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>Instead, government could've imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer

>Instead, government could've imposed ban on the consumer products which are wrapped using plastic material. Almost 50% plastic come directly from such consumer products sold by all FMCG companies. Such plastic material which is used as a wrapper (e.g. mineral bottles, wrappers of chocolates, biscuits, wafers, tobacco, etc.) is often useless and people tend to throw it right away. Broadly speaking, that would be a terrible backwards step for the environment. Plastic packaging often reduces waste by protecting the product from spoilage and damage. A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. Many people argue that milk should be sold in re-usable glass containers rather than disposable bottles or cartons, but the environmental case is really marginal. The glass bottle is considerably more energy-intensive to produce and transport, with more energy used to collect and wash it for re-use. Returnable glass bottles are often worse than disposable plastic if the transport distance is too great and/or the breakage rate is too high. In many cases, the best option is reusable plastic bottles, which are less energy-intensive to manufacture, lighter to transport and more durable than glass. Plastic is a wonderful material that has an important role to play in a sustainable economy. There has been a huge increase in the quality and availability of bio-based and biodegradable plastics in the packaging industry. We have irrationally demonised a very useful material, creating a huge distraction from much more serious environmental problems. If you buy a beef steak wrapped in plastic, the problem is the steak, not the wrapper. The plastic wrapper produced ~10g of CO2 and required ~100ml of water to produce; the steak produced ~7kg of CO2 and required ~4,000 litres of water to produce. As long as it is disposed of responsibly, a whole trash bag full of plastic packaging has a negligible environmental impact compared to a single portion of beef.

