Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by zdiscov » Sat, May 22, 2021, 8:25 PM UTC

redisman wrote: post #133

kibwen wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Environmental action can be taken relatively quickly when nation-state-level corporate interests aren't funding campaigns to oppose it. The premier example is the banning of CFCs in the 1980s in defense of the ozone layer: "The discovery of the hole [over Antarctica] was evidence that the magnitude of the problem was far greater than scientists had originally predicted. International alarm at the ozone layer’s thinni…

Plastic is a magically useful and durable material with many orders of magnitude more uses than CFC. I hope you’re right but looking around the world, there are very few objects that aren’t at least partially made out of some polymer. Another question is what to do with all the existing plastic. From what I understand there’s not really anything other than high temperature burning that will safely get rid of it witho…

fungal food, perhaps - https://leaps.org/plastic-eating-mushrooms-let-you-have-your...

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

#162

Post by slumpt_ » Sat, May 22, 2021, 9:08 PM UTC

mlindner wrote: post #110

slumpt_ wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN can be a bit of a hive for libertarian-minded engineers. Regulation = bad, to hell with the nuance, etc.

There's not much nuance when a governmental agency puts "Plastic manufactured items" on the same list as "Asbestos", "Lead", and "Mercury".

ok

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

#163

Post by totony » Sat, May 22, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

MarkLowenstein wrote: post #92

cronix wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's worse than that. It's showing up in rain and snow, and our water supply because most filtration systems don't catch micro/nanoplastics. It's in our bodies. I think we will eventually find it's also largely responsible for the tremendous drop off in birth rates and reproductive health that the world has been experiencing the last 10+ years and possibly other neurological and "brain" issues that have increased in…

Sorry but I can't abide the scientific ignorance being displayed all over this conversation. (1) The first article you cite "Microplastic particles now discoverable in human organs" only announces that some scientists made a technique to discover such particles. The only ones they found were ones they inserted on purpose to verify their technique. That headline leads people strongly to incorrect conclusions like you…

>Plastic is an amazingly inert substance that is unlikely to cause harm outside of physical constriction. In honor of this thread, I'm going to go eat a Lego. You can rest assured that I'll be back tomorrow to collect my downvotes.

This also shows scientific ignorance. Some plastics can be somewhat inert (although their manufacturing process maybe embed random trash in them), but microplastics are a whole other beast. The smaller something is, the more likely its physical properties are to differ from its bigger counterpart.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068600/

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

#164

Post by atom_arranger » Sat, May 22, 2021, 10:07 PM UTC

lotsofpulp wrote: post #151

atom_arranger wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could bury it in a giant pit somewhere without a lot of water running through it (prevent leeching). The actual amount of waste there is isn’t actually that high if you were to store it in a giant cube somewhere, the problem is the logistics of that, and the fact that right now it’s everywhere. I can’t find a source right now but I remember something like, if you were to take all the garbage produced by the world…

That does not sound right. Just based on pictures like these: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/27/world/asia/indias-plague-... The US alone produces near 300 million tons per year, and a kilometer cube of water weights 1,000 million tons. https://www.epa.gov/facts-and-figures-about-materials-waste-...

It may have been per year, I don’t recall. The waste in that photo does not seem very deep, so it’s possibly taking up a lot more area than needed.

So if we go by that stat (300 million tons per year) we need 0.3km^3 per year for the United States to store all of its waste. So let’s say we have a hundred years worth, that’s 30km^3. Could we dig a hole 30km^3 somewhere? Not really, we can’t dig that deep generally. If we made this hole (or structure, it could have walls and a net over possibly) 100km by 100km it would need to be 2.7km deep/high to store 100 years of garbage.

It would be difficult to do this, and would probably need more area to be feasible, but I would think it would be less of a mess environmentally to try to contain the problem to a few sites like this rather than having smaller poorly contained dumps all over the world.

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

#165

Post by citiguy » Sun, May 23, 2021, 3:05 PM UTC

atom_arranger wrote: post #147

redisman wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plastic is a magically useful and durable material with many orders of magnitude more uses than CFC. I hope you’re right but looking around the world, there are very few objects that aren’t at least partially made out of some polymer. Another question is what to do with all the existing plastic. From what I understand there’s not really anything other than high temperature burning that will safely get rid of it witho…

We could bury it in a giant pit somewhere without a lot of water running through it (prevent leeching). The actual amount of waste there is isn’t actually that high if you were to store it in a giant cube somewhere, the problem is the logistics of that, and the fact that right now it’s everywhere. I can’t find a source right now but I remember something like, if you were to take all the garbage produced by the world…

The NYTimes magazine [1] ran a piece in 1996 says a 35 square mile landfill, 100 yards deep, will store all US trash until the year 3000. To put that in perspective, that's about 1 tenth of 1 percent of the range land currently available for grazing. I'm sure someone could find a corner in a desert somewhere for such a need if required.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...

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

#166

Post by 908B64B197 » Mon, May 24, 2021, 6:18 PM UTC

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #128

908B64B197 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You didn't read then, it clearly states in the articles (and many others you can google) that the defense production act (or rather the threat of it) and executive order required manufacturers to prioritize domestic orders over exports. To this day manufacturers in the US are still not exporting their supply. What date you put your order in doesn't matter if the supplier isn't allowed to provide it to you until later…

You seem to have been mislead here. The act exists, but has not been used so far. Manufacturers are simply following delivery schedules.

> FWIW Canada announced their order of the Pfizer vaccine August 5th. The US on July 22nd. Are you seriously trying to suggest that two weeks is the key decider here? Nonsense.

Two weeks is a huge amount of time! The US was smart to secure it's orders sooner. There's limited supply and one big buyer (the United States) placed a large order first. I don't understand why Trudeau decided to wait a whole week to place his order (but hey, If Canadians prefer to get vaccines later that's good for us). It's like with investing: if you show up a week late to the series A, it's too late!

> for COVID-19 vaccines procured by the U.S. government is given to the American people before assisting other nations.

"Procured by" here is the key. It's only natural that what the US government bought using American taxpayer's money goes to American taxpayers first. This EO does not prevent any company from selling internationally, it prevents the US government from distributing the dose it purchased to foreign countries. This doesn't impact Canadian purchases.

Not sure why there's so much misinformation floating around the Executive Orders and manufacturer's delivery schedules. Maybe the Canadian government is trying to save face?

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

#167

Post by ChrisArchitect » Fri, Jun 04, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

this is good as a way around the setback that occurred in the last year. Far as I can see on the ground, the whole environmental movement, climate change, plastics, oceans etc, was steadily ramping up more and more... Greta etc.... everyone using reusable grocery bags was a highly visible thing and then the pandemic/covid hit and all of a sudden we're all using plastic bags by the ton again and people are littering masks all over the city etc. No more reusable shopping bags, a ton more waste because everyone is at home, etc etc. Big set back.