7 ms·

This is probably a dumb question, but what essential products use plastics and for which no other material is an adequate substitute for the plastic components?

waiseristy 7y ago
There are an innumerable amount of products that would either be impossible to produce, unsafe to use, or expensive and wasteful without plastics
- ehnto 7y ago
  That only changes the question to "are these products worth it?". I would argue there is a huge portion of consumer products that only use plastic because it is cheaper and the negatives of plastics were not in the equation at all.
  - learnstats2 7y ago
    But what would you be using instead and why would that material not have broadly similar negatives?
    - ehnto 7y ago
      It vastly depends on the product, but it is a question worth asking over and over again when we design products. It has historically been plastic because it is cheap and readily altered to match the exact needs of the product. Rigid, soft, rugged, smooth, coarse, we can make a plastic suit. Plastic cups are a good example, we have numerous materials at our disposal but we make disposable cups and containers out of plastic. Even bio-degradable plastic cups are a bad choice of material, as they take special circumstances to break down that many municipalities don't provide for and most users aren't carrying their bio degradable cups home to put in their compost. If they end up in the ocean, they will last just as long as other plastics. So that is bad product design, it doesn't take the full product lifecycle into account and ignores even it's typical usage of just a single serve drink used once. Plastics have spoiled us too, so in many cases there probably isn't an alternative that is just as good. We may just have to accept that and find ways to make better materials out of more sustainable sources.
      - learnstats2 7y ago
        Yes - I've also heard criticism of bio-degradable plastic cups from environmental groups. But, I missed it if you said it - what material should we ideally use for disposable cups, currently?
        ehnto 7y ago
        I would personally pick paper for single use cups. It is not perfect, still quite resource intensive to make and still unlikely to be recycled properly. But they can at least be sustained through sustainable forestry and the waste will degrade in the most likely places it will end up.
  - ahje 7y ago
    Remember, that plastic is not just cheaper -- it's also often lighter. We could do a lot of stuff with metal, wood or good old granite, but emissions from manufacturing transporting all those heavier goods would spike and we don't want that as long as manufacturing and transporting are dependent on fossil fuels. Plastic is fine. It has it's uses, and we won't get rid of it anytime soon. We need to get rid of the bulk of the one-time use stuff though, and focus on re-usable items if we want to change something.
    - ehnto 7y ago
      I agree, your last paragraph is how I feel about the situation summed up. It is an excellent material, but we waste it on single use expendable items that we could really do without. I do want to add though that if we had greener transport, then heavier items wouldn't be that big of a deal. So if we are playing the long game, that would almost be a good incentive for transport and industry to be more efficient in the long run.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
inflatableDodo 7y ago
The medical field comes immediately to mind, from implants through to flexible tubing. I mean, I suppose you could make the tubing for a peristaltic pump from cat gut or something.
chrisbrandow 7y ago
It’s not just “can be made”, but “can be made remotely as inexpensively or as easily”
TehCorwiz 7y ago
Lots of medical and lab supplies, such as tubing, tools, and stents. For some applications glass is too fragile, metal can be too reactive. Even "inert" metals like titanium or nickel eventually develop bio-films. Various plastics' combination of temperature stability at both high and low temps (cryo / autoclave), non-bio-reactivity (body doesn't attack or reject over short spans), and corrosion resistance makes plastics perfect for these situations. Especially wet situations. And since plastics can be fine tuned for application specific needs they can be iterated on quickly with a materials but not manufacturing process change in some cases. My wife and I had this conversation a couple weeks ago asking this very question which ultimately boils down to: "Are plastics worth it at all ever?" And the answer we found, surprisingly, was yes. edit: a typo.
- phkahler 7y ago
  Aren't plastics usually reasonable to burn as well? As in burning mostly produces CO2 and water? Or do common plastics contain some nasty atoms we dont want in the air in any way?
  - TehCorwiz 7y ago
    Plastics often are doped with heavy metals like molybdenum to affect mechanical properties like wear resistance, or bromine for fire resistance. Neither of which you want in your lungs.
  - ghjjjj 7y ago
    Even putting aside the heavy metals, the assumption that they burn into CO2 is a hard one to accomplish in fact. Done improperly, you end up with a very snokey, sooty smoke. Done properly, you’re dealing with very high T, which is hard, and NOx production. But, assuming you’re doing a good job... burn baby burn! (Just separate out the per-fluorinates - HF is nasty)
  - code_duck 7y ago
    They can be burned safely in an incinerator. Ad hoc burning can produce very toxic chemicals, though, including dioxins, hydrogen cyanide, vinyl chloride and furans. It could release lead. It depends on the type of plastic (PVC? Polyethylene? Polypropylene?). This is why it’s troubling to see people burning bags of trash and tossing in plastic bags and soda bottles as if they magically disappear. This is a good rundown: https://www.directplastics.co.uk/about_plastics/post/whats-in-those-fumes https://www.directplastics.co.uk/about_plastics/post/whats-i... MIT says... https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-we-safely-burn-used-plastic-objects-in-a-domestic-fireplace/ https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-we-sa... “When plastic is burned, it releases dangerous chemicals such as hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals, as well as particulate.”
munk-a 7y ago
As some siblings have pointed out there are specific uses plastics are good for - and I don't think the goal should be to reduce plastic usage to zero. I think it's more important to go after stupid consumer product usages of plastic that are unnecessary, a moderate amount of plastic use and reuse is totally reasonable and sustainable, when we have half the mass being tossed away in the form of clamshells then we have an issue.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  I agree. Yesterday the IT department brought me a big box of USB hard drives. I spent an hour unpacking them and after setting the recyclable cardboard aside was left with a mountain of plastic shells that were used for shock absorption and peg hangars. IMO, there's no reason these couldn't have been made of cardboard as well.