nafey 8y ago
> It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. Will need citation for that.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  Producing a cucumber results in CO2 emissions of about 1kg (3.3kg CO2 per kg product, avg weight ~300g). Shrink-wrapping a cucumber increases the average shelf life from 9 days to 15 days in refrigerated conditions and from 2 days to 5 days in ambient conditions. Producing a kilogram of polyethylene film packaging emits about 2.7kg of CO2. The wrapping on an average-sized cucumber weighs about 2g, producing an additional 5.4g of CO2 emissions and increasing the total carbon footprint of the cucumber by ~0.54%. About 12% of cucumbers delivered to US retailers go unsold due to damage, spoilage or other loss. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901104000991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550898/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550898/ http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-_Nov_2010_V101.f1571b4f.10324.pdf http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-... http://www.mdpi.com:8080/2077-0472/5/3/626/pdf http://www.mdpi.com:8080/2077-0472/5/3/626/pdf
  - ozborn 8y ago
    While carbon emissions are an important consideration, they are not only impact of plastic. Plastics often end up in the ocean where they cause havoc with not just marine marine life, but also people. It is not just about viewing unsightly plastic, but also ingestion of plastic and chemicals associated with plastic such as phthalates and endocrine disruptors. While spoilage is in issue, so are the various health problems associated with plastic. While there are too many unstudied plastic associated chemicals to quantify the impact, a number of them are clearly associated with cancer, obesity and infertility. This month's issue of National Geographic is devoted to the problem of plastic in the ocean and is worth a look.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      As brutal as it might seem, plastic pollution is not a high priority. It makes for some shocking and upsetting photos, but it's not a fundamental threat to the marine ecosystem. The sources of marine plastic pollution are non-obvious and can be mostly mitigated through better management of waste rather than elimination at source. Ocean acidification due to rising CO2 levels is a cataclysmic threat to the marine ecosystem. A relatively small decrease in pH could lead to the extinction of many key invertebrate species and the complete collapse of some habitats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification The health risks posed by plastics are marginal at worst. There are some legitimate concerns about certain persistent organic pollutants, but plastics are not the primary sources of exposure to these compounds and their use is largely under effective control.
efficax 8y ago
CO2 is only one environmental impact factor. Plastic waste is devastating for our oceans. Reducing plastic usage and CO2 should be twin goals.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >Plastic waste is devastating for our oceans. CO2 is having a far more severe impact on the oceans through acidification. All of the world's major coral reefs have experienced severe bleaching events; the IPCC has predicted the complete collapse of many reef ecosystems if CO2 emissions are not brought under control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
- briandear 8y ago
  Why not figure out why plastic ends up in the ocean and solve that problem? Motor oil in the oceans is far more dangerous than plastics, but no sane person is advocating banning lubricants. Instead laws and practices were developed to ensure used oil doesn’t end up in storm drains and water supplies.
Lunatic666 8y ago
That's all true, couple of years ago it made more sense to actually burn plastic waste, e.g. to use it to make steel than to recycle it. But the problem in India and China is that the plastic is dumped in the rivers and ends up in the food chain where we are all eating it later on. Steaks and glass bottles do no harm to the environment when just thrown away
titzer 8y ago
The environment is more than a single dimension. I'm not going to dispute your stats on individual items here--as far as CO2 goes, maybe you're right. But the oceans and landfills are filling up with non-biodegradable plastic garbage that is weakening ecosystems all over the planet. We need to get our waste pipeline under control at all stages, and plastic packaging is garbage for a long term plan. As evidence I cite every beach in the world. I'll take the spoiled cucumbers and milk; it's wasted energy, it contributes to ecological impact, but ultimately biodegradable.
- briandear 8y ago
  Landfill waste doesn’t generally end up in the oceans. Landfills aren’t the problem, it’s the bad management of waste, typically by countries that care more about basic survival than the effect of their trash on a whale. A villager in rural China doesn’t typically have the luxury of caring as much as some Instagraming Brooklynite. Creating better processes around waste management is going to have a much larger and predicatable effect than outright bans — which can have unintended consequences that the “smart people” fail to predict. Blanket bans on DDT are a good example, sounded good, until millions more people died of malaria. (I am not suggesting we continue or end the DDT ban, it’s just an example of the effect of a policy that was driven by emotion rather than a rigorous scientific process.) It’s possible that banning plastic could have unforeseen consequences that haven’t been considered by the simpletons that typically are charged with making government policy.
linkmotif 8y ago
> A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. But that is endemic to our insane food system. I think plastic wrapped cucumbers aren’t worth having. If you can’t survive without literally destroying the environment, at least let other animals enjoy Earth.
vfinn 8y ago
It's hardly demonizing without a reason. Sounds almost like a "it's not the guns, it's the bad people" argument, but here plastics will continue to create problems most importantly in the form of microplastics, no matter how you regulate. We continue polluting our waters and the food we eat, and the longer we continue, the more difficult it will be to restore the situation, so we need drastic actions. On top of the obvious (see the related pictures), we have phtalates for example, that we don't know much about.
nmcfarl 8y ago
So that last 'graph got me wondering, and knowing that there are basically no plastics recycled where I live, I looked up if cling film, or polystyrene (a typical steak wrapping) could be recycled in Seatlle, and the answer is no. In fact it looks like the answer is no most everywhere. And while cling film does degrade after decades, while polystyrene might take multiple 100,000s of years. Which means the problem might be the steak if the wrapper is disposed responsibly, disposing responsibly is the real problem, and likely impossible.
- ceejayoz 8y ago
  See if your grocery store's plastic bag recycling can take it. Cling film can't be recycled with glass/plastic/paper because it ties up the machines, but here in upstate NY you can put it in with grocery bags, ziplocks, and other thin plastics at the in-store drop-off. We started doing this as well as a composting service and it's remarkable how much emptier our trash bin is now - half the volume, easily.
  - TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
    This exactly sums up the problem. It's no use being able to recycle everything if doing so requires everybody to sort their waste and take it to different places. Most people won't do that. If we remove single use bags and cling film (yes, cling film is going to be a tough one), you're no longer reliant on the consumer to responsibly manage their waste. There's a trade off. You're no longer sorting waste, and you're still generating less waste, but reduced shelf lives mean you now need to shop for fresh produce more often, potentially using more fuel and offsetting any gains. But you're no longer producing waste that takes centuries to decompose.
- trothamel 8y ago
  What's irresponsible about just landfilling it after it has served its purpose? You're taking a small amount of oil that started off underground, and then isolating it back under ground. The main problem appears to be with people who litter, and in areas that don't have a sanitation system to carry away and isolate garbage like this. Recycling plastic is nice, but the point of GP's post is that even without it, it has the potential to massively reduce waste.
dd36 8y ago
Cucumbers are more harmful than plastic?!? I stopped reading right there. One timely biodegrades, the other doesn’t. That’s the whole problem.
- TylerE 8y ago
  This is exactly the kind of tunnel vision that annoys me. Things take much more energy to PRODUCE than to dispose of. Agriculture is incredibly energy, land, and water intensive.
  - state_less 8y ago
    We can and should do better. What if we had a robot that would drive through the fields, detecting weeds and crushing or cutting them out instead of chemical solutions? Couldn't we deliver the water more directly as well? Shouldn't transportation use battery powered vehicles instead of fossil fuel based vehicles? Can't we steam wash with renewable energy? Maybe it costs more to do some of these things now, but I think folks could use some good goals to work toward.
    - beauzero 8y ago
      On a happy note "no-till" is starting to prove itself. There are mixtures of effectiveness and chemical usage but checkout the No Till vids the USDA is promoting https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS
  - chicob 8y ago
