10 ms·

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 va

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 poison sponge that bioaccumulates and has got absolutely everywhere.

fredley 8y ago
I predict it won't be long before using non-biodegradeable plastic in any packaging or short-lived product will be banned. It's outrageous that everything is packaged in material that will almost certainly not be properly recycled, and end up in landfill or the ocean.
- r00fus 8y ago
  Bioplastics / biodegradable plastics are not a panacea: https://www.explainthatstuff.com/bioplastics.html https://www.explainthatstuff.com/bioplastics.html
  - vkou 8y ago
    > Unfortunately, not all bioplastics compost easily or completely and some leave toxic residues or plastic fragments behind. Some will break down only at high temperatures in industrial-scale, municipal composters or digesters, or in biologically active landfills (also called bioreactor landfills), not on ordinary home compost heaps or in conventional landfills. This is not that big a problem. The solution to it is municipal composting, instead of chucking it in your back yard. Bioplastics aren't a panacea, but biodegradable ones are. We want durable materials that don't biodegrade. That's why we use plastics. Ideally, there should be a way - some catalyst, or some environment in which they do degrade. Industrial composting of biodegradable plastics is just that. Unfortunately, it does not really solve the microfiber problem. We can't make clothing out of biodegradable plastic.
    - r00fus 8y ago
      I take it you didn't read the link. The problems with "biodegradable" is that often times it's not 100% and will result in particulate and toxins. If someone is composting they'd prefer not have toxins in there - goal is to grow stuff using the compost. So how do you get rid of this stuff cleanly?
- agumonkey 8y ago
  For a while I've been scavenging devices. So I have my eyes on people's waste quite regularly.. I'm thinking of starting a recycling factory. If people just threw all their waste in my yard I'd be rich. - Tons of cardboard - Tons of batteries - Tons of partially working devices - etc etc The thing is, 'you' buy the packaging most of the time. People are stupid, they just follow the stream of 'nice' from nice looking store, to nice looking brand name, to nice looking package. I'm sure if you made everything in thin cardboard with minimal markings, they'd be angry.
  - heurist 8y ago
    In my area there's a market around finding used items at Goodwill outlets, fixing them up, and reselling through Craigslist/Offer Up/neighbors/etc. My wife and her mother find a lot of useful, inexpensive things at Goodwill outlets, including nice furniture, kitchen utensils, decoration, and electronics I now use daily. As someone who used to shop by hunting down brand name products in big box stores when I needed anything, the realization that used, nearly-free items are both readily available still functional was surprisingly profound.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      That's exactly my conclusion. With a bit of time, friends/family (the more the merrier in a way), you can have a shit ton of things for a few bucks. Another thing is that after a while I started to realize that sometimes I spend more hours on fixing than buying a new one. Also I felt I could just be a customer for someone invested into a whatever store (social feelings) and I could find my own spot to make more use of my time. /me back repurposing 'dead' laptop batteries with a 1$ li-ion charging pcb :)
  - rwallace 8y ago
    > I'm sure if you made everything in thin cardboard with minimal markings, they'd be angry. If only some things had minimal packaging, those vendors would be a competitive disadvantage, but if everything had minimal packaging, maybe consumers would be angry for five minutes, but then they'd get used to it. In other words, this is exactly the kind of coordination problem that governments were invented to solve.
r00fus 8y ago
Problem is, plastics are entirely a byproduct of the hugely dominant petrochemical industrial complex (sibling of Big Oil). Bioplastics exist, but the reason we use so much plastic instead of glass/paper is because it's cheap because it's actually a waste product of oil refinement. Realistically, yes, it's poisonous (so are the superfund-sites-to-be we call gas stations, not to mention the offshore rigs, refinery sites, etc) but Big Oil is super powerful. Is there any likelihood any of that changes?
- mc32 8y ago
  Ironically Aramco in planning for future with less petro-derived fuel, is planning on making other things from petroleum, mosltly more plasticky stuff... Can’t blame them much since that is the source of ~80% of their revenues...
  - r00fus 8y ago
    Plastic is already everywhere already - is this just a push to increase it's usage?
    - mc32 8y ago
      They see the market for petrified fuels going down so they are working with DuPont and other to research ways to make more uses for petrochemicals
gowld 8y ago
If you are willing to wait eons to solve a problem, poisoning everyone is a fine solution.
athenot 8y ago