ghjjjj 7y ago
Normal plastics (or polymers) aren’t all that bad. Some fish will choke on it and that’s terrible, sure. But, if you want a real environmental shit-show read up of per fluorinate manufacturing. Teflon, gore Tex, etc is the real deamon children of the polymer industry.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
dsfyu404ed 7y ago
if your definition of "adequate" includes a price component than a heck of a lot of things.
- trickstra 7y ago
  Exactly this. We must not forget how stupidly cheap it is to make something from plastic before we start making bags, cups and straws out of paper. The great thing about plastics is their high durability and low cost of production. The main problem with plastics is their high durability and low cost of production.
pkaye 7y ago
I have kidney dialysis daily and there is quite a bit of stuff for which plastic is most suitable.
TeMPOraL 7y ago
There are few things that couldn't possibly be done without plastic, but most of things do benefit from being plastic to various degree. People mention various material properties crucial to medical use, but I'd mention a simple other one: mass. If you tried to replace plastics with metals and glass in consumer products while retaining similar material properties, you'd end up with a lot heavier products. Think e.g. plastic bottle vs. glass bottle for an obvious example. All that mass increases fuel used whenever you have to move it. This alone doesn't justify use of plastics everywhere, but it does matter at scale and over lifecycles of some products, so it's worth remembering.
- ricardobeat 7y ago
  Aluminium has similar weight to volume ratio for small applications, and is the easiest to recycle, but is not aesthetically pleasing. Hopefully something like ALON (transparent aluminium ceramic) could come to the consumer market at some point?
  - aetherspawn 7y ago
    I think Al is bad for you when it comes to handling food. I’ve heard that aluminium pots and pans, as well as traces in things like salt, are strongly linked to Alzheimer’s.
    - FreeFull 7y ago
      This is why aluminium drinks cans have a lining of plastic on the inside. So even with aluminium containers, you don't get away from plastic.
      - ricardobeat 7y ago
        True, and the original lining ended up being banned as an endocrine disruptor (BPA). I’d guess the lining is more for protecting the integrity of the metal than food safety. A middle-ground alternative would be returning to glass once transportation is fully electric and based on clean energy. Still lots of downsides, not an easy problem to solve.
dredmorbius 7y ago
A very good question, actually, and one which gets to the heart of materials science. Which is nowhere near my areas of expertise, though I've been looking into this incidental to other interests. Meta-answering by way of what the pre-plastic world looked like.... The history of the study itself is interesting: materials science & engineering grew mostly out of mining engineering, which subsumed metallurgy (see Agricola's De Re Metalica, still a leading text through the early 20th century, or the evolution of M.I.T.'s course catalogue), but picked up other elements (so to speak) especially with the rise of coal-tar and petroleum (organic) chemistry. There was the golden age of plastics, roughly 1920-1940, when many modern polymers were invented (polystyrene, polyester, PVC, Nylon, etc.). Earlier, ~1840s-1890s rayon and celluloid (from plant fibres) and bakelite (coal tar). Vaclav Smil has an excellent book on materials, Making the Modern World, which looks at sourcing and usage (https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world/oclc/868348464 https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world/oclc/...). Strongly recommended. You can look at what materials were used before plastics were available. Early 20th century children's toys were often made of stamped tin. Wood, woven fibres or reeds (baskets, wicker or rattan furniture), fabrics, hides, metals, and stone, were commonly used. Plastics replaced many of these on the basis of cost, weight, flexibility, mouldability, process-scalability, automation, and frequently durability, as well as water-, air-, and rot-resistance. Human use of materials gives a strong sense of time. In film and theatre, much of the atmosphere of an era, beyond mere styling, derives from the materials used or incorporated: stone, brick, plaster, ceramics, wood, fibres, dyes, glass, metals, and synthetics. Mid-century US clothing is dominated by wool and leather, the 1960s mood is set by synthetcs and plastics, 1970s by polyester. Since then there's been a movement back to more natural fabrics generally, though nylon outerwear cold-weather garments are still popular. Many of the shifts in material use are energy-bounded. Not merely in processing (metals smelting, glass and ceramics production), but in transport and sourcing. Paris's catacombs, I've just learned, were largely formed as quarries for building materials. Almost all pre-modern construction used locally-sourced materials, or materials which could be moved nearly entirely by water, with minimal thermal processing. Lumber use was historically minimised due to its scarcity -- half-timbered and full-brick or stone construction limit wood use for a few weight-bearing members, and fill planes and voids with more-abundant materials -- stone, wattle-and-daub, lathe-and-plaster, brick, even straw. (Fire risk was another consideration restricting wood construction in pre-modern cities.) Whilst the US had vast forests at its founding, they were largely consumed within about a century, for both construction and fuel. Despite its coal riches, wood use exceeded coal through the 1880s. (Oil surpassed coal only in the 1950s.) With coal, steam, rail, excavators, drilling rigs, pipelines, and tankers, sourcing vast amounts of coal and oil from inconvenient remote locations and synthesizing useful fabrication and construction materials became possibe. Voila: Plastic age. Metal mining, refining, smelting, and founding also advanced rapidly -- highly-reliable, high-power locomotives, rails, pipelines, and steamships were infeasible prior to Bessemer steel (1860s). Aircraft required aluminium structural members and fuselage panels (1880s). So there's a complex bootstrap process involved. (This isn't a defence of plastics, just a brief, very rough, and non-expert materials/economic history.)
fredgrott 7y ago
anyone that has a breathing issue uses plastic in all the hose connections up to the oxygen machine...my Father uses such a machine and those tubes regularly fail after awhile and need replacing..I usually get the job of replacing them..

