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There's something profoundly wrong when it makes sense to us to extract oil from the ground in the Middle East, ship it to India, convert it into polymer, ship
by qubex 10y ago
There's something profoundly wrong when it makes sense to us to extract oil from the ground in the Middle East, ship it to India, convert it into polymer, ship it to China, mould it into knives and forks, ship it to the West, use it once, and then bury it forever underground (or expend energy to smelt it down into lower grade polymer for use in something that will end up in the ground), all to avoid rinsing some metallic cutlery.
- lukas099 10y agoNot disagreeing with you, but this system does employ a lot of people in the Middle East, India, China, and the West.
- Kadin 10y agoIf that's the goal, we might as well just pay people to dig a hole and then fill it back in again repeatedly, and it wouldn't produce as much CO2 in the end. Or, you know, pay them to wash reusable silverware.
- zdkl 10y agoYeah, but nobody in the west wants to do that?
- digikata 10y agoI'm hoping for automated wash bots...
- lfowles 10y agoSome sort of machine... think we could have it wash dishes too?
- nommm-nommm 10y agoSo... a dishwasher?
- digikata 10y agoHaha, yes, but with a little bit more of the pipeline automated. I would love to start with a messy stack of dishes on one end of a table, have the automation to sort out trash, then separate and rack silverware, dishes, cups etc into a 'dishwasher', then unrack it into a nice organized output area (where other staff could just pull clean items out of).
- toyg 10y ago> all to avoid rinsing some metallic cutlery. It's not that; it's that the capitalist/commercial way of life is naturally one-way: I sell you something and you go away. Anything after the sale is burdensome and unnatural, from a commercial point of view; so we get one-way cutlery.
- trevyn 10y agoWhat if it's actually tremendously efficient to do it this way, in a way that is not inutitive to the layperson? There are many many other uses for oil and polymer and shipping capacity, and the plastic cutlery industry can leverage these incredible economies of scale.
- cmyr 10y agoA problem I have with systems of such complexity is that it feels basically unknowable whether or not this is true. It totally may be. On the otherhand, it might just be that we're basically subsidizing an incredibly expansive practice by creating enormous and complex upstream costs that we ignore in our current accounting.
- J-dawg 10y agoI remember reading stories several years ago of Scottish prawns being shipped to Thailand to be shelled by hand, and then shipped back for sale in the UK [0]. I have no idea whether this still happens, but I find it utterly mind-blowing that this process was the most efficient way of getting the job done. Globalisation sure does lead to some weirdly counter intuitive outcomes. [0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534286/12000-mile-trip-to-have-seafood-shelled.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1534286/12000-mile-tr...
- TeMPOraL 10y agoI'm pretty convinced this is less efficient than doing it locally. The issue here is that when you talk efficiency, you need to ignore monetary issues - moeny is exactly the bullshit complexity that makes those things turn out so weird. So let's talk energy. Does this pipeline - oil from Middle East, through India, through China, to the West and to the ground makes sense? Probably not so much; I doubt the oil extraction and manufacturing scales that well to justify shipping bulk resources halfway around the world. And definitely nothing justifies just throwing the things away after one use. What makes things less energy-efficient is monetary considerations. The current chain of production is established on monetary efficiency - which is based on labor costs, transportation costs, etc., which all stem from trade deals and political power of different countries. Comparing what we have with what could be, the real (and too often forgotten) question is: can we do better? The emphasis is on "can". Maybe the current state of affairs represents close to the best we can reasonably achieve from where we are now. I don't know. Which honestly makes me want to throw my hands up in the air and give up. I don't see a simpler solution than "invent free fusion energy", or something.