    And plastic intensive as well. A single plantation of 1 ha of olive trees in super high-density mode uses around 1700 PE cups, 1700 PVC shoot protectors and 2,5 km of PVC drip irrigation tubes, not to mention the tying. Melon production also directly uses plastic, albeit temporarily. Greenhouses need repair and maintenance. Also worth of mention all the herbicide/fungicide/insecticide plastic containers. Only these last have an actual though-of destination for recycling, which is mandatory. These have to be washed and made unusable, to avoid accidents, which means forgetting about 2 out of 3 Rs in this case.
hannofcart 8y ago
> If you buy a beef steak ... ...but you won't. Not in India.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  That's the subject of a rather heated debate. India is religiously and ethnically diverse; a non-trivial proportion of secular Hindus do eat beef. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India
codeisawesome 8y ago
Energy appears to be obtainable sustainably (so a feeling manifests that it’s okay to waste it right now as long as we keep pedalling hard toward a clean solution ASAP). Plastic degradation appears to be a much harder problem. Also of course, helps that plastic garbage is “visible and ugly”, whereas climate change is abstract.
- CarVac 8y ago
  The issue with food waste is limited phosphorus supplies for fertilizer.
- allendoerfer 8y ago
  This is also my way of thinking. Don't worry about engergy, worry about waste and chemicals instead. Solve all problems through more and more green energy (recycling, reusing, cleaning etc.) and smarter and smarter robots (cleaning, separating, mechanical solutions instead of chemicals).
athenot 8y ago
While CO₂ emission is important, this is not primary reason for banning plastic bags. It's plastic in various states of (un)decomposition all over the ecosystem. A cucumber is 100% biodegradable with no solid residue. The plastic that wraps it will take a long time to decompose and is likely to be found clogging up some piece of nature—whether in the soil, affecting plants or obstructing some body function of an animal.
- riantogo 8y ago
  Based on jdietrich's input, it is then a waste processing problem and not a plastic problem. Tackling the symptom in this case seems net more harmful.
  - dd36 8y ago
    By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical. Humans don't dispose of things properly. That's a fact. Creating more plastic waste will create more plastic pollution. It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste. Again, producers don't plastic wrap cucumbers to save CO2. The entire premise is ridiculous. Charge producers for the waste their products create. That will incentivize less waste. Charge them for the CO2 they emit. That will incentivize a reduction in CO2. You can accomplish both with market signals.
    - jdietrich 8y ago
      >By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical. Not at all. Cucumbers have a relatively short shelf-life due to a high water content and a permeable skin, so wrapping them makes economic and environmental sense. Apples and citrus fruits don't need plastic packaging, but their shelf life is considerably enhanced by the application of a protective wax coating. Some products like loose salad leaves need modified atmosphere packaging to achieve a satisfactory shelf life, while delicate soft fruits require a protective packaging system that could involve a variety of wood- or plastic-based products. I'm indifferent to points of principle, I care about choosing the most sustainable tool for any given task. The critical environmental issue in our fruit and vegetable supply is the needlessly high use of air freight to maintain supplies of out-of-season produce. A single package of asparagus or green beans might produce emissions of >10kg CO2e, simply because of their transport mode. If you want to reduce the sustainability of your produce consumption, that one issue overwhelms pretty much everything else. >It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste. You're trading one kind of waste for another. Plastic packaging is wasteful in one sense because it is disposable, but it reduces a potentially far greater waste by protecting products during transportation and storage. Plastic isn't always the most sustainable packaging material, but it often is. That decision needs to be made based on hard facts, not the presumption that plastic is evil. >Charge producers for the waste their products create. That will incentivize less waste. Charge them for the CO2 they emit. That will incentivize a reduction in CO2. I'm fully in favour of both, as long as those charges represent the actual economic impacts of mitigating those issues.
scotchmi_st 8y ago
This is a really great point that deserves to be it's own comment, rather than a reply to another. The two greatest challenges facing us in the next few years are climate change and water usage. Plastic is an issue, but it's not a life-or-death-for-the-species problem. We can figure plastic out later. We already are discovering bacteria and other organisms that can digest plastics. It seems to me we have a kind of liberal guilt when it comes to plastic production. As if we're defiling this green and pleasant land with something alien to the universe. We're almost certainly not producing anything that hasn't already existed. We should stop acting like we are. (The same goes for nuclear waste.) As long as plastics are disposed responsibly in ways that don't damage plants and animals, what's the issue?
- state_less 8y ago
  > As long as plastics are disposed responsibly in ways that don't damage plants and animals, what's the issue? Please don't discount one of the biggest issues though. I've told folks their plastic bottle is about to blow away (overlooking lands end, right over the ocean). The person picks it up, walks a bit further up the trail and throw it in the bushes. I've had folks throw their cigarette butt on the side of the road on Independence pass. I asked them to pick it up, and they noodled around at the ground with their foot as if to find it, then hop in their car and take off. We should design for some irresponsibility and more so in places where there isn't much environmental consciousness.
  - scotchmi_st 8y ago
    You're referring to anecdotes. Maybe the sort of behaviour is widespread, but even if it is, you then need to prove it's having much of an impact on the environment, and even then it's a drop in the ocean compared with the damage done via climate change and water consumption. We need to get out of our parochial ideas about waste. Plastics are aesthetically bad, but other forces are quantitatively way worse.
    - state_less 8y ago
      It probably won't come as a big surprise that I also would like to address the larger forces as well. That doesn't mean that we can't also want to address the garbage that is littering our oceans.
ryanianian 8y ago
The decision to use glass as the de-facto re-usable container medium has always driven me nuts. I think the "marketing" is that it's slightly "harder" (mentally) to throw away a nice glass bottle than it is a plastic container because we've been so conditioned to throw out the plastic ones. I've long wondered why retailers don't offer a "refill" option for items like milk and liquid cleaning products. The bottles for laundry detergent in particular are usually thick plastic that rightfully could serve their purpose for a very long time. The store could have a big tank of the stuff and consumers can bring the re-usable bottle in for a refill at a worthwhile discount. Similar to what some retailers do with water and those re-fillable 5-gallon jugs. Perhaps the economics don't favor this for other products, but it seems like banning plastic in favor of heavier and less-re-usable options is just political hype without real examination, as you point out.
- Slippery_John 8y ago
  Some detergent makers actually do sell refill bags that use far less plastic. There's also been a resurgence of milkmen in London and some other places, where you leave out your empty bottles and get a refill. While there aren't milkpeople where I live, there are a few places where I can pay a deposit on a glass bottle and then exchange it for a full bottle whenever I need. It's not widespread by any means, but it is happening.
  - ryanianian 8y ago
    The re-usable detergent bags are nice, and many countries do distribute milk in thin plastic bags that you then empty into a pitcher at home. But as parent points out, exchanging glass bottles isn't really better for the environment (in terms of CO2) as compared to properly disposing of plastic. No real reason why those deposit+refill bottles need to be glass; they could just as well be quality plastic and reduce some transport-weight. Similarly having a guy driving a truck around to deliver heavy liquids seems inefficient when you could just as well bring all your plastic bottle back to the store at one time and refill from big tanks there.
    - 8y ago
rmk 8y ago
This is the type of comment that keeps me coming back to hacker news! Where did you get this information? Books? Care to share recommendations?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  If you only read one book on the subject, read Dr David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air. It clearly explains how we use energy, how we produce it and how we can sustainably match supply and demand. It gave me an intuitive understanding of energy, using quick order-of-magnitude calculations to figure out the really important issues. It's written from a British perspective, but the principles are universally applicable. Best of all, it's completely free to read online. https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/ I'd also highly recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It reveals that most Westerners have a grossly distorted and irrationally pessimistic image of the world. It's not really about energy or environmentalism, but it fills a vital gap in our common understanding of the future - the immense, unstoppable rise of the global middle-class. Once you internalise the idea that there is no great divide between the "first world" and the "third world", everything else looks very different. A majority of the world's population are neither very poor nor very rich, which presents a completely different set of challenges with respect to sustainable energy and climate change. https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/ https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/ My other recommendation would be to make good use of Google Scholar and SciHub. A large proportion "debates" I see aren't really debates at all, because the key points being argued are incorrect or irrelevant. Scientific research doesn't necessarily give us answers, but it can stop us from arguing over stupid questions.
