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Plastics are poisoning us

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Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#481

Post by yetihehe »

fullstop wrote: post #257
yetihehe wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I solved this problem in minimalist way - I wash my car maybe twice a year. It sits in my driveway in rain anyway because my garage is waiting for some spare time so that I can finally reuse all that pallets I collected since last year (mostly clean pallets I've already made some nice yard furniture for myself and family, all those pallets already have planned use but I don't have enough time).

Pallets are often treated with chemicals, so keep that in mind.

That's why I wrote that they are clean, I keep that in mind, but thanks for noticing.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#482

Post by xerox13ster »

asoneth wrote: post #417
grimgoldgo wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are regularly burning food in steel or iron pans, maybe it's time to understand why? I cook in exclusively iron and steel cookware and I cannot remember the last time something got burned (excepting when I deliberately charred something.)

I have been learning how to season, cook with, and clean cast iron. As someone who did not grow up using it it’s definitely not intuitive. The other challenge is that I either have to lock it away or teach everyone else in the household how to care for it. At various points in my life I’ve had coatings ruined by roommates, partners, guests, and housekeepers who did things that seemed perfectly sensible like letting i…

you can season stainless steel just like you season cast iron, it just requires more coats to hold and will need to be repeated more often. I've seasoned my skillets and frying pans. I'd never bother with my sauce pans bc they get acidic stuff like vinegar for poached eggs, tomato sauce, or fruit, but they're steel anyway so I can just scrub them with wire wool.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#483

Post by bzzzt »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #469
bzzzt wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your 'easy step' is to live in a place where this is possible? Is the entire world welcome to live next to you?

Not who youre responding to (but probably who you thought you were responding to) but where I live is not Hawaii or the pacific northwest, it's not all roses. It gets hot and it gets cold, not Montana cold and not Arizona hot but still a bit extreme. And very, very humid. There's always a reason to say you can't do it, but I do what I can and if it's important to you you can too. It's a change in habit and lifestyle,…

> Live lighter and don't rely on comfort like you'll die without it.

While for some people it's a comfort issue there are lots of people that will literally die without cooling during heatwaves.

Besides that, you can't expect people to be productive (especially in jobs where you're supposed to make use of your brain) when they are slowly cooked in a hot office.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#484

Post by phero_cnstrcts »

delfinom wrote: post #362
hourago wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, we are awash in labels already and I am sick of everything having a legal treatise attached to it. Labels just throw the problem back in the laps of consumers, an approach which clearly does not work. Some labels are good and informative. Some labels are just a way for corporations to blame consumers for what consumers cannot do anything about. Falsehood: - "Consumers are purchasing toxic products, so that is w…

Recycling labels are some of the biggest falsehoods. Many plastics are simply not recycled at all, I think at best only #1 and #2 plastics are largely ever recycled. Even things like orange juice containers are considered not recyclable due to their heavy plastic coatings inside the paper shell and they will get sorted out to be dumped. It's one way industry has scammed the public by convincing them much of the waste…

It’s terrible. Plus the west pays the Chinese companies to take care off the plastics anyway. They just dump it in the ocean and nothing is recycled.

Is actually better for the planet that you just burn it yourself instead of wasting diesel on transport to nowhere.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#485

Post by brnt »

Retric wrote: post #337
jader201 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teflon Aka Polytetrafluoroethylene cookware represents a health hazard. Are you saying, then, that this claim [1] is false? It states that PTFE is safe, whereas PFOA — what Teflon used to contain — was the component that made Teflon unsafe. [1] https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/is-teflon-coating-safe

Here’s a direct quote from your link: “Health Risks of Teflon Coating Teflon is generally safe, but heating it to above 300 degrees Celsius or 570 degrees Fahrenheit poses a danger to your health.” Note they didn’t say Teflon was safe at 299C, the risk is chemical breakdown not a phase transition like water which boils at a specific temperature and pressure. When used properly pans shouldn’t get anywhere close to tha…

> When used properly pans shouldn’t get anywhere close to that temperature range

What frying pan when used properly doesn't get near 300 C? A pan surface temp of 200-250 C is nothing strange when frying a steak.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#486

Post by iso1631 »

hinkley wrote: post #375
scrps wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace plastic with lead and reread. Lead was used for centuries before the risks were fully understood.

