10 ms·

Why no plastic bottles as well? The vast majority of plastic I use is from bottles.

Brakenshire 8y ago
Probably because there is a health implication there, the possibility that people could get dehydrated and not have easy access to bottled water.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  There are also substantial health implications to eliminating plastic cutlery, cups, etc. We may be largely oblivious to it now and we may fail to see the connection between the cutlery going and an uptick in illnesses after the change. The California bag ban slightly preceded the uptick in "medieval diseases" in California, which has since spread from Southern California to other cities (possibly by homeless people leaving California and taking their diseases with them). The uptick in such infections is generally traced to lack of sanitation among the homeless, but the idea that the bag ban is an element tends to get dismissed because "we can't prove it, man!" basically. I was still in California and still homeless when the bag ban was instituted. Following the ban, my sons and I saw more homeless people digging through trash cans, probably for free bags they could use for various purposes. I never did it, but some homeless people use plastic bags as a toilet substitute. They poop in a bag and take it to the nearest trash can rather than poop on the sidewalk. If you are digging bags out of a trash can to have a bag to poop in because you no longer have ready access to free new ones and 10 cents per bag is a financial hardship for you, well, it shouldn't shock anyone that there is an uptick in disease. But no one actually wants to believe that or take that possibility seriously since no official health organization has announced that this is an issue. Meanwhile, I have seen articles that suggest the CDC is actively downplaying the uptick in diseases like hepatitis. They aren't aggressively issuing public health warnings and putting this into the news. It's been slow to get press and the problem gets downplayed as largely an issue for homeless people. From what I have read, a lot of antibiotic resistant infections are bred in third world countries with poor plumbing and the like, then inadvertently exported via travelers. But, hey, the US and Europe can both readily get in on the action by banning all the disposable items that help make modern life less dangerous than life in a third world country. Let's go with that plan. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases-flare-as-unsanitary-living-conditions-proliferate/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases...
  - happymellon 8y ago
    So the solution is public hygiene, like public toilets being available. Not handing out plastic bags to poop in, wrapping poop in plastic is the worst option.
    - DoreenMichele 8y ago
      I would love to see more public bathrooms that are well maintained and genuinely accessible to the homeless. The public library is often the only obvious source for a public bathroom available to absolutely anyone and homeless people are frequently asked to leave the library for various reasons and sometimes banned from it. But way to go to completely miss the point. Disposable plastic bags have myriad other uses, such as carting trash away from your camp or even carrying some of your possessions when you can't currently afford a new bag and your last one broke or whatever. Pooping in plastic bags in just one use that homeless people have for free plastic bags routinely acquired every time they purchase something. Every time you eliminate one more free resource from the lives of the poorest of the poor, it winds up being a hardship with myriad consequences.
      - jacobolus 8y ago
        If people need certain necessities to live, the way to help them best is not to provide them a random assortment of free (subsidized) materials without consideration of the negative side effects of the subsidy, but to directly give them money.
        DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I keep hearing that. It strikes me as a way to decide now to screw people over on this specific detail on the theory that, someday, there will be UBI and everything will work just fine. Someday never seems to come on such promises. I was openly homeless on Hacker News for 5.7 years. Plenty of people here are UBI proponents who argued that I of all people should also be a UBI proponent due to my poverty. Such people were not throwing money at me. I'm old an cynical. If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come. A lot of people on HN make quite good money and routinely espouse a lot of high-minded ideals. You would think of all places, this would be one where someone trying in earnest to make their life work via some kind of online income would most find help to readily solve their financial problems and stop being desperately poor. I'm no longer homeless, but I still live on under $20k annually. I get treated like a whiner with no real point for using myself as an example in these discussions. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they usually aren't. I'm incredibly skeptical of such arguments. People on HN expect good, well-written content on the front page of HN all day, every day. They aggressively use ad blockers, actively find ways around pay walls and routinely tell me that writing doesn't deserve to make money and I should get a real job. Writing is something I am capable of doing, in spite of my handicaps. I have six years of college and I know a lot of stuff and I can be on a computer at home and write. If well-heeled, high-minded people who regularly come together in large numbers on HN can't be arsed to help me stop being poor, then it seems really extremely unlikely to me that the poor will ever get anything like UBI. I'm not for UBI. I don't think it works. But, moreover, I don't think it will really happen. I think talk of UBI is like when so-called friends tell you that if they win the lottery, they will give you half of it. In reality, that's typically a lie. It's an easy thing to say because winning the lottery is so very unlikely. People actually willing to help are willing to do whatever they can in the here and now, no matter how small. But most of what I hear is promises of someday while I continue to flail and most people react to my flailing by making me feel like I am doing something wrong. I'm an embarrassment. I'm doing something socially inappropriate. Perhaps I shall just go away at some point and leave HN to the well-heeled, high-minded types who like to talk a good game and do nothing. Then I won't be actively making them look like the hypocrites they so obviously are in most cases. I'm tired and trying to do some paid work. If I don't return to this discussion, everyone here can just assume that's why.
- fileeditview 8y ago
  I remember a time when (almost) all bottled water was in glass bottles.. didn't seem to be a problem back then and everyone seemed hydrated. I also remember when the plastic bottles were hyped because they were so much easier to carry.. not sure it was worth it.
  - organsnyder 8y ago
    Glass is often harder to recycle than plastic. Our county's single-stream facility recycles glass into construction fill. We really need to get back to reusing bottles rather than trying to recycle them.
- ddebernardy 8y ago
  Once upon a time, cities offered potable water every here and there. The problem is that as these watering holes become rarer and rarer, locals sometimes push for the remaining ones to get shut down citing nuisances [0]. [0]: https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/a-nice-une-fontaine-deau-coupee-pour-eloigner-les-sdf_84611/ https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/a-nice-une-fontaine... (French)
KevinS626 8y ago
Coke and Pepsi would sooner nuke the EU then allow for plastic bottles to be eliminated. I'm sure between the two of them they produce most of the plastic waste in the world but I'm glad governments are attacking low hanging fruit instead.
- mips_avatar 8y ago
  In Norway all bottled beverages come in refillable plastic bottles. They’re basically the same as normal bottles but a bit thicker. You pay about 50 cents for the bottle, and every grocery store has a little machine where you return the bottles and get a refund. The whole system works pretty well. I wish the US had something similar.
  - jnurmine 8y ago
    Same in Finland and Sweden. Aluminium cans are recycled too, and most glass bottles. As a side note, where I live all waste is sorted (mixed, plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, clear glass, colored glass, biowaste, batteries, lamps...). All this might seem like a a waste of money but it is actually beneficial: the municipality creates biogas from biowaste and runs the city buses with it. They produced so much gas that they sold it to neighbouring municipalities at least a few years back.