jt2190 8y ago
Would you mind providing some links to these biodegradeable plastics? The last time I checked bio-degradeable plastic was nothing more than a marketing sleight of hand: Essentially just micro plastic bound together with something biodegradeable like corn starch. The plastic still enters the environment, skips the part where it breaks down from large pieces to tiny ones, yet still contaminates the enviroment.
snambi 8y ago
What an awesome logic... Plastic is better than organic stuff.
hw 8y ago
"A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping." A gram or two, multiplied by millions of cucumbers and other food products wrapped in plastic. We produce more than we need to consume. Grocery stores are buying more produce and wasting more, and farmers are growing more. CO2 emissions is a big problem, but so are plastics. Just because one produces more CO2 than the other doesn't mean we can't tackle both problems together. And the issue of plastics is not that of CO2. Plastics are useful - I agree. However they are overused not for their usefulness, but for convenience. Produce doesn't need to be wrapped in plastic in grocery stores. Restaurants need not use plastics for takeout orders. Iced drinks don't need to be contained in plastic cups, nor do they require straws. Plastic bags are absolutely unnecessary, and there are other alternatives that work just as well.
drb91 8y ago
You seem to simply prefer effectively permanent waste over energy use. Many do not.
vkou 8y ago
This is all well and good, in a country with clear garbage pickup schedules, where people put their plastic in their garbage bin, and a garbage truck comes to take it away into a landfill. Unfortunately, in countries with plastic pollution problems, there are a large number of externalities that your essay did not account for. Or, more specifically one large externality - when people are done using it, they throw it out. Until the garbage disposal situation gets resolved, it makes perfect sense to demonize and ban plastic. If you want plastic back, maybe this is an incentive to get garbage disposal fixed.
dahart 8y ago
> the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. You're comparing the transportation costs of cucumbers to the production costs of plastic wrap, this conflated comparison seems disingenuous to me. It also needs to be qualified that whatever truth is in that statement only applies to cucumbers that went to the grocery store and weren't sold. It's not true for cucumbers that dry up in the field where they grew. Fixing that problem has nothing to do with cucumbers and everything to do with making sales and transportation more efficient. > The plastic wrapper produced ~10g of CO2 and required ~100ml of water to produce; the steak produced ~7kg of CO2 and required ~4,000 litres of water to produce. I'm curious what water usage has to do with this? Water used to raise a cow gets to be used again, right? > As long as it is disposed of responsibly, a whole trash bag full of plastic packaging has a negligible environmental impact compared to a single portion of beef. Are you claiming that every kg of beef production releases more c02 than every kg of plastic production? How do you figure that?
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >You're comparing the transportation costs of cucumbers to the production costs of plastic wrap, this conflated comparison seems disingenuous to me. Cucumbers are wrapped in plastic to enhance their shelf life and reduce waste due to spoilage. If the environmental impact of the plastic is lower than the environmental impact of the cucumbers that would be lost due to spoilage, then it is a net environmental benefit. I have provided references to support this argument in another comment in this thread. I'm curious what water usage has to do with this? Water used to raise a cow gets to be used again, right? Water loops around endlessly through the water cycle, but clean water is a limited resource. The run-off water from cattle feedlots, grazing pastures or the fields used to grow cattle feed cannot be readily recaptured in a usable form; this run-off water will have polluting effects on aquatic life due to contamination with nitrates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology) >Are you claiming that every kg of beef production releases more CO2 than every kg of plastic production? How do you figure that? Yes. I found the figures in published reports. Producing a kilogram of polyethylene packaging film results in about 2.7kg of CO2 emissions, from refining the oil through to disposal. Producing a kilogram of beef results in about 39kg of CO2 equivalent emissions from farm to plate, made up partly from direct energy inputs and partly from the methane and nitrous oxide produced by the cattle, which are significantly more potent warming gases than CO2. http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-_Nov_2010_V101.f1571b4f.10324.pdf http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-... http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodology_ewg_meat_eaters_guide_to_health_and_climate_2011.pdf http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodolog...
inapis 8y ago
I see two problems with your argument. One - you are giving humans and plastic a lot of benefit of doubt. Time and again, it is demonstrated that human convenience trumps environmental concerns. So governments can have state-of-the-art recycling facilities but getting people to co-operate is an uphill challenge. Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal. The world is rapidly moving towards sustainable sources of energy and thus energy consumption is becoming less of a concern. Glass, cucumbers etc can be sustainably disposed off or recycled but plastic can't be - at least not all kinds currently in use/production. And the cucumber example is a little disingenuous. A lot of the cucumber product is fast moving and fly off the shelves rapidly. Number of cucumbers being actually consumed is >>> than the number of cucumbers being spoiled. But the environment has to deal with sum total of all the plastic used to wrap the cucumber - even those which were consumed rapidly and would have not been spoiled at all.
- jdietrich 8y ago
  >Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal. If you just burn the wrapper in your fireplace, it'll produce less than 6g of CO2. We're talking about the equivalent of half a teaspoon of gasoline. Growing and transporting a cucumber produces about 1kg of CO2. The wrapper is not the problem. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901104000991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110...
  - TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
    But we want the cucumber, and any leftover cucumber will decompose to nothing - it doesn't require any specialised waste processing. The 1kg of CO2 to grow and transport the cucumber is a spent cost, but half a teaspoon of gasoline for every single cucumber is an obscene environmental cost. The same argument applies to your steak - the environmental cost of the steak is irrelevant, because the steak is the product we want, and again, leftover steak disappears without trace in very short order. The issue is the packaging, which we don't want but hangs around for half a millenia if disposed of irresponsibly. The goal of this part of the initiative is to deal with that "last mile" problem of irresponsible waste processing, because we can't trust people to dispose of plastics properly. That will inevitably have a knock on effect on the rest of the supply chain, because now companies can't sell products which use single use plastics in that area, so they'll look at alternative ways of packaging their product. That might result in some products having shorter shelf lives, but those products don't require complex waste management practices - they just move to different levels of the food chain. The other environmental issues such as the transport cost are an entirely separate concern which aren't impacted by this move at all.
asenna 8y ago
> If you buy a beef steak wrapped in plastic, the problem is the steak, not the wrapper. Oh no worries about beef, they're definitely handling that problem in India well.
yongjik 8y ago
You can't compare CO2 and plastic wraps by weight, because the scale of the problem is very different. According to Wikipedia, mankind emitted 33.5 Gt of CO2 in the year 2010, and the surface area of the Earth is 510072000 km^2. In other words, we add 66g of CO2 per every square meter of the Earth, every year. Imagine an Earth where we add six ~10g plastic wraps per square meter, every year, in every corner of the world. It becomes clear that the reason plastic wraps are collectively a less serious problem is that there are much less of them in the first place, compared to CO2 emission. In other words, you cannot just compare a single piece of plastic wrap with an equal mass of CO2 and claim they are equivalent. You're comparing apples and oranges.
thecrazyone 8y ago
Amen, amen, amen. Plastic is good. Your (Govt's) inability to recycle plastic is the issue. No! the govt is going to blame someone and something else for its failures :sigh:

