151–160 of 213 posts
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Isn't that a problem that could be solved with law enforcement and cleaners like what developed countries do? That still seems to be cheaper than glass bottles.
Cheaper is not the measure of everything. Glass bottles, returned and re-used are much better for the environment than plastic bottles.
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Yeah, we're the problem. It's OUR plastic that China isn't allowing in anymore.
No we're not the fucking problem. We are the good guys.
It's always dangerous to think one is on the right side of history.
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The biggest problem with making statements about "plastic" is that it's such a broad category of materials that you almost invariably doom yourself to talking nonsense. Most plastic (particularly PET, PP, HDPE, and LDPE) is not poisonous, even when decomposed, and does not bioaccumulate in the conventional sense. Perhaps by "poison sponge" you don't mean that it's poisonous; you mean that it absorbs poisons. Well, is…
> Well, isn't that what you would want to do with poisons? Not if something is going to eat the plastic, and I'm going to eat that something, because then I'm eating the poison.
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No we're not the fucking problem. We are the good guys.
I would love to think the world is so black and white, but we export plastic to China and now, they don't want it. So. It's always dangerous to think one is on the right side of history.
It's imperative that this sorry excuse of a country be wiped off the face of the earth
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> Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags? If you put a price (read: tax) on plastic, I'm sure many folks would jump at the opportunity of replacing plastic-heavy stuff with no/minimal plastic options possibly using glass or paper (or metal where things are disposable that shouldn't be). Thing is, plastic has a subsidized price right now due to petroleum supply chain being subsidized - plastic is a byproduc…
Not necessarily. In 2004, Germany introduced a 25 cent deposit on single-use plastic bottles [1] for types of beverages where single-use bottles were much more common than reusable bottles. The intention was like you describe: to encourage consumers and manufacturers to prefer reusable bottles. However, the opposite happened. In the first few months after the law came into power, each retailer would only take back bo…
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I don't understand why it's better to not recycle glass. Yes transporting used glass is costly, but isn't collecting and transporting sand even more costly? And while we won't run out of sand, good sand is limited. Or can you use any sort of sand to produce glass instead of a specific type of sand? Doesn't refining sand into glass take additional energy compared to melting existing glass?
For one truck load, how much sand can you carry per volume, vs. old glass bottles? For the latter, aren't you mostly transporting air? You don't want to BREAK the glass bottles, since they still need to be sorted, and cleaned.
I am far from an expert, but here in germany glas gets recycled in 3 bins, brown, green, white - and get usually smashed by people throwing those bottles in. So not much air. And cleaned they still can get (and should)
We need to stop making things out of plastic, where any alternative exists. The stuff is going to be the asbestos of the 21st century. Microplastic has been vastly, vastly underrated as a problem. All my lifetime the attitude has been that plastic takes eons to degrade and pulverize, but when it does, the problem of unsightly or dangerous litter is presumably finished. Now we're seeing the opposite: plastic dust is a…
Plastic is an amazing material. You can thermoform it, it's a great insulator, molds and fungi don't feed on it, it's incredibly strong (e.g. UHMWPE rope a.k.a dyneema) and so on. The trouble seems to be we don't really respect the environment enough, so we use it in terrible ways, like single use products. We often don't need those nice properties in single use products, yet we use it anyway because we don't pay due…
Eg Miracle Body https://www.mix.com.my/en/goods.php?id=3456
They’re light, and you can make the entire thing out of the same material.
Seems like Northern Africa would be a pretty logical place for disposing waste. Lots of unused desert land very close to the sea for easy access by barge.