There are many different types of plastics. Some end up in nature as tiny pieces like you mention and are indeed very bad for the ecosystem. But it's also possible to set up a proper recycling & valorization system. Northern Europe already does it: over 98% of consumer plastics are either recycled or valorized through heat (producing power or city heating). Despite that, there's an effort to address the low-hanging fruit of plastics that end up in the oceans and waterways, specifically single-use plastics: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/plastic_waste.htm http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/plastic_waste.htm
- p3llin0r3 8y ago
  Preventing plastic in Europe would have basically no effect on plastic in the ocean. The problem is people with poor waste management infrastructure tossing their junk into the rivers and oceans in developing countries. https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting-the-oceans-the-most/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...
  - quantum_magpie 8y ago
    The waste thrown into the rivers and oceans in developing countries is from the US and the EU.
- radicalbyte 8y ago
  In The Netherlands we burn our waste or recycle. I have a separate bin for plastic, food/garden, paper/cardboard and general waste. Glass and clothes are collected at the supermarket. Most glass and plastic drinks bottles are reused, you pay a deposit for them (excellent system!). Oil, batteries, light bulbs are collected at schools/supermarkets. Electronics can be returned to stores or more often taken to the skip. They're put in shipping containers and I assume sold somewhere.
- JulianMorrison 8y ago
  Recycling is less help than it looks. Assuming it's captured (big assumption with a lot being binned and straight into landfill) it gets made into degraded products, it can't cycle back to the original use good as new like glass. And a lot of those products are things that look like big plastic dust sources. And nobody recycles dust.
state_less 8y ago
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 respect to the long term consequences. So we use things like plastic containers, forks, cups, bottles and spoons. What are some alternatives? Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags?
- r00fus 8y ago
  > 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 byproduct (we even fight wars to keep the price low).
  - p3llin0r3 8y ago
    Unfortunately, this probably wouldn't work. Most plastic waste does not come from rich countries with decent waste infrastructure. It comes from shipping and fishing and industrial vessels who dump their garbage into the ocean, and developing countries who dispose of all of their waste by throwing it into a river or the ocean to be washed away. You can't tax them because they are not in your country. You would have to stop the plastic being created at it's source, and prevent it from ever being released into the environment.
    - oldcynic 8y ago
      Should we ignore the escalating amounts of waste, mainly from single use packaging, in the developed world meanwhile?
      - 8y ago
eco 8y ago
The problem with switching to alternatives like "compostable plastics" is they need to be composted in a special facility that most people aren't going to have easy access to so they'll either throw them in with their recycling (which contaminates the recycling stream) or they put them in with their garbage (which, in a oxygen starved environment like a landfill, causes them to release a lot of methane as they decompose). So now the consumer often has to to decide if they want more greenhouse gases or more microplastics in the environment.
bladecatcher 8y ago
Although not yet commercially viable there are a few companies trying to address this problem. Algopack[0], a French startup is making plastic like material from seaweed (brown algae) and there are others that are trying out bioplastics made from sugarcane [0] http://www.algopack.com/algopackgb.php http://www.algopack.com/algopackgb.php
ams6110 8y ago
Most plastic degrades rather rapidly in UV (sunlight). Buried, it may not, but it's also rather inert underground.
aarongough 8y ago
A friend of mine is a researcher in water quality, I asked him what the primary source of microplastics was and his answer surprised me: textiles. Apparently things like fleece shed small plastic fibres constantly every time they're washed, and those fibers make up the bulk of most microplastics.
- corey_moncure 8y ago
  Have you seen what goes into our childrens' clothes and toys lately? My kids and house are always covered in this microscopic glitter stuff that falls off their clothing and toys. The winter holidays are the worst. I never buy it but inevitably someone will get this junk for my kids, and I'm the evil dad if I say "no". I hate to be a grinch, but I really wish we would stop importing and/or selling this stuff. But nope, we seem to value cheap thrills over the future of our natural environment.
kragen 8y ago