nafey 8y ago

> It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. Will need citation for that.

jdietrich 8y ago
Producing a cucumber results in CO2 emissions of about 1kg (3.3kg CO2 per kg product, avg weight ~300g). Shrink-wrapping a cucumber increases the average shelf life from 9 days to 15 days in refrigerated conditions and from 2 days to 5 days in ambient conditions. Producing a kilogram of polyethylene film packaging emits about 2.7kg of CO2. The wrapping on an average-sized cucumber weighs about 2g, producing an additional 5.4g of CO2 emissions and increasing the total carbon footprint of the cucumber by ~0.54%. About 12% of cucumbers delivered to US retailers go unsold due to damage, spoilage or other loss. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901104000991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550898/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3550898/ http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-_Nov_2010_V101.f1571b4f.10324.pdf http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-... http://www.mdpi.com:8080/2077-0472/5/3/626/pdf http://www.mdpi.com:8080/2077-0472/5/3/626/pdf
- ozborn 8y ago
  While carbon emissions are an important consideration, they are not only impact of plastic. Plastics often end up in the ocean where they cause havoc with not just marine marine life, but also people. It is not just about viewing unsightly plastic, but also ingestion of plastic and chemicals associated with plastic such as phthalates and endocrine disruptors. While spoilage is in issue, so are the various health problems associated with plastic. While there are too many unstudied plastic associated chemicals to quantify the impact, a number of them are clearly associated with cancer, obesity and infertility. This month's issue of National Geographic is devoted to the problem of plastic in the ocean and is worth a look.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    As brutal as it might seem, plastic pollution is not a high priority. It makes for some shocking and upsetting photos, but it's not a fundamental threat to the marine ecosystem. The sources of marine plastic pollution are non-obvious and can be mostly mitigated through better management of waste rather than elimination at source. Ocean acidification due to rising CO2 levels is a cataclysmic threat to the marine ecosystem. A relatively small decrease in pH could lead to the extinction of many key invertebrate species and the complete collapse of some habitats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification The health risks posed by plastics are marginal at worst. There are some legitimate concerns about certain persistent organic pollutants, but plastics are not the primary sources of exposure to these compounds and their use is largely under effective control.

efficax 8y ago

CO2 is only one environmental impact factor. Plastic waste is devastating for our oceans. Reducing plastic usage and CO2 should be twin goals.

jdietrich 8y ago
>Plastic waste is devastating for our oceans. CO2 is having a far more severe impact on the oceans through acidification. All of the world's major coral reefs have experienced severe bleaching events; the IPCC has predicted the complete collapse of many reef ecosystems if CO2 emissions are not brought under control. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_acidification
briandear 8y ago
Why not figure out why plastic ends up in the ocean and solve that problem? Motor oil in the oceans is far more dangerous than plastics, but no sane person is advocating banning lubricants. Instead laws and practices were developed to ensure used oil doesn’t end up in storm drains and water supplies.

Lunatic666 8y ago

That's all true, couple of years ago it made more sense to actually burn plastic waste, e.g. to use it to make steel than to recycle it. But the problem in India and China is that the plastic is dumped in the rivers and ends up in the food chain where we are all eating it later on. Steaks and glass bottles do no harm to the environment when just thrown away

titzer 8y ago

The environment is more than a single dimension. I'm not going to dispute your stats on individual items here--as far as CO2 goes, maybe you're right. But the oceans and landfills are filling up with non-biodegradable plastic garbage that is weakening ecosystems all over the planet. We need to get our waste pipeline under control at all stages, and plastic packaging is garbage for a long term plan. As evidence I cite every beach in the world. I'll take the spoiled cucumbers and milk; it's wasted energy, it contributes to ecological impact, but ultimately biodegradable.

briandear 8y ago
Landfill waste doesn’t generally end up in the oceans. Landfills aren’t the problem, it’s the bad management of waste, typically by countries that care more about basic survival than the effect of their trash on a whale. A villager in rural China doesn’t typically have the luxury of caring as much as some Instagraming Brooklynite. Creating better processes around waste management is going to have a much larger and predicatable effect than outright bans — which can have unintended consequences that the “smart people” fail to predict. Blanket bans on DDT are a good example, sounded good, until millions more people died of malaria. (I am not suggesting we continue or end the DDT ban, it’s just an example of the effect of a policy that was driven by emotion rather than a rigorous scientific process.) It’s possible that banning plastic could have unforeseen consequences that haven’t been considered by the simpletons that typically are charged with making government policy.

linkmotif 8y ago

> A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. But that is endemic to our insane food system. I think plastic wrapped cucumbers aren’t worth having. If you can’t survive without literally destroying the environment, at least let other animals enjoy Earth.

vfinn 8y ago

It's hardly demonizing without a reason. Sounds almost like a "it's not the guns, it's the bad people" argument, but here plastics will continue to create problems most importantly in the form of microplastics, no matter how you regulate. We continue polluting our waters and the food we eat, and the longer we continue, the more difficult it will be to restore the situation, so we need drastic actions. On top of the obvious (see the related pictures), we have phtalates for example, that we don't know much about.

nmcfarl 8y ago

So that last 'graph got me wondering, and knowing that there are basically no plastics recycled where I live, I looked up if cling film, or polystyrene (a typical steak wrapping) could be recycled in Seatlle, and the answer is no. In fact it looks like the answer is no most everywhere. And while cling film does degrade after decades, while polystyrene might take multiple 100,000s of years. Which means the problem might be the steak if the wrapper is disposed responsibly, disposing responsibly is the real problem, and likely impossible.