Probably because there is a health implication there, the possibility that people could get dehydrated and not have easy access to bottled water.

DoreenMichele 8y ago
There are also substantial health implications to eliminating plastic cutlery, cups, etc. We may be largely oblivious to it now and we may fail to see the connection between the cutlery going and an uptick in illnesses after the change. The California bag ban slightly preceded the uptick in "medieval diseases" in California, which has since spread from Southern California to other cities (possibly by homeless people leaving California and taking their diseases with them). The uptick in such infections is generally traced to lack of sanitation among the homeless, but the idea that the bag ban is an element tends to get dismissed because "we can't prove it, man!" basically. I was still in California and still homeless when the bag ban was instituted. Following the ban, my sons and I saw more homeless people digging through trash cans, probably for free bags they could use for various purposes. I never did it, but some homeless people use plastic bags as a toilet substitute. They poop in a bag and take it to the nearest trash can rather than poop on the sidewalk. If you are digging bags out of a trash can to have a bag to poop in because you no longer have ready access to free new ones and 10 cents per bag is a financial hardship for you, well, it shouldn't shock anyone that there is an uptick in disease. But no one actually wants to believe that or take that possibility seriously since no official health organization has announced that this is an issue. Meanwhile, I have seen articles that suggest the CDC is actively downplaying the uptick in diseases like hepatitis. They aren't aggressively issuing public health warnings and putting this into the news. It's been slow to get press and the problem gets downplayed as largely an issue for homeless people. From what I have read, a lot of antibiotic resistant infections are bred in third world countries with poor plumbing and the like, then inadvertently exported via travelers. But, hey, the US and Europe can both readily get in on the action by banning all the disposable items that help make modern life less dangerous than life in a third world country. Let's go with that plan. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases-flare-as-unsanitary-living-conditions-proliferate/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/medieval-diseases...
- happymellon 8y ago
  So the solution is public hygiene, like public toilets being available. Not handing out plastic bags to poop in, wrapping poop in plastic is the worst option.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I would love to see more public bathrooms that are well maintained and genuinely accessible to the homeless. The public library is often the only obvious source for a public bathroom available to absolutely anyone and homeless people are frequently asked to leave the library for various reasons and sometimes banned from it. But way to go to completely miss the point. Disposable plastic bags have myriad other uses, such as carting trash away from your camp or even carrying some of your possessions when you can't currently afford a new bag and your last one broke or whatever. Pooping in plastic bags in just one use that homeless people have for free plastic bags routinely acquired every time they purchase something. Every time you eliminate one more free resource from the lives of the poorest of the poor, it winds up being a hardship with myriad consequences.
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      If people need certain necessities to live, the way to help them best is not to provide them a random assortment of free (subsidized) materials without consideration of the negative side effects of the subsidy, but to directly give them money.
      - DoreenMichele 8y ago