And mercury. Lead was used for millenia . Romans drank from lead goblets. It sweetened the wine. And we didn’t know the full story of lead until 20 years after it was banned from gasoline, and the violent crime rates started to drop.

But we haven't used plastic for millennia, and sure while it gets everywhere, some environments are far higher in microplastics than others, so doing comparisons should be easy

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#487

Post by tfourb »

midoridensha wrote: post #465
tfourb wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "good old way" of making leather soles grippy is nails, just to give one example. Even using synthetic materials instead of hobnails would reduce plastic consumption quite a bit for these use cases. I've hiked quite a bit in various types of boots and yes, It's nice to have lighter shoes, but for most people most of the time a kg more or less won't make the damndest bit of difference. Only a fraction of all hiker…

I guess you're a slow or easy hiker or something, because most people can immediately tell the difference between boots with a 1kg per-boot difference between them. I'm not even some kind of super-serious hiker, but I'm not going to choose boots that weigh double. Even walking around town that much weight would be annoying and tiring. Anyway, I do agree about using synthetic material for the soles, and leather constr…

99% of people are „slow and easy“ hikers so I’m in good company (though I have hiked a couple of alpine long distance trails). We buy synthetic shoes because they are cheap, look flashy and are marketed on Instagram. I’m not saying that people don’t notice the difference, I’m saying it wouldn’t make a difference to their general quality of life if the affordable (or only) option would be a shoe made out of 95%-100% biodigradable materials. I don’t really care about the 0.1% of people who go to outer space or climb Mount Everest or the 1% who do competitive trail running. Let them wear all the “high performance” great they want/need. But the default option (due to price and convenience) for the rest of us should be something that does not pollute the environment for the next 1,000 years.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#488

Post by pvaldes »

iso1631 wrote: post #172
MagicMoonlight wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or just use glass... completely non reactive, fully recyclable. The perfect container.

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

Iphones had the same problem. Solved it with an outer rubber skin protecting the tablet. Should be easy to do the same with glass bottle while avoiding algae grow at he same time

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#489

Post by literalAardvark »

shortcake27 wrote: post #462
literalAardvark wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steel is mostly recycled. Pet is very much not. Pet does leach (as microplastic). No point in buying plastic bottles unless they're pla. Just reuse a water/soda bottle you bought on a whim.

Steel is not recycled by consumers. You cannot put steel in a recycling bin. You _ may_ be able to take steel to a resource recovery centre. However if the travel uses oil or electricity that comes from coal, I wouldn’t be surprised if this ended up being worse for the environment than a PET bottle. With regards to leaching, the FDA has declared PET bottles safe for repeated use.

Electricity coming from coal is not something you address by using plastic bottles.

There's almost nothing worse than forever plastics at this point in time. They're everywhere, they're toxic, and we don't know how to fix it.

Steel is recycled as often as it's economically feasible to do. It's not hand selected by consumers because there's already a whole process for dealing with metals in general that's been in place for a hundred years. Which is ideal really, the less I have to select by hand the better.

Here it's scavengers stripping it out of refuse (and everything that's not bolted to the ground, really). In the US it's probably put on a barge and stripped in Mexico or something, no idea. It's rarely thrown out though, as it's very expensive and very useful.

The FDA is also cool with BPA, pfas, teflon, etc. Don't rely too much on it. PET is safe, ish. As i wrote: use it, avoid buying new. It does leach microplastic but those are everywhere so it's "safe", and by that I mean it's unavoidable "background pollution" these days, as there's microplastic even inside produce.

Re: Plastics are poisoning us

#490

Post by literalAardvark »

hgomersall wrote: post #264
literalAardvark wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steel is mostly recycled. Pet is very much not. Pet does leach (as microplastic). No point in buying plastic bottles unless they're pla. Just reuse a water/soda bottle you bought on a whim.

I read PET actually is recycled extensively. I mean, you need to recycle it, but it's economically viable to actually recycle it rather than just make it "someone else's problem".

Iirc it gets downcycled, not recycled. You can't make bottles out of it anymore, it goes into textiles or something. And that's in the highly optimistic case in which it makes it to a recycling center, which doesn't happen for 80% of plastic.
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