ceejayoz 8y ago
See if your grocery store's plastic bag recycling can take it. Cling film can't be recycled with glass/plastic/paper because it ties up the machines, but here in upstate NY you can put it in with grocery bags, ziplocks, and other thin plastics at the in-store drop-off. We started doing this as well as a composting service and it's remarkable how much emptier our trash bin is now - half the volume, easily.
- TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
  This exactly sums up the problem. It's no use being able to recycle everything if doing so requires everybody to sort their waste and take it to different places. Most people won't do that. If we remove single use bags and cling film (yes, cling film is going to be a tough one), you're no longer reliant on the consumer to responsibly manage their waste. There's a trade off. You're no longer sorting waste, and you're still generating less waste, but reduced shelf lives mean you now need to shop for fresh produce more often, potentially using more fuel and offsetting any gains. But you're no longer producing waste that takes centuries to decompose.
trothamel 8y ago
What's irresponsible about just landfilling it after it has served its purpose? You're taking a small amount of oil that started off underground, and then isolating it back under ground. The main problem appears to be with people who litter, and in areas that don't have a sanitation system to carry away and isolate garbage like this. Recycling plastic is nice, but the point of GP's post is that even without it, it has the potential to massively reduce waste.

dd36 8y ago

Cucumbers are more harmful than plastic?!? I stopped reading right there. One timely biodegrades, the other doesn’t. That’s the whole problem.

TylerE 8y ago
This is exactly the kind of tunnel vision that annoys me. Things take much more energy to PRODUCE than to dispose of. Agriculture is incredibly energy, land, and water intensive.
- state_less 8y ago
  We can and should do better. What if we had a robot that would drive through the fields, detecting weeds and crushing or cutting them out instead of chemical solutions? Couldn't we deliver the water more directly as well? Shouldn't transportation use battery powered vehicles instead of fossil fuel based vehicles? Can't we steam wash with renewable energy? Maybe it costs more to do some of these things now, but I think folks could use some good goals to work toward.
  - beauzero 8y ago
    On a happy note "no-till" is starting to prove itself. There are mixtures of effectiveness and chemical usage but checkout the No Till vids the USDA is promoting https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS https://www.youtube.com/user/TheUSDANRCS
- chicob 8y ago
  And plastic intensive as well. A single plantation of 1 ha of olive trees in super high-density mode uses around 1700 PE cups, 1700 PVC shoot protectors and 2,5 km of PVC drip irrigation tubes, not to mention the tying. Melon production also directly uses plastic, albeit temporarily. Greenhouses need repair and maintenance. Also worth of mention all the herbicide/fungicide/insecticide plastic containers. Only these last have an actual though-of destination for recycling, which is mandatory. These have to be washed and made unusable, to avoid accidents, which means forgetting about 2 out of 3 Rs in this case.

hannofcart 8y ago

> If you buy a beef steak ... ...but you won't. Not in India.

jdietrich 8y ago
That's the subject of a rather heated debate. India is religiously and ethnically diverse; a non-trivial proportion of secular Hindus do eat beef. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_slaughter_in_India

codeisawesome 8y ago

Energy appears to be obtainable sustainably (so a feeling manifests that it’s okay to waste it right now as long as we keep pedalling hard toward a clean solution ASAP). Plastic degradation appears to be a much harder problem. Also of course, helps that plastic garbage is “visible and ugly”, whereas climate change is abstract.

CarVac 8y ago
The issue with food waste is limited phosphorus supplies for fertilizer.
allendoerfer 8y ago
This is also my way of thinking. Don't worry about engergy, worry about waste and chemicals instead. Solve all problems through more and more green energy (recycling, reusing, cleaning etc.) and smarter and smarter robots (cleaning, separating, mechanical solutions instead of chemicals).

athenot 8y ago

While CO₂ emission is important, this is not primary reason for banning plastic bags. It's plastic in various states of (un)decomposition all over the ecosystem. A cucumber is 100% biodegradable with no solid residue. The plastic that wraps it will take a long time to decompose and is likely to be found clogging up some piece of nature—whether in the soil, affecting plants or obstructing some body function of an animal.

riantogo 8y ago
Based on jdietrich's input, it is then a waste processing problem and not a plastic problem. Tackling the symptom in this case seems net more harmful.
- dd36 8y ago
  By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical. Humans don't dispose of things properly. That's a fact. Creating more plastic waste will create more plastic pollution. It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste. Again, producers don't plastic wrap cucumbers to save CO2. The entire premise is ridiculous. Charge producers for the waste their products create. That will incentivize less waste. Charge them for the CO2 they emit. That will incentivize a reduction in CO2. You can accomplish both with market signals.
  - jdietrich 8y ago
    >By his logic, we should plastic wrap every vegetable and fruit. That is nonsensical. Not at all. Cucumbers have a relatively short shelf-life due to a high water content and a permeable skin, so wrapping them makes economic and environmental sense. Apples and citrus fruits don't need plastic packaging, but their shelf life is considerably enhanced by the application of a protective wax coating. Some products like loose salad leaves need modified atmosphere packaging to achieve a satisfactory shelf life, while delicate soft fruits require a protective packaging system that could involve a variety of wood- or plastic-based products. I'm indifferent to points of principle, I care about choosing the most sustainable tool for any given task. The critical environmental issue in our fruit and vegetable supply is the needlessly high use of air freight to maintain supplies of out-of-season produce. A single package of asparagus or green beans might produce emissions of >10kg CO2e, simply because of their transport mode. If you want to reduce the sustainability of your produce consumption, that one issue overwhelms pretty much everything else. >It's far easier to not create the waste in the first place. And there are ways to reduce CO2 that don't involve creating exponentially more plastic waste. You're trading one kind of waste for another. Plastic packaging is wasteful in one sense because it is disposable, but it reduces a potentially far greater waste by protecting products during transportation and storage. Plastic isn't always the most sustainable packaging material, but it often is. That decision needs to be made based on hard facts, not the presumption that plastic is evil. >Charge producers for the waste their products create. That will incentivize less waste. Charge them for the CO2 they emit. That will incentivize a reduction in CO2. I'm fully in favour of both, as long as those charges represent the actual economic impacts of mitigating those issues.