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, isn't that what you would want to do with poisons? Clay and activated charcoal absorb and adsorb poisons too. That's why you feed them to poisoning victims. The problem is the poisons, not the plastics. Using alternatives where they exist may or may not be an improvement. Usually you can use glass bottles instead of plastic bottles, for example. But a PET 2-ℓ bottle might be 27 grams of extremely nontoxic PET. The corresponding glass bottle weighs nearly a kilogram, 30 times as much. This means that most kinds of environmental damage associated with it increase by one and a half orders of magnitude; you need 30 trucks instead of one to transport the bottles to the bottling facility, 30 tons of raw material instead of one to make 30,000 bottles, and so on. The glass also needs higher processing temperatures, using more energy, and produces broken glass when discarded, so the disparity is actually somewhat larger. Similarly, a traditional plastic shopping bag is entirely nontoxic, weighs 100 milligrams, and can be reused three or four times, but is sterile the first time you use it. If you replace it with a canvas bag that weighs 65 grams and can be reused hundreds of times, you're using 650 times more material in exchange for only 100 times more uses, and you dramatically increase your risk of food poisoning from raw vegetables. Washing the canvas bag once will typically use both more energy than the plastic bag used during its entire lifecycle and also more material — it's hard to get it clean with only 100 milligrams of soap! A better tradeoff is to use slightly thicker plastic bags which can survive dozens of uses, use new plastic bags for your raw vegetables, and bury the plastic safely when you're done with it. (A common pathological effect of regulations against plastic shopping bags is that people have to replace them with plastic garbage bags.) Being able to use 30 or 100 times less material, and common, nontoxic materials like carbon and hydrogen instead of rare, toxic materials like boron and chromium, are major environmental advantages of many plastics in many uses. There are some uses of plastics which are environmentally harmful, and there are some plastics which do generate toxic products if they are allowed to break down — most notably PVC. Car fuel consumption is, generally speaking, closely proportional to weight; and, for a given emissions control system, harmful emissions are closely proportional to fuel consumption. Individual car weight has diminished enormously during the last 50 years primarily due to greatly increased use of plastics, though improved metals have also played a role. You can build cars almost entirely from metals, with only a few crucial components such as gaskets and hoses made from plastics, but doing so is environmentally harmful. So why is there so much anti-plastic sentiment? I think there are four main reasons, aside from the actual environmental damage from some uses of plastics. 1. Plastic is very visible, and renouncing plastic is a low-cost, high-visibility way to advertise your virtue as an Environmentally Conscious Person. Doing things that would actually have a significant benefit to the environment, such as not having children, not eating meat, not financially supporting the US military through taxes, carefully weighing the costs and benefits of possible actions, and using passive solar climate control in your house, is costly and therefore unpopular. 2. I'm a hippie, and the horror at what industrial civilization is doing to our beautiful planet leads many hippies to reject industrial civilization entirely. This kind of anarcho-primitivism, which I do not agree with, considers products of industry and especially petroleum and chemistry to be undesirable, at times even ritually impure, like cannibalism. Thus canvas bags are preferable to plastic bags, wool (such as actual fleece) is preferable to microfiber polyester ("polar fleece"), and brass is preferable to plastic, entirely independent of their actual environmental impact. This creates a sort of coincidental association between environmentalism and the rejection of plastic which provides fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments. 3. At least in the US, the upper class considers wool preferable to microfiber polyester and brass preferable to plastic for an entirely different reason from anarcho-primitivists: they consider innovation and cheap goods to be déclassé, deriving much of their social value from a traditionalist, Romanticist value system. Cynics might also point out that using expensive goods where cheap ones would do serves as a form of conspicuous consumption, reliably signaling the wealth of the consumer to observers. Either way, the upper class — which still controls much of the press in the US, and thus has a powerful role as tastemakers, despite the rise of lower-class celebrities like the Kardashians and Trump — is also fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments. 4. Selling alternatives to disposable plastics is very profitable. As a simple example, a supermarket can sell cloth bags instead of giving away plastic bags for free. Many times, its customers will forget to bring cloth bags with them, and will buy more bags than they need, so in practice a single cloth bag will replace 10 plastic bags instead of 100. This works as a form of price discrimination, since customers on tighter budgets will be more careful to bring bags to avoid the artificially imposed cost. Finally, this makes the supermarket appear upscale, both because it's advertising its hip environmental consciousness, and because it is less associated with déclassé things like plastic bags. This enables it to charge higher profit margins on its other merchandise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics
p3llin0r3 8y ago
That would require anyone but a modern nation taking the blame for something bad on this Earth and we all know that is not going to happen. Forget it's the Asian countries that produce the plastic. White people did everything didn't your hear?