waiseristy 7y ago

There are an innumerable amount of products that would either be impossible to produce, unsafe to use, or expensive and wasteful without plastics

ehnto 7y ago
That only changes the question to "are these products worth it?". I would argue there is a huge portion of consumer products that only use plastic because it is cheaper and the negatives of plastics were not in the equation at all.
- learnstats2 7y ago
  But what would you be using instead and why would that material not have broadly similar negatives?
  - ehnto 7y ago
    It vastly depends on the product, but it is a question worth asking over and over again when we design products. It has historically been plastic because it is cheap and readily altered to match the exact needs of the product. Rigid, soft, rugged, smooth, coarse, we can make a plastic suit. Plastic cups are a good example, we have numerous materials at our disposal but we make disposable cups and containers out of plastic. Even bio-degradable plastic cups are a bad choice of material, as they take special circumstances to break down that many municipalities don't provide for and most users aren't carrying their bio degradable cups home to put in their compost. If they end up in the ocean, they will last just as long as other plastics. So that is bad product design, it doesn't take the full product lifecycle into account and ignores even it's typical usage of just a single serve drink used once. Plastics have spoiled us too, so in many cases there probably isn't an alternative that is just as good. We may just have to accept that and find ways to make better materials out of more sustainable sources.
    - learnstats2 7y ago
      Yes - I've also heard criticism of bio-degradable plastic cups from environmental groups. But, I missed it if you said it - what material should we ideally use for disposable cups, currently?
      - ehnto 7y ago
        I would personally pick paper for single use cups. It is not perfect, still quite resource intensive to make and still unlikely to be recycled properly. But they can at least be sustained through sustainable forestry and the waste will degrade in the most likely places it will end up.
- ahje 7y ago
  Remember, that plastic is not just cheaper -- it's also often lighter. We could do a lot of stuff with metal, wood or good old granite, but emissions from manufacturing transporting all those heavier goods would spike and we don't want that as long as manufacturing and transporting are dependent on fossil fuels. Plastic is fine. It has it's uses, and we won't get rid of it anytime soon. We need to get rid of the bulk of the one-time use stuff though, and focus on re-usable items if we want to change something.
  - ehnto 7y ago
    I agree, your last paragraph is how I feel about the situation summed up. It is an excellent material, but we waste it on single use expendable items that we could really do without. I do want to add though that if we had greener transport, then heavier items wouldn't be that big of a deal. So if we are playing the long game, that would almost be a good incentive for transport and industry to be more efficient in the long run.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

inflatableDodo 7y ago

The medical field comes immediately to mind, from implants through to flexible tubing. I mean, I suppose you could make the tubing for a peristaltic pump from cat gut or something.

chrisbrandow 7y ago

It’s not just “can be made”, but “can be made remotely as inexpensively or as easily”

TehCorwiz 7y ago

Lots of medical and lab supplies, such as tubing, tools, and stents. For some applications glass is too fragile, metal can be too reactive. Even "inert" metals like titanium or nickel eventually develop bio-films. Various plastics' combination of temperature stability at both high and low temps (cryo / autoclave), non-bio-reactivity (body doesn't attack or reject over short spans), and corrosion resistance makes plastics perfect for these situations. Especially wet situations. And since plastics can be fine tuned for application specific needs they can be iterated on quickly with a materials but not manufacturing process change in some cases. My wife and I had this conversation a couple weeks ago asking this very question which ultimately boils down to: "Are plastics worth it at all ever?" And the answer we found, surprisingly, was yes. edit: a typo.

phkahler 7y ago
Aren't plastics usually reasonable to burn as well? As in burning mostly produces CO2 and water? Or do common plastics contain some nasty atoms we dont want in the air in any way?
- TehCorwiz 7y ago
  Plastics often are doped with heavy metals like molybdenum to affect mechanical properties like wear resistance, or bromine for fire resistance. Neither of which you want in your lungs.
- ghjjjj 7y ago
  Even putting aside the heavy metals, the assumption that they burn into CO2 is a hard one to accomplish in fact. Done improperly, you end up with a very snokey, sooty smoke. Done properly, you’re dealing with very high T, which is hard, and NOx production. But, assuming you’re doing a good job... burn baby burn! (Just separate out the per-fluorinates - HF is nasty)
- code_duck 7y ago
  They can be burned safely in an incinerator. Ad hoc burning can produce very toxic chemicals, though, including dioxins, hydrogen cyanide, vinyl chloride and furans. It could release lead. It depends on the type of plastic (PVC? Polyethylene? Polypropylene?). This is why it’s troubling to see people burning bags of trash and tossing in plastic bags and soda bottles as if they magically disappear. This is a good rundown: https://www.directplastics.co.uk/about_plastics/post/whats-in-those-fumes https://www.directplastics.co.uk/about_plastics/post/whats-i... MIT says... https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-we-safely-burn-used-plastic-objects-in-a-domestic-fireplace/ https://engineering.mit.edu/engage/ask-an-engineer/can-we-sa... “When plastic is burned, it releases dangerous chemicals such as hydrochloric acid, sulfur dioxide, dioxins, furans and heavy metals, as well as particulate.”

munk-a 7y ago

As some siblings have pointed out there are specific uses plastics are good for - and I don't think the goal should be to reduce plastic usage to zero. I think it's more important to go after stupid consumer product usages of plastic that are unnecessary, a moderate amount of plastic use and reuse is totally reasonable and sustainable, when we have half the mass being tossed away in the form of clamshells then we have an issue.

reaperducer 7y ago
I agree. Yesterday the IT department brought me a big box of USB hard drives. I spent an hour unpacking them and after setting the recyclable cardboard aside was left with a mountain of plastic shells that were used for shock absorption and peg hangars. IMO, there's no reason these couldn't have been made of cardboard as well.

ghjjjj 7y ago

Normal plastics (or polymers) aren’t all that bad. Some fish will choke on it and that’s terrible, sure. But, if you want a real environmental shit-show read up of per fluorinate manufacturing. Teflon, gore Tex, etc is the real deamon children of the polymer industry.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

dsfyu404ed 7y ago

if your definition of "adequate" includes a price component than a heck of a lot of things.

trickstra 7y ago
Exactly this. We must not forget how stupidly cheap it is to make something from plastic before we start making bags, cups and straws out of paper. The great thing about plastics is their high durability and low cost of production. The main problem with plastics is their high durability and low cost of production.

pkaye 7y ago

I have kidney dialysis daily and there is quite a bit of stuff for which plastic is most suitable.