scotchmi_st 8y ago

This is a really great point that deserves to be it's own comment, rather than a reply to another. The two greatest challenges facing us in the next few years are climate change and water usage. Plastic is an issue, but it's not a life-or-death-for-the-species problem. We can figure plastic out later. We already are discovering bacteria and other organisms that can digest plastics. It seems to me we have a kind of liberal guilt when it comes to plastic production. As if we're defiling this green and pleasant land with something alien to the universe. We're almost certainly not producing anything that hasn't already existed. We should stop acting like we are. (The same goes for nuclear waste.) As long as plastics are disposed responsibly in ways that don't damage plants and animals, what's the issue?

state_less 8y ago
> As long as plastics are disposed responsibly in ways that don't damage plants and animals, what's the issue? Please don't discount one of the biggest issues though. I've told folks their plastic bottle is about to blow away (overlooking lands end, right over the ocean). The person picks it up, walks a bit further up the trail and throw it in the bushes. I've had folks throw their cigarette butt on the side of the road on Independence pass. I asked them to pick it up, and they noodled around at the ground with their foot as if to find it, then hop in their car and take off. We should design for some irresponsibility and more so in places where there isn't much environmental consciousness.
- scotchmi_st 8y ago
  You're referring to anecdotes. Maybe the sort of behaviour is widespread, but even if it is, you then need to prove it's having much of an impact on the environment, and even then it's a drop in the ocean compared with the damage done via climate change and water consumption. We need to get out of our parochial ideas about waste. Plastics are aesthetically bad, but other forces are quantitatively way worse.
  - state_less 8y ago
    It probably won't come as a big surprise that I also would like to address the larger forces as well. That doesn't mean that we can't also want to address the garbage that is littering our oceans.

ryanianian 8y ago

The decision to use glass as the de-facto re-usable container medium has always driven me nuts. I think the "marketing" is that it's slightly "harder" (mentally) to throw away a nice glass bottle than it is a plastic container because we've been so conditioned to throw out the plastic ones. I've long wondered why retailers don't offer a "refill" option for items like milk and liquid cleaning products. The bottles for laundry detergent in particular are usually thick plastic that rightfully could serve their purpose for a very long time. The store could have a big tank of the stuff and consumers can bring the re-usable bottle in for a refill at a worthwhile discount. Similar to what some retailers do with water and those re-fillable 5-gallon jugs. Perhaps the economics don't favor this for other products, but it seems like banning plastic in favor of heavier and less-re-usable options is just political hype without real examination, as you point out.

Slippery_John 8y ago
Some detergent makers actually do sell refill bags that use far less plastic. There's also been a resurgence of milkmen in London and some other places, where you leave out your empty bottles and get a refill. While there aren't milkpeople where I live, there are a few places where I can pay a deposit on a glass bottle and then exchange it for a full bottle whenever I need. It's not widespread by any means, but it is happening.
- ryanianian 8y ago
  The re-usable detergent bags are nice, and many countries do distribute milk in thin plastic bags that you then empty into a pitcher at home. But as parent points out, exchanging glass bottles isn't really better for the environment (in terms of CO2) as compared to properly disposing of plastic. No real reason why those deposit+refill bottles need to be glass; they could just as well be quality plastic and reduce some transport-weight. Similarly having a guy driving a truck around to deliver heavy liquids seems inefficient when you could just as well bring all your plastic bottle back to the store at one time and refill from big tanks there.
  - 8y ago

rmk 8y ago

This is the type of comment that keeps me coming back to hacker news! Where did you get this information? Books? Care to share recommendations?

jdietrich 8y ago
If you only read one book on the subject, read Dr David MacKay's Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air. It clearly explains how we use energy, how we produce it and how we can sustainably match supply and demand. It gave me an intuitive understanding of energy, using quick order-of-magnitude calculations to figure out the really important issues. It's written from a British perspective, but the principles are universally applicable. Best of all, it's completely free to read online. https://www.withouthotair.com/ https://www.withouthotair.com/ I'd also highly recommend Factfulness by Hans Rosling. It reveals that most Westerners have a grossly distorted and irrationally pessimistic image of the world. It's not really about energy or environmentalism, but it fills a vital gap in our common understanding of the future - the immense, unstoppable rise of the global middle-class. Once you internalise the idea that there is no great divide between the "first world" and the "third world", everything else looks very different. A majority of the world's population are neither very poor nor very rich, which presents a completely different set of challenges with respect to sustainable energy and climate change. https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/ https://www.gapminder.org/factfulness-book/ My other recommendation would be to make good use of Google Scholar and SciHub. A large proportion "debates" I see aren't really debates at all, because the key points being argued are incorrect or irrelevant. Scientific research doesn't necessarily give us answers, but it can stop us from arguing over stupid questions.

jt2190 8y ago

Would you mind providing some links to these biodegradeable plastics? The last time I checked bio-degradeable plastic was nothing more than a marketing sleight of hand: Essentially just micro plastic bound together with something biodegradeable like corn starch. The plastic still enters the environment, skips the part where it breaks down from large pieces to tiny ones, yet still contaminates the enviroment.

snambi 8y ago

What an awesome logic... Plastic is better than organic stuff.

hw 8y ago

"A lot of people bemoan the plastic wrapping on cucumbers, but that wrapping doubles the shelf life of the product. It's a net win, because the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping." A gram or two, multiplied by millions of cucumbers and other food products wrapped in plastic. We produce more than we need to consume. Grocery stores are buying more produce and wasting more, and farmers are growing more. CO2 emissions is a big problem, but so are plastics. Just because one produces more CO2 than the other doesn't mean we can't tackle both problems together. And the issue of plastics is not that of CO2. Plastics are useful - I agree. However they are overused not for their usefulness, but for convenience. Produce doesn't need to be wrapped in plastic in grocery stores. Restaurants need not use plastics for takeout orders. Iced drinks don't need to be contained in plastic cups, nor do they require straws. Plastic bags are absolutely unnecessary, and there are other alternatives that work just as well.

drb91 8y ago

You seem to simply prefer effectively permanent waste over energy use. Many do not.