fredley 8y ago

I predict it won't be long before using non-biodegradeable plastic in any packaging or short-lived product will be banned. It's outrageous that everything is packaged in material that will almost certainly not be properly recycled, and end up in landfill or the ocean.

r00fus 8y ago
Bioplastics / biodegradable plastics are not a panacea: https://www.explainthatstuff.com/bioplastics.html https://www.explainthatstuff.com/bioplastics.html
- vkou 8y ago
  > Unfortunately, not all bioplastics compost easily or completely and some leave toxic residues or plastic fragments behind. Some will break down only at high temperatures in industrial-scale, municipal composters or digesters, or in biologically active landfills (also called bioreactor landfills), not on ordinary home compost heaps or in conventional landfills. This is not that big a problem. The solution to it is municipal composting, instead of chucking it in your back yard. Bioplastics aren't a panacea, but biodegradable ones are. We want durable materials that don't biodegrade. That's why we use plastics. Ideally, there should be a way - some catalyst, or some environment in which they do degrade. Industrial composting of biodegradable plastics is just that. Unfortunately, it does not really solve the microfiber problem. We can't make clothing out of biodegradable plastic.
  - r00fus 8y ago
    I take it you didn't read the link. The problems with "biodegradable" is that often times it's not 100% and will result in particulate and toxins. If someone is composting they'd prefer not have toxins in there - goal is to grow stuff using the compost. So how do you get rid of this stuff cleanly?
agumonkey 8y ago
For a while I've been scavenging devices. So I have my eyes on people's waste quite regularly.. I'm thinking of starting a recycling factory. If people just threw all their waste in my yard I'd be rich. - Tons of cardboard - Tons of batteries - Tons of partially working devices - etc etc The thing is, 'you' buy the packaging most of the time. People are stupid, they just follow the stream of 'nice' from nice looking store, to nice looking brand name, to nice looking package. I'm sure if you made everything in thin cardboard with minimal markings, they'd be angry.
- heurist 8y ago
  In my area there's a market around finding used items at Goodwill outlets, fixing them up, and reselling through Craigslist/Offer Up/neighbors/etc. My wife and her mother find a lot of useful, inexpensive things at Goodwill outlets, including nice furniture, kitchen utensils, decoration, and electronics I now use daily. As someone who used to shop by hunting down brand name products in big box stores when I needed anything, the realization that used, nearly-free items are both readily available still functional was surprisingly profound.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    That's exactly my conclusion. With a bit of time, friends/family (the more the merrier in a way), you can have a shit ton of things for a few bucks. Another thing is that after a while I started to realize that sometimes I spend more hours on fixing than buying a new one. Also I felt I could just be a customer for someone invested into a whatever store (social feelings) and I could find my own spot to make more use of my time. /me back repurposing 'dead' laptop batteries with a 1$ li-ion charging pcb :)
- rwallace 8y ago
  > I'm sure if you made everything in thin cardboard with minimal markings, they'd be angry. If only some things had minimal packaging, those vendors would be a competitive disadvantage, but if everything had minimal packaging, maybe consumers would be angry for five minutes, but then they'd get used to it. In other words, this is exactly the kind of coordination problem that governments were invented to solve.

r00fus 8y ago

Problem is, plastics are entirely a byproduct of the hugely dominant petrochemical industrial complex (sibling of Big Oil). Bioplastics exist, but the reason we use so much plastic instead of glass/paper is because it's cheap because it's actually a waste product of oil refinement. Realistically, yes, it's poisonous (so are the superfund-sites-to-be we call gas stations, not to mention the offshore rigs, refinery sites, etc) but Big Oil is super powerful. Is there any likelihood any of that changes?

mc32 8y ago
Ironically Aramco in planning for future with less petro-derived fuel, is planning on making other things from petroleum, mosltly more plasticky stuff... Can’t blame them much since that is the source of ~80% of their revenues...
- r00fus 8y ago
  Plastic is already everywhere already - is this just a push to increase it's usage?
  - mc32 8y ago
    They see the market for petrified fuels going down so they are working with DuPont and other to research ways to make more uses for petrochemicals

gowld 8y ago

If you are willing to wait eons to solve a problem, poisoning everyone is a fine solution.

athenot 8y ago

There are many different types of plastics. Some end up in nature as tiny pieces like you mention and are indeed very bad for the ecosystem. But it's also possible to set up a proper recycling & valorization system. Northern Europe already does it: over 98% of consumer plastics are either recycled or valorized through heat (producing power or city heating). Despite that, there's an effort to address the low-hanging fruit of plastics that end up in the oceans and waterways, specifically single-use plastics: http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/plastic_waste.htm http://ec.europa.eu/environment/waste/plastic_waste.htm

p3llin0r3 8y ago
Preventing plastic in Europe would have basically no effect on plastic in the ocean. The problem is people with poor waste management infrastructure tossing their junk into the rivers and oceans in developing countries. https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting-the-oceans-the-most/ https://www.statista.com/chart/12211/the-countries-polluting...
- quantum_magpie 8y ago
  The waste thrown into the rivers and oceans in developing countries is from the US and the EU.
radicalbyte 8y ago
In The Netherlands we burn our waste or recycle. I have a separate bin for plastic, food/garden, paper/cardboard and general waste. Glass and clothes are collected at the supermarket. Most glass and plastic drinks bottles are reused, you pay a deposit for them (excellent system!). Oil, batteries, light bulbs are collected at schools/supermarkets. Electronics can be returned to stores or more often taken to the skip. They're put in shipping containers and I assume sold somewhere.
JulianMorrison 8y ago
Recycling is less help than it looks. Assuming it's captured (big assumption with a lot being binned and straight into landfill) it gets made into degraded products, it can't cycle back to the original use good as new like glass. And a lot of those products are things that look like big plastic dust sources. And nobody recycles dust.

state_less 8y ago

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 respect to the long term consequences. So we use things like plastic containers, forks, cups, bottles and spoons. What are some alternatives? Should we go back to glass bottles and paper bags?

r00fus 8y ago
> 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 byproduct (we even fight wars to keep the price low).
- p3llin0r3 8y ago
  Unfortunately, this probably wouldn't work. Most plastic waste does not come from rich countries with decent waste infrastructure. It comes from shipping and fishing and industrial vessels who dump their garbage into the ocean, and developing countries who dispose of all of their waste by throwing it into a river or the ocean to be washed away. You can't tax them because they are not in your country. You would have to stop the plastic being created at it's source, and prevent it from ever being released into the environment.
  - oldcynic 8y ago
    Should we ignore the escalating amounts of waste, mainly from single use packaging, in the developed world meanwhile?
    - 8y ago

eco 8y ago

The problem with switching to alternatives like "compostable plastics" is they need to be composted in a special facility that most people aren't going to have easy access to so they'll either throw them in with their recycling (which contaminates the recycling stream) or they put them in with their garbage (which, in a oxygen starved environment like a landfill, causes them to release a lot of methane as they decompose). So now the consumer often has to to decide if they want more greenhouse gases or more microplastics in the environment.

bladecatcher 8y ago

Although not yet commercially viable there are a few companies trying to address this problem. Algopack[0], a French startup is making plastic like material from seaweed (brown algae) and there are others that are trying out bioplastics made from sugarcane [0] http://www.algopack.com/algopackgb.php http://www.algopack.com/algopackgb.php

ams6110 8y ago

Most plastic degrades rather rapidly in UV (sunlight). Buried, it may not, but it's also rather inert underground.

aarongough 8y ago

A friend of mine is a researcher in water quality, I asked him what the primary source of microplastics was and his answer surprised me: textiles. Apparently things like fleece shed small plastic fibres constantly every time they're washed, and those fibers make up the bulk of most microplastics.

corey_moncure 8y ago
Have you seen what goes into our childrens' clothes and toys lately? My kids and house are always covered in this microscopic glitter stuff that falls off their clothing and toys. The winter holidays are the worst. I never buy it but inevitably someone will get this junk for my kids, and I'm the evil dad if I say "no". I hate to be a grinch, but I really wish we would stop importing and/or selling this stuff. But nope, we seem to value cheap thrills over the future of our natural environment.