TeMPOraL 7y ago

There are few things that couldn't possibly be done without plastic, but most of things do benefit from being plastic to various degree. People mention various material properties crucial to medical use, but I'd mention a simple other one: mass. If you tried to replace plastics with metals and glass in consumer products while retaining similar material properties, you'd end up with a lot heavier products. Think e.g. plastic bottle vs. glass bottle for an obvious example. All that mass increases fuel used whenever you have to move it. This alone doesn't justify use of plastics everywhere, but it does matter at scale and over lifecycles of some products, so it's worth remembering.

ricardobeat 7y ago
Aluminium has similar weight to volume ratio for small applications, and is the easiest to recycle, but is not aesthetically pleasing. Hopefully something like ALON (transparent aluminium ceramic) could come to the consumer market at some point?
- aetherspawn 7y ago
  I think Al is bad for you when it comes to handling food. I’ve heard that aluminium pots and pans, as well as traces in things like salt, are strongly linked to Alzheimer’s.
  - FreeFull 7y ago
    This is why aluminium drinks cans have a lining of plastic on the inside. So even with aluminium containers, you don't get away from plastic.
    - ricardobeat 7y ago
      True, and the original lining ended up being banned as an endocrine disruptor (BPA). I’d guess the lining is more for protecting the integrity of the metal than food safety. A middle-ground alternative would be returning to glass once transportation is fully electric and based on clean energy. Still lots of downsides, not an easy problem to solve.

dredmorbius 7y ago

A very good question, actually, and one which gets to the heart of materials science. Which is nowhere near my areas of expertise, though I've been looking into this incidental to other interests. Meta-answering by way of what the pre-plastic world looked like.... The history of the study itself is interesting: materials science & engineering grew mostly out of mining engineering, which subsumed metallurgy (see Agricola's De Re Metalica, still a leading text through the early 20th century, or the evolution of M.I.T.'s course catalogue), but picked up other elements (so to speak) especially with the rise of coal-tar and petroleum (organic) chemistry. There was the golden age of plastics, roughly 1920-1940, when many modern polymers were invented (polystyrene, polyester, PVC, Nylon, etc.). Earlier, ~1840s-1890s rayon and celluloid (from plant fibres) and bakelite (coal tar). Vaclav Smil has an excellent book on materials, Making the Modern World, which looks at sourcing and usage (https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world/oclc/868348464 https://www.worldcat.org/title/making-the-modern-world/oclc/...). Strongly recommended. You can look at what materials were used before plastics were available. Early 20th century children's toys were often made of stamped tin. Wood, woven fibres or reeds (baskets, wicker or rattan furniture), fabrics, hides, metals, and stone, were commonly used. Plastics replaced many of these on the basis of cost, weight, flexibility, mouldability, process-scalability, automation, and frequently durability, as well as water-, air-, and rot-resistance. Human use of materials gives a strong sense of time. In film and theatre, much of the atmosphere of an era, beyond mere styling, derives from the materials used or incorporated: stone, brick, plaster, ceramics, wood, fibres, dyes, glass, metals, and synthetics. Mid-century US clothing is dominated by wool and leather, the 1960s mood is set by synthetcs and plastics, 1970s by polyester. Since then there's been a movement back to more natural fabrics generally, though nylon outerwear cold-weather garments are still popular. Many of the shifts in material use are energy-bounded. Not merely in processing (metals smelting, glass and ceramics production), but in transport and sourcing. Paris's catacombs, I've just learned, were largely formed as quarries for building materials. Almost all pre-modern construction used locally-sourced materials, or materials which could be moved nearly entirely by water, with minimal thermal processing. Lumber use was historically minimised due to its scarcity -- half-timbered and full-brick or stone construction limit wood use for a few weight-bearing members, and fill planes and voids with more-abundant materials -- stone, wattle-and-daub, lathe-and-plaster, brick, even straw. (Fire risk was another consideration restricting wood construction in pre-modern cities.) Whilst the US had vast forests at its founding, they were largely consumed within about a century, for both construction and fuel. Despite its coal riches, wood use exceeded coal through the 1880s. (Oil surpassed coal only in the 1950s.) With coal, steam, rail, excavators, drilling rigs, pipelines, and tankers, sourcing vast amounts of coal and oil from inconvenient remote locations and synthesizing useful fabrication and construction materials became possibe. Voila: Plastic age. Metal mining, refining, smelting, and founding also advanced rapidly -- highly-reliable, high-power locomotives, rails, pipelines, and steamships were infeasible prior to Bessemer steel (1860s). Aircraft required aluminium structural members and fuselage panels (1880s). So there's a complex bootstrap process involved. (This isn't a defence of plastics, just a brief, very rough, and non-expert materials/economic history.)

fredgrott 7y ago

anyone that has a breathing issue uses plastic in all the hose connections up to the oxygen machine...my Father uses such a machine and those tubes regularly fail after awhile and need replacing..I usually get the job of replacing them..