vkou 8y ago

This is all well and good, in a country with clear garbage pickup schedules, where people put their plastic in their garbage bin, and a garbage truck comes to take it away into a landfill. Unfortunately, in countries with plastic pollution problems, there are a large number of externalities that your essay did not account for. Or, more specifically one large externality - when people are done using it, they throw it out. Until the garbage disposal situation gets resolved, it makes perfect sense to demonize and ban plastic. If you want plastic back, maybe this is an incentive to get garbage disposal fixed.

dahart 8y ago

> the environmental impact of wasted cucumbers is far greater than the environmental impact of a gram or two of polyethylene wrapping. You're comparing the transportation costs of cucumbers to the production costs of plastic wrap, this conflated comparison seems disingenuous to me. It also needs to be qualified that whatever truth is in that statement only applies to cucumbers that went to the grocery store and weren't sold. It's not true for cucumbers that dry up in the field where they grew. Fixing that problem has nothing to do with cucumbers and everything to do with making sales and transportation more efficient. > The plastic wrapper produced ~10g of CO2 and required ~100ml of water to produce; the steak produced ~7kg of CO2 and required ~4,000 litres of water to produce. I'm curious what water usage has to do with this? Water used to raise a cow gets to be used again, right? > As long as it is disposed of responsibly, a whole trash bag full of plastic packaging has a negligible environmental impact compared to a single portion of beef. Are you claiming that every kg of beef production releases more c02 than every kg of plastic production? How do you figure that?

jdietrich 8y ago
>You're comparing the transportation costs of cucumbers to the production costs of plastic wrap, this conflated comparison seems disingenuous to me. Cucumbers are wrapped in plastic to enhance their shelf life and reduce waste due to spoilage. If the environmental impact of the plastic is lower than the environmental impact of the cucumbers that would be lost due to spoilage, then it is a net environmental benefit. I have provided references to support this argument in another comment in this thread. I'm curious what water usage has to do with this? Water used to raise a cow gets to be used again, right? Water loops around endlessly through the water cycle, but clean water is a limited resource. The run-off water from cattle feedlots, grazing pastures or the fields used to grow cattle feed cannot be readily recaptured in a usable form; this run-off water will have polluting effects on aquatic life due to contamination with nitrates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_zone_(ecology) >Are you claiming that every kg of beef production releases more CO2 than every kg of plastic production? How do you figure that? Yes. I found the figures in published reports. Producing a kilogram of polyethylene packaging film results in about 2.7kg of CO2 emissions, from refining the oil through to disposal. Producing a kilogram of beef results in about 39kg of CO2 equivalent emissions from farm to plate, made up partly from direct energy inputs and partly from the methane and nitrous oxide produced by the cattle, which are significantly more potent warming gases than CO2. http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-_Nov_2010_V101.f1571b4f.10324.pdf http://www.wrap.org.uk/sites/files/wrap/Carbon_Methodology_-... http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodology_ewg_meat_eaters_guide_to_health_and_climate_2011.pdf http://static.ewg.org/reports/2011/meateaters/pdf/methodolog...

inapis 8y ago

I see two problems with your argument. One - you are giving humans and plastic a lot of benefit of doubt. Time and again, it is demonstrated that human convenience trumps environmental concerns. So governments can have state-of-the-art recycling facilities but getting people to co-operate is an uphill challenge. Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal. The world is rapidly moving towards sustainable sources of energy and thus energy consumption is becoming less of a concern. Glass, cucumbers etc can be sustainably disposed off or recycled but plastic can't be - at least not all kinds currently in use/production. And the cucumber example is a little disingenuous. A lot of the cucumber product is fast moving and fly off the shelves rapidly. Number of cucumbers being actually consumed is >>> than the number of cucumbers being spoiled. But the environment has to deal with sum total of all the plastic used to wrap the cucumber - even those which were consumed rapidly and would have not been spoiled at all.

jdietrich 8y ago
>Second - the nature of plastic itself. You are basing sustainability on cost to environment in production but not taking into account the cost of disposal. If you just burn the wrapper in your fireplace, it'll produce less than 6g of CO2. We're talking about the equivalent of half a teaspoon of gasoline. Growing and transporting a cucumber produces about 1kg of CO2. The wrapper is not the problem. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1462901104000991 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146290110...
- TheGrumpyBrit 8y ago
  But we want the cucumber, and any leftover cucumber will decompose to nothing - it doesn't require any specialised waste processing. The 1kg of CO2 to grow and transport the cucumber is a spent cost, but half a teaspoon of gasoline for every single cucumber is an obscene environmental cost. The same argument applies to your steak - the environmental cost of the steak is irrelevant, because the steak is the product we want, and again, leftover steak disappears without trace in very short order. The issue is the packaging, which we don't want but hangs around for half a millenia if disposed of irresponsibly. The goal of this part of the initiative is to deal with that "last mile" problem of irresponsible waste processing, because we can't trust people to dispose of plastics properly. That will inevitably have a knock on effect on the rest of the supply chain, because now companies can't sell products which use single use plastics in that area, so they'll look at alternative ways of packaging their product. That might result in some products having shorter shelf lives, but those products don't require complex waste management practices - they just move to different levels of the food chain. The other environmental issues such as the transport cost are an entirely separate concern which aren't impacted by this move at all.

asenna 8y ago

> If you buy a beef steak wrapped in plastic, the problem is the steak, not the wrapper. Oh no worries about beef, they're definitely handling that problem in India well.

yongjik 8y ago

You can't compare CO2 and plastic wraps by weight, because the scale of the problem is very different. According to Wikipedia, mankind emitted 33.5 Gt of CO2 in the year 2010, and the surface area of the Earth is 510072000 km^2. In other words, we add 66g of CO2 per every square meter of the Earth, every year. Imagine an Earth where we add six ~10g plastic wraps per square meter, every year, in every corner of the world. It becomes clear that the reason plastic wraps are collectively a less serious problem is that there are much less of them in the first place, compared to CO2 emission. In other words, you cannot just compare a single piece of plastic wrap with an equal mass of CO2 and claim they are equivalent. You're comparing apples and oranges.

thecrazyone 8y ago

Amen, amen, amen. Plastic is good. Your (Govt's) inability to recycle plastic is the issue. No! the govt is going to blame someone and something else for its failures :sigh: