7 ms·

2018 statistic of the year: Plastic waste fact tops list

45 points by carlosgg 8y ago

Waterluvian 8y ago
Wow the stat about Russia shocked me. So I looked it up [1]. Some rough reference points for men living to 65: Canada is 88%. U.S. is 82%. Russia is 57%. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?view=chart https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?view=...
- eloff 8y ago
  Fascinating page. That's unchanged from the 1960's stats. I'm really curious what causes that (or what people think causes that.) It looks similar for a lot of the old USSR countries with strong ties to Russia - but that could be either genetics or culture/lifestyle or both.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
    I hear alcohol addiction is rampant. Wikipedia about alcohol consumption in Russia[1]: > High volumes of alcohol consumption have serious negative effects on Russia's social fabric and bring political, economic and public health ramifications. Alcoholism has been a problem throughout the country's history because drinking is a pervasive, socially acceptable behaviour in Russian society and alcohol has also been a major source of government revenue for centuries. It has repeatedly been targeted as a major national problem, with mixed results. Alcoholism in Russia has according to some authors acquired a character of a national disaster and has the scale of a humanitarian catastrophe. Wikipedia mentions a study in chapter Impact, Demographic: > A study by Russian, British and French researchers published in The Lancet scrutinized deaths between 1990 and 2001 of residents of three Siberian industrial towns with typical mortality rates and determined that 52% of deaths of people between the ages of 15 and 54 were the result of alcohol abuse. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_in_Russi...
    - onetimemanytime 8y ago
      Other things aside, could cold /not "pleasant" weather cause people to drink more?
      - Waterluvian 8y ago
        Iceland, Sweden, Norway, etc. All make it into the high 80s on that site. So do other cold regions. I doubt their alcoholism is as troublesome.
        swebs 8y ago
        Swedish alcohol taxes are so high that its impossible to be alcoholic unless you're well off. It's a pretty big problem in Finland with a 30% alcoholism rate. Finnish alcohol taxes are somewhat high as well, but many people in Helsinki bypass that by buying from Estonia. https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_unacknowledged_problem_alcoholism/9062483 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_unacknowledged_p... https://nordic.businessinsider.com/alcoholism-finland-2016-8/ https://nordic.businessinsider.com/alcoholism-finland-2016-8...
      - vkou 8y ago
        It's not the weather, it's your life prospects. If you're living in developed, cosmopolitan, prosperous Moscow[1], it's one thing. If you're living in a small, dying, de-industrialized Soviet-era town in the middle of nowhere, your life probably sucks, your local government is incredibly corrupt, your future economic prospects are non-existent, but a bottle of vodka costs $3 USD, and will make you happy for an hour. [1] Average life expectancy in Moscow? 77 years (The US is at 79). Average life expectancy in Russia? 71 years.
- adamnemecek 8y ago
  There's a rumor that Russian government subsidizes vodka production so that they don't have to pay pensions.
FooHentai 8y ago
Why is plastic pyrolysis not being employed to recycle on a massive scale? Seems all that is needed is to site them near oil refineries, and you have a clean, self-powering means of recycling plastic into oil/fuel.
- ars 8y ago
  It's because we insist on recycling glass, requiring it to be separated, which is expensive: Glass is heavy, worthless, and breaks into tiny shards. If we removed glass from recycling then you could have two streams: Metal, and burn. Where we would burn paper and plastic for their energy, requiring less energy to be extracted from the ground.
maxxxxx 8y ago
When I read something like this I really wish the people who use all their smarts for selling more ads to sell more crap would instead work on figuring out trash separation and recycling. It's a very interesting problem: Recognizing different items, handle it, and recycle it. It has it all: AI, computer vision, robotics. It would make the world a much better place.
- lucisferre 8y ago
  Might not be a lot of aptitude overlap between those two problems.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    What do you mean? No single person can solve it all. It's not like there is one guy who creates all of google's tech. You need many people with different skills.
- mc32 8y ago
  Isn’t most of the issue a lack of profitability in recycling rather than a problem in sorting? In other words more efficient sorting won't result in more recycling unless recycling becomes worthwhile (profitable). One way to make it “profitable” would be to put exorbitant taxes on virgin plastics or petroleum derived plastics.
  - tryptophan 8y ago
    Or a carbon tax! Recycling presumably puts much less new CO2 into their air than making it new, and so would incentivize recycling more.
    - ars 8y ago
      > Recycling presumably puts much less new CO2 into their air than making it new I'm pretty sure it doesn't. If it did recycled products would be cheaper than new, but they aren't. It depends a lot on how much free labor AKA consumer pre-sorting you get though. Countries where this is seen as normal and expected have workable recycling.
Reedx 8y ago
There's also the fact that it often gets shipped very long distances. It'd be helpful if we placed much more emphasis on reduce and reuse, so there's less in the first place. Patagonia is a good example of a company doing this, but an all too rare one.
andrewstuart 8y ago
That's because "recycling" is just the packaging industries way of avoiding blame for manufacturing infinite garbage. One day the world might realise that we live in an infinite garbage world because we pay the packaging industry to make infinite garbage. Recycling is not meant to work, it's meant to keep attention away from the packaging industries role in destroying our beautiful planet. It's all about the money. The solution isn't to clean up/recycle the garbage - it's to stop making it. Turn off the tap. It's like the sugar industry - for decades everyone thought that obesity was caused by fat in food and the solution was to eat less fatty food and to lose weight by exercise. This suited the sugar industry extremely well because it turns out that obesity is caused mainly by sugar, but they no doubt big sugar was very happy that everyone was pointing the finger at fat as the problem and exercise as the solution - that lets the sugar industry off the hook very nicely. The packaging industry must laugh behind its hands at all the people trying to recycle and clean up all the garbage that it makes, when the real solution - which no-one currently proposes - is just to stop manufacturing garbage in the first place. Everyone is focused on how to deal with the garbage - there's no problem to deal with if you stop making it. If you read all the comments in this thread you'll see how the number one focus of most people is to work out how to handle the packaging - there's no questioning at all of why it exists.
- __blockcipher__ 8y ago
  This is a great point. I’ve been told that in my local area you can’t even recycle thin film plastics. Which is probably at least half my plastic waste if not way more since I don’t buy disposable water bottles...

45 points by carlosgg 8y ago

Wow the stat about Russia shocked me. So I looked it up [1]. Some rough reference points for men living to 65: Canada is 88%. U.S. is 82%. Russia is 57%. [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?view=chart https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TO65.MA.ZS?view=...

eloff 8y ago
Fascinating page. That's unchanged from the 1960's stats. I'm really curious what causes that (or what people think causes that.) It looks similar for a lot of the old USSR countries with strong ties to Russia - but that could be either genetics or culture/lifestyle or both.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 8y ago
  I hear alcohol addiction is rampant. Wikipedia about alcohol consumption in Russia[1]: > High volumes of alcohol consumption have serious negative effects on Russia's social fabric and bring political, economic and public health ramifications. Alcoholism has been a problem throughout the country's history because drinking is a pervasive, socially acceptable behaviour in Russian society and alcohol has also been a major source of government revenue for centuries. It has repeatedly been targeted as a major national problem, with mixed results. Alcoholism in Russia has according to some authors acquired a character of a national disaster and has the scale of a humanitarian catastrophe. Wikipedia mentions a study in chapter Impact, Demographic: > A study by Russian, British and French researchers published in The Lancet scrutinized deaths between 1990 and 2001 of residents of three Siberian industrial towns with typical mortality rates and determined that 52% of deaths of people between the ages of 15 and 54 were the result of alcohol abuse. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_consumption_in_Russi...
  - onetimemanytime 8y ago
    Other things aside, could cold /not "pleasant" weather cause people to drink more?
    - Waterluvian 8y ago
      Iceland, Sweden, Norway, etc. All make it into the high 80s on that site. So do other cold regions. I doubt their alcoholism is as troublesome.
      - swebs 8y ago
        Swedish alcohol taxes are so high that its impossible to be alcoholic unless you're well off. It's a pretty big problem in Finland with a 30% alcoholism rate. Finnish alcohol taxes are somewhat high as well, but many people in Helsinki bypass that by buying from Estonia. https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_unacknowledged_problem_alcoholism/9062483 https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/finlands_unacknowledged_p... https://nordic.businessinsider.com/alcoholism-finland-2016-8/ https://nordic.businessinsider.com/alcoholism-finland-2016-8...
    - vkou 8y ago
      It's not the weather, it's your life prospects. If you're living in developed, cosmopolitan, prosperous Moscow[1], it's one thing. If you're living in a small, dying, de-industrialized Soviet-era town in the middle of nowhere, your life probably sucks, your local government is incredibly corrupt, your future economic prospects are non-existent, but a bottle of vodka costs $3 USD, and will make you happy for an hour. [1] Average life expectancy in Moscow? 77 years (The US is at 79). Average life expectancy in Russia? 71 years.
adamnemecek 8y ago
There's a rumor that Russian government subsidizes vodka production so that they don't have to pay pensions.

FooHentai 8y ago

Why is plastic pyrolysis not being employed to recycle on a massive scale? Seems all that is needed is to site them near oil refineries, and you have a clean, self-powering means of recycling plastic into oil/fuel.

ars 8y ago
It's because we insist on recycling glass, requiring it to be separated, which is expensive: Glass is heavy, worthless, and breaks into tiny shards. If we removed glass from recycling then you could have two streams: Metal, and burn. Where we would burn paper and plastic for their energy, requiring less energy to be extracted from the ground.

maxxxxx 8y ago

When I read something like this I really wish the people who use all their smarts for selling more ads to sell more crap would instead work on figuring out trash separation and recycling. It's a very interesting problem: Recognizing different items, handle it, and recycle it. It has it all: AI, computer vision, robotics. It would make the world a much better place.

lucisferre 8y ago
Might not be a lot of aptitude overlap between those two problems.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  What do you mean? No single person can solve it all. It's not like there is one guy who creates all of google's tech. You need many people with different skills.
mc32 8y ago
Isn’t most of the issue a lack of profitability in recycling rather than a problem in sorting? In other words more efficient sorting won't result in more recycling unless recycling becomes worthwhile (profitable). One way to make it “profitable” would be to put exorbitant taxes on virgin plastics or petroleum derived plastics.
- tryptophan 8y ago
  Or a carbon tax! Recycling presumably puts much less new CO2 into their air than making it new, and so would incentivize recycling more.
  - ars 8y ago
    > Recycling presumably puts much less new CO2 into their air than making it new I'm pretty sure it doesn't. If it did recycled products would be cheaper than new, but they aren't. It depends a lot on how much free labor AKA consumer pre-sorting you get though. Countries where this is seen as normal and expected have workable recycling.

Reedx 8y ago

There's also the fact that it often gets shipped very long distances. It'd be helpful if we placed much more emphasis on reduce and reuse, so there's less in the first place. Patagonia is a good example of a company doing this, but an all too rare one.

andrewstuart 8y ago

That's because "recycling" is just the packaging industries way of avoiding blame for manufacturing infinite garbage. One day the world might realise that we live in an infinite garbage world because we pay the packaging industry to make infinite garbage. Recycling is not meant to work, it's meant to keep attention away from the packaging industries role in destroying our beautiful planet. It's all about the money. The solution isn't to clean up/recycle the garbage - it's to stop making it. Turn off the tap. It's like the sugar industry - for decades everyone thought that obesity was caused by fat in food and the solution was to eat less fatty food and to lose weight by exercise. This suited the sugar industry extremely well because it turns out that obesity is caused mainly by sugar, but they no doubt big sugar was very happy that everyone was pointing the finger at fat as the problem and exercise as the solution - that lets the sugar industry off the hook very nicely. The packaging industry must laugh behind its hands at all the people trying to recycle and clean up all the garbage that it makes, when the real solution - which no-one currently proposes - is just to stop manufacturing garbage in the first place. Everyone is focused on how to deal with the garbage - there's no problem to deal with if you stop making it. If you read all the comments in this thread you'll see how the number one focus of most people is to work out how to handle the packaging - there's no questioning at all of why it exists.

__blockcipher__ 8y ago
This is a great point. I’ve been told that in my local area you can’t even recycle thin film plastics. Which is probably at least half my plastic waste if not way more since I don’t buy disposable water bottles...