kragen 8y ago

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, isn't that what you would want to do with poisons? Clay and activated charcoal absorb and adsorb poisons too. That's why you feed them to poisoning victims. The problem is the poisons, not the plastics. Using alternatives where they exist may or may not be an improvement. Usually you can use glass bottles instead of plastic bottles, for example. But a PET 2-ℓ bottle might be 27 grams of extremely nontoxic PET. The corresponding glass bottle weighs nearly a kilogram, 30 times as much. This means that most kinds of environmental damage associated with it increase by one and a half orders of magnitude; you need 30 trucks instead of one to transport the bottles to the bottling facility, 30 tons of raw material instead of one to make 30,000 bottles, and so on. The glass also needs higher processing temperatures, using more energy, and produces broken glass when discarded, so the disparity is actually somewhat larger. Similarly, a traditional plastic shopping bag is entirely nontoxic, weighs 100 milligrams, and can be reused three or four times, but is sterile the first time you use it. If you replace it with a canvas bag that weighs 65 grams and can be reused hundreds of times, you're using 650 times more material in exchange for only 100 times more uses, and you dramatically increase your risk of food poisoning from raw vegetables. Washing the canvas bag once will typically use both more energy than the plastic bag used during its entire lifecycle and also more material — it's hard to get it clean with only 100 milligrams of soap! A better tradeoff is to use slightly thicker plastic bags which can survive dozens of uses, use new plastic bags for your raw vegetables, and bury the plastic safely when you're done with it. (A common pathological effect of regulations against plastic shopping bags is that people have to replace them with plastic garbage bags.) Being able to use 30 or 100 times less material, and common, nontoxic materials like carbon and hydrogen instead of rare, toxic materials like boron and chromium, are major environmental advantages of many plastics in many uses. There are some uses of plastics which are environmentally harmful, and there are some plastics which do generate toxic products if they are allowed to break down — most notably PVC. Car fuel consumption is, generally speaking, closely proportional to weight; and, for a given emissions control system, harmful emissions are closely proportional to fuel consumption. Individual car weight has diminished enormously during the last 50 years primarily due to greatly increased use of plastics, though improved metals have also played a role. You can build cars almost entirely from metals, with only a few crucial components such as gaskets and hoses made from plastics, but doing so is environmentally harmful. So why is there so much anti-plastic sentiment? I think there are four main reasons, aside from the actual environmental damage from some uses of plastics. 1. Plastic is very visible, and renouncing plastic is a low-cost, high-visibility way to advertise your virtue as an Environmentally Conscious Person. Doing things that would actually have a significant benefit to the environment, such as not having children, not eating meat, not financially supporting the US military through taxes, carefully weighing the costs and benefits of possible actions, and using passive solar climate control in your house, is costly and therefore unpopular. 2. I'm a hippie, and the horror at what industrial civilization is doing to our beautiful planet leads many hippies to reject industrial civilization entirely. This kind of anarcho-primitivism, which I do not agree with, considers products of industry and especially petroleum and chemistry to be undesirable, at times even ritually impure, like cannibalism. Thus canvas bags are preferable to plastic bags, wool (such as actual fleece) is preferable to microfiber polyester ("polar fleece"), and brass is preferable to plastic, entirely independent of their actual environmental impact. This creates a sort of coincidental association between environmentalism and the rejection of plastic which provides fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments. 3. At least in the US, the upper class considers wool preferable to microfiber polyester and brass preferable to plastic for an entirely different reason from anarcho-primitivists: they consider innovation and cheap goods to be déclassé, deriving much of their social value from a traditionalist, Romanticist value system. Cynics might also point out that using expensive goods where cheap ones would do serves as a form of conspicuous consumption, reliably signaling the wealth of the consumer to observers. Either way, the upper class — which still controls much of the press in the US, and thus has a powerful role as tastemakers, despite the rise of lower-class celebrities like the Kardashians and Trump — is also fertile ground for anti-plastics arguments and barren ground for pro-plastics arguments. 4. Selling alternatives to disposable plastics is very profitable. As a simple example, a supermarket can sell cloth bags instead of giving away plastic bags for free. Many times, its customers will forget to bring cloth bags with them, and will buy more bags than they need, so in practice a single cloth bag will replace 10 plastic bags instead of 100. This works as a form of price discrimination, since customers on tighter budgets will be more careful to bring bags to avoid the artificially imposed cost. Finally, this makes the supermarket appear upscale, both because it's advertising its hip environmental consciousness, and because it is less associated with déclassé things like plastic bags. This enables it to charge higher profit margins on its other merchandise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microplastics

p3llin0r3 8y ago

That would require anyone but a modern nation taking the blame for something bad on this Earth and we all know that is not going to happen. Forget it's the Asian countries that produce the plastic. White people did everything didn't your hear?