Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Canada declares plastics toxic, paving the way for restrictions

motherjones.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 167 posts

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

#81

Post by shard »

galangalalgol wrote: post #60
lstamour wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that can be made from paper, should be. Primarily bags, shipping containers, product packaging, etc. I've seen Amazon replace plastic bubble wrap with paper-based bubble wrap, for example. They use really fine bits of paper and presumably glue to create the "bubbles". Instead of using plastic to wrap shipping containers, you could use a more re-usable material. Or perhaps we could come up with cardboard "rin…

Cans for food is iffy, without the liners doesn't it disintegrate the metal? Jars work well and can be reused. Bring back deposits!

Cans for food is actually one thing I would like to see addressed with an alternative. With how ubiquitous cans are, it was a source of plastic in contact with foods that is difficult to avoid.

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

#82

Post by callamdelaney »

In the UK a granny can't buy a few vegetables without being charged a surcharge for the bag that's required; though corporations package food with thousands and thousands of tonnes of excess packaging with seemingly no additional charge.

Where's the justice in this? Why charge the consumer when huge corporations like Asda, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Sainsburys etc are happy to buy tonnes of plastic that's unnecessary and will be thrown away? Carrier bag charges are just posturing in the face of this.

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

#83

Post by TheSpiceIsLife »

dataflow wrote: post #13

It's such a pleasant surprise to me how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue. The recent WWF report came out less than 2 years ago [1]. Microplastics were obviously known for a long time, but that's when conversations about microplastics re-ignited. And now we can see an entire country declaring plastics toxic and restricting them. If you'd asked me an hour ago, I'd have predicted it'…

> how effectively and quickly people have become concerned about this issue.

I don't really know how to take this.

Surely you're joking?

People have been banging on about plastics for at least the past 20 years while I've been paying attention, so probably longer.

So some report came out two years ago, that was long overdue.

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

#84

Post by adventured »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #14

Many people might think something as massive as the ocean is basically unlimited and that there's no way us humans could screw it up. Not true. Take a sample of seawater from almost anywhere right now and you'll find microplastics. Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.

> Something like 80% of the world's fish stocks are also gone from overfishing.

Is there an estimate that goes along with that number for when 95%+ of all fish stocks will be gone?

Given the extraordinarily fast depletion implied by the 80% figure (the vast majority of which has happened in the past century), it must be very soon. Within 10-20 years there would have to be almost no fish stocks left given the advance of world's population and its collective demand for fish.

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

#85

Post by cmrdporcupine »

version_five wrote: post #17
908B64B197 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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-…

Not an expert in the oil sands but personally I think there are benefits from getting oil from a virtually uninhabited area in northern canada vs relying on other suppliers. I completely agree on the vaccine issue, Canada had failed miserably vs. comparator nations in this regard.

What comparator nations? Do you mean the ones with their own vaccine manufacturing, and the ones that put in place protectionist measures to prevent their trading partners and allies from buying vaccines from them?

Canada is just lucky the EU doesn't behave like the US, and we have been able to source vaccines from Pfizer's EU manufacturing. When the chips were down, we couldn't rely on our friends to the south.

Now that we have supply, Canada's vaccination rate is climbing rapidly. Well over 50% of the eligible (12+) population and climbing.

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

#86

Post by motohagiography »

Even as someone who doesn't think highly of this admin or mo'jones, plastics are the crack cocaine of manufacturing, and of all the empty gestures this government has made, this is probably the most useful thing they could do.

It's regressive in the sense that it will cause a hedonic hit to people who buy cheap things for comfort, but the majority of plastics begin and end their lives as disposable garbage. Let's just say when you clean up a park, creek, lake, or a beach, you don't end up with a collection of champagne bottles and caviar tins - it's all fast food bottles and containers.

The next one would be concrete and laws about disposing of contaminated fill, because that's the huge environmental horror afflicting rural areas that is a direct result of a real estate bubble manufactured by their other policies, but it's a start.

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

#87

Post by stardek »

perardi wrote: post #51
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 the weird thing is: I can’t find a CBC report on this announcement on Wednesday. Nor any other Canadian news source, even in the weeds ones like iPolitics. Maybe I’m just not searching properly, but I don’t see any other reporting. I mean, they absolutely promised they’d ban single-use plastics, and I was under the impression that was definitely a real thing: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/government-to-ban-sing…

I agree it is a bit weird. I also wasn't able to find a recent press release from the government and some of the articles about this from the past week have been using quotes from 2019 (giving the impression, to me, as though they are recent).

But in the interest of proving to myself that this isn't all some big hoax I did manage to find the government page listing all the schedule 1 toxic substances [0]. Hopefully that helps a bit. The final item on the list when I write this is "Plastic manufactured items"

[0] https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...

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

#88

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

galangalalgol wrote: post #28
_qwfv wrote: post #6

Great. Regulation and reduction of plastic production is long overdue. There are some places where it makes sense to use plastic, but we're far, far overproducing the stuff because it's convenient. It's fantastically difficult to recycle in practice, burning it produces toxic smoke and carbon emissions, and putting it into the waste stream results in a bunch of it getting dropped on the sides of roadways.

Is there a good list of what things we can reasonably replace? As I'm typing this I wonder what we would use for shock absorbant things like phone cases or water proof seals like cv boots on car suspensions. Edit:. Looking around, electrical insulation, seals, and shock absorbers are the three things that I cant think of a good replacement for. Some seals like for weather proofing you could use spring bronze.

The big problem is that there has been little to no effort on what to do with waste plastic. It's cheap to produce but it looks like it's expensive to deal with the waste. Right now it costs money to discard it so people and companies do their best to shift the burden to some one else.

Plastic is an important part of our modern society but we need to use it and get rid of it wisely.

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

#89

Post by danielrhodes »

I'm curious what is meant by "plastic" here - it would be a shame if they banned all plastics. Plastic as we know it comes in many varieties, depending on the use case. In general I think it refers to polyethylene. [1]

However, it is also possible to produce plastics from hemp, which is vastly superior on many dimensions compared to what is common today. Hemp was just legalized in many US states in 2018 after having been banned in the 30s due to lobbying pressure from cotton manufacturers. Moreover, there are recyclable (and I assume less toxic) plastics produced from corn, which you might see in cups at forward-thinking shops. These plastics biodegrade significantly faster than petroleum-based alternatives.

So hopefully any legislation is specific to plastics which are harmful.

[1] The report here goes into more detail on which specific long-chain polymers are commonly found in pollutants: https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...

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

#90

Post by cmrdporcupine »

version_five wrote: post #80
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Canadian vaccination rate is not 4%. It's as of today in Ontario at 60% of adults single dosed (49% of the population, and 58% of those 12+). The Canadian strategy is to get herd immunity on single doses before moving onto second doses. And judging from what I've seen happen in other countries, and from the emerging data about single-dose effectiveness, it's turning out to be the best strategy.

If Canada (Ontario in particular) has such a clever strategy, why are we living under a stay at home order where police have been deployed to prevent us from doing anything but grocery shop? I dont see how anyone living in Ontario could have anything good to say about what I would argue is our governments complete failure to serve its citizens in any way, whether protecting vulnerable people form covid, or even affor…

I see you have an axe to grind, but those are two separate issues. And two different levels of government. The federal gov't does not issue stay at home orders.

FWIW I think this provincial gov't is mind bogglingly incompetent, and also a bit malevolent.

Post reply on HN