        I keep hearing that. It strikes me as a way to decide now to screw people over on this specific detail on the theory that, someday, there will be UBI and everything will work just fine. Someday never seems to come on such promises. I was openly homeless on Hacker News for 5.7 years. Plenty of people here are UBI proponents who argued that I of all people should also be a UBI proponent due to my poverty. Such people were not throwing money at me. I'm old an cynical. If you aren't willing to open your wallet right here, right now and help out poor people you personally know, I am skeptical that "someday" will ever come. A lot of people on HN make quite good money and routinely espouse a lot of high-minded ideals. You would think of all places, this would be one where someone trying in earnest to make their life work via some kind of online income would most find help to readily solve their financial problems and stop being desperately poor. I'm no longer homeless, but I still live on under $20k annually. I get treated like a whiner with no real point for using myself as an example in these discussions. In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they usually aren't. I'm incredibly skeptical of such arguments. People on HN expect good, well-written content on the front page of HN all day, every day. They aggressively use ad blockers, actively find ways around pay walls and routinely tell me that writing doesn't deserve to make money and I should get a real job. Writing is something I am capable of doing, in spite of my handicaps. I have six years of college and I know a lot of stuff and I can be on a computer at home and write. If well-heeled, high-minded people who regularly come together in large numbers on HN can't be arsed to help me stop being poor, then it seems really extremely unlikely to me that the poor will ever get anything like UBI. I'm not for UBI. I don't think it works. But, moreover, I don't think it will really happen. I think talk of UBI is like when so-called friends tell you that if they win the lottery, they will give you half of it. In reality, that's typically a lie. It's an easy thing to say because winning the lottery is so very unlikely. People actually willing to help are willing to do whatever they can in the here and now, no matter how small. But most of what I hear is promises of someday while I continue to flail and most people react to my flailing by making me feel like I am doing something wrong. I'm an embarrassment. I'm doing something socially inappropriate. Perhaps I shall just go away at some point and leave HN to the well-heeled, high-minded types who like to talk a good game and do nothing. Then I won't be actively making them look like the hypocrites they so obviously are in most cases. I'm tired and trying to do some paid work. If I don't return to this discussion, everyone here can just assume that's why.
fileeditview 8y ago
I remember a time when (almost) all bottled water was in glass bottles.. didn't seem to be a problem back then and everyone seemed hydrated. I also remember when the plastic bottles were hyped because they were so much easier to carry.. not sure it was worth it.
- organsnyder 8y ago
  Glass is often harder to recycle than plastic. Our county's single-stream facility recycles glass into construction fill. We really need to get back to reusing bottles rather than trying to recycle them.
ddebernardy 8y ago
Once upon a time, cities offered potable water every here and there. The problem is that as these watering holes become rarer and rarer, locals sometimes push for the remaining ones to get shut down citing nuisances [0]. [0]: https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/a-nice-une-fontaine-deau-coupee-pour-eloigner-les-sdf_84611/ https://www.liberation.fr/direct/element/a-nice-une-fontaine... (French)

KevinS626 8y ago

Coke and Pepsi would sooner nuke the EU then allow for plastic bottles to be eliminated. I'm sure between the two of them they produce most of the plastic waste in the world but I'm glad governments are attacking low hanging fruit instead.

mips_avatar 8y ago
In Norway all bottled beverages come in refillable plastic bottles. They’re basically the same as normal bottles but a bit thicker. You pay about 50 cents for the bottle, and every grocery store has a little machine where you return the bottles and get a refund. The whole system works pretty well. I wish the US had something similar.
- jnurmine 8y ago
  Same in Finland and Sweden. Aluminium cans are recycled too, and most glass bottles. As a side note, where I live all waste is sorted (mixed, plastic, metal, cardboard, paper, clear glass, colored glass, biowaste, batteries, lamps...). All this might seem like a a waste of money but it is actually beneficial: the municipality creates biogas from biowaste and runs the city buses with it. They produced so much gas that they sold it to neighbouring municipalities at least a few years back.