay.

Re: Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

#112

Post by 908B64B197 »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #106
908B64B197 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the ones that put in place protectionist measures to prevent their trading partners and allies from buying vaccines from them? Citation needed? There are no, as far as I'm aware of, any trade restrictions on vaccines being shipped to Canada from the United States. The Trump administration simply invested earlier in promising vaccines, and therefore secured the first deliveries. Canada decided not to do so, and…

https://financialpost.com/news/economy/biden-uses-trumps-ame... Trump enacted controls (used the US Defense Production Act) which prevented manufacturers from exporting until all domestic orders were fulfilled. It was questionable whether it was enforceable, but manufacturers have followed it. Biden has continued this policy. Even to the point of hoarding vaccines not yet approved in the US (AstraZeneca) though they…

Reading the articles, suppliers are simply delivering the doses in the order they were bought. There's no "evil export restrictions".

Other countries simply had to invest earlier, when it was more risky to do so, if they wanted to be the first to get doses.

Re: Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

#115

Post by NeutronStar »

908B64B197 wrote: post #5
version_five wrote: post #3

The canadian government is big into the business of making these kind of "declarations" these days, so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is. Although I don't think Mother Jones is a legitimate news source, so would be careful about taking anything in the article at face value.

> so our PM can demonstrate to everyone how progressive he is. Maybe he should focus on providing vaccines instead (Canada's vaccination rate sits at barely 4% while the US is at 38%) [0] and stop pushing pipelines to export some of the most environmentally destructive oil on the planet [1]. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/world/covid-vaccina... [1] https://news.yahoo.com/trudeau-stresses-disappointment-…

The PM is totally capable of handling 2 issues in the same week.

Re: Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

#116

Post by dataflow »

mediaman wrote: post #108
dataflow wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"There is a lot of misleading and false statements in this article"? > The result is that 74% of plastic beverage containers in Canada are recycled "Canadians dispose of about 3.3M tonnes of plastic each year [...] almost 50% of which is packaging. Well over 75% currently goes to landfills, a small proportion is incinerated and about 1% ends up directly in the environment. Only 9% — or 305,000 tonnes — is recycled, t…

The 74% recovery rate was in reference to BC only, not all of Canada - I updated my comment which mistakenly referred to all of CA for that recovery rate. The reason to focus on BC is because they are the only province to have passed EPR that allowed these facilities to be built. The point is that EPR, taxing plastic packaging, and investing in recycling works, and BC versus the rest of Canada is the prime example of…

> so-called environmentalists who look at this success and cognitive-dissonance themselves into emitting more carbon and accelerating climate catastrophe because "plastic is bad"

I don't understand what this means or whom or what you're talking about, but regarding your general sentiment:

What you're doing is making some very generous extrapolations that are rather dubious and going to need a lot of evidence to make a compelling case for. Examples include:

- That all plastics are fundamentally recyclable with success comparable to some subset of them if only we care to invest more in it.

- That the rates will increase to be much higher than they are. (Because frankly I do not find it plausible that even 55% recycling globally across all plastics is going to do anything but stretch the deadline for a real solution a little bit.)

- That other countries that are still developing won't end up increasing global wastes N-fold, which would easily eat through any moderate 50% or 70% rate or whatever moderate amount you hypothetically manage to achieve. (And it's not even really a "budget" to begin with, given this stuff lingers around.)

- That if only environmentalists cared to spend time lobbying legislators, you'd see legislators across the world react the same way as they appear to have in BC, and on a short time scale. (i.e., you're basically ignoring differing politics, economics, and competing interests.)

By all means, we should make progress on every front we can. But we also don't want to let that distract us or get deluded by half-baked solutions with questionable scalability (and whether it's physical vs. economic vs. political barriers doesn't really matter here). Frankly I cannot fault anyone for believing we do not have the luxury to keep betting the future of the planet on an asymptotic solution. We need drastic global changes fast, and the average person has only so much bandwidth to spare. Giving people a false sense of optimism about recycling can (and has) made everyone too comfortable with plastic consumption, which has been vividly damaging.

Re: Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

#118

Post by tekstar »

mediaman wrote: post #91

There is a lot of misleading and false statements in this article. They claim plastic recycling doesn't work. It's true that most plastic isn't recycled, but that's because of lackluster government involvement, not some technological barrier. British Columbia has the most sophisticated recycling equipment in North America. Two plants there first use lasers to identify different types of plastic (PP, HDPE, PET, etc) i…

Is plastic still that much less energy usage compared to paper when you include the energy needed to recycle it?

Re: Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

#119

Post by ClumsyPilot »

mediaman wrote: post #104
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

74% is still a far cry from a solved problem - what do they do with the quarter that can't be recycled? Aluminium is actually 100% recyclable with some countries approaching 98%. Plastic has symbols that tell you what kind of plastic a given piece of packaging is made of, and the consumers need to figure out which kind are recyclable in their particular state or local area. Then some plastics are thermosetting and th…

We should absolutely push for even higher rates of recycling. High 90s would be fantastic. But even 74% is already much higher than we get with aluminum cans. You say aluminum cans are "100% recyclable", as if they are 100% recycled, but that's a sleight of hand. PET, PP, PE is also "100% recyclable" but the issue here is what actually gets recycled. For aluminum, the actual recycle rates are less than 50% in the US.…

It appears to be 82% in UK and over 90% in brazil. But also Aluminium is not toxic and does not disintegrate into microscopic particles that accumulate in your organs. Unlike plastic, it can be recycled perfectly and produce a product as good as the original, so long as people are bothered to drop it into the bin. Most types of plastic are only 'downcycled' -> bottles become carpets, and carpets become garbage.

I think CO2 is a red herring when it comes to packaging, most of world GHG emissions are not from packaging production - it's energy, transport, heating, etc. If tomorrow all packaging had zero CO2 emission, we would have made no real difference.

Re: Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

#120

Post by throwawayboise »

pfdietz wrote: post #35
pedalpete wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you got a source for this concern? Tires are rubber, not plastic as far as I know, and though many textiles are polyester, and fleece is mostly recycled plastics (if I recall) where is the mass use of plastic in the textile industry?

Rubber is a plastic. As for polyester, what do you think PET plastic is? I will add that a weathered component of tire rubber has recently been identified as causing mass death of salmon when it washes off into streams.

The fish-killing is caused by an added chemical that acts as a sunscreen. It increases the UV resistance of the rubber, thus prolonging tire life. It isn't the rubber itself that is the problem, at least in that example.
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