9 ms·

Plastics in general make me nervous. I watched a talk from an endocrinologist that many plastics and their byproducts can bind to chemical receptors, throwing o

Plastics in general make me nervous. I watched a talk from an endocrinologist that many plastics and their byproducts can bind to chemical receptors, throwing off the production and ratios of various hormones and neurotransmitters. We made a big push against BPA-free plastic years ago, but there may be other varieties that are just as harmful: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/tritan-certichem-eastman-bpa-free-plastic-safe/ https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/03/tritan-certi... (I'm also very nervous about "biodegradable" plastic which appears to break down granularly, but persists microscopically in the environment.) As much as I applaud the effort to use cloth bags at the grocery store, the vast majority of the products we place in them are still wrapped in huge quantities of single-use plastic. While metal cans and glass jars are at least somewhat more recyclable/reusable, I'm not even sure we have a good replacement for the necessary evil of food-safe containers. If someone more knowledgable than myself had suggestions on how to look for safer/greener plastic varieties, or general strategies to reduce their use, I'd love to hear them.

goda90 7y ago
Unfortunately, metal cans have a plastic liner too. We use plastic in so much it'll be really hard to get away from it.
- xvilka 7y ago
  The film is thin, and it will burn away during melting. So it will certainly help to reduce the plastic pollution compared to pure plastic bottles and cans.
kevin_thibedeau 7y ago
Metal cans are lined with plastic. You're basically limited to glass and wax paper.
- barney54 7y ago
  And while it is possible to recycle glass, in practice it is tough. Glass is heavy and therefore costly to transport. It also generally has to be sorted by color before it is recycled (and this is a problem with U.S. multi stream recycling collection). https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recycling-US-broken/97/i6 https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...
  - lukifer 7y ago
    The other thing I wonder about is all the extra crap on nearly all bottles: glue and stickers and wrappers and ink. I suspect some/most of what I put into recycling just ends up in a landfill anyway. And what kills me is, if our E2E supply chain was anything resembling sanity, there's no reason the identical bottle couldn't be shipped back to the manufacturer to be washed and reused directly! (...pandemics notwithstanding) Maybe it's unrealistic, but in light of the efficiency and innovation created by standard-sized shipping containers, I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try to push manufacturers to standardize on various glass bottle shapes and sizes, to make them easy to reuse directly across different products and locations.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jbay808 7y ago
      I think package standardization would be a revolutionary benefit to humanity, beyond even what the shipping container has achieved. I remember visiting Japan and being blown away when I walked into a bookstore - almost every book was a standard size. This means bookshelves can be a standard size. This means people can fit books into their small homes efficiently. Boxes are designed to fit the books perfectly. Cloth book-covers fit library books perfectly. Coming back to North America, it felt that bookshelves were a war between publishers to produce the most awkwardly shaped book that would stick out from the shelf more than any others. In an age where Amazon will ship you a toothbrush in a 1' box stuffed with paper, where a lot of consumers don't even see the product on a shelf so the attractiveness of the box doesn't matter, think of the benefits that package standardization could have. Apparently the USSR would wash and reuse glass bottles, and the container shape would be the same whether it contained pickles or whatever. I've only heard this anecdotally though.
- nervousvarun 7y ago
  Ouch. Even the classic aluminum coke/beer can? Or tuna/sardine can etc? Always just assumed that was the only practical recyclable container. Apparently even those have plastic? Wow.
  - hammock 7y ago
    Yes they are all lined with BPA or equivalent, to protect the can from corrosion.
  - chrisjc 7y ago
    Perhaps this video will answer your question. I was also shocked to learn this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ
  - BostonEnginerd 7y ago
    They use a thin plastic liner to prevent reaction with the Aluminum. These will burn off when the Al is melted for recycling. Great video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ
  - limomium 7y ago
    The funny thing is, aluminum is even more toxic than plastic is, so they fix one mistake with another :)
- hammock 7y ago
  Wax paper uses synthetic wax (or silicone for parchment paper), which might as well be plastic.
- spqr0a1 7y ago
  Peaches and pineapple are some of the few foods still distributed in tin-plated cans without a plastic lining.
- tachyonbeam 7y ago
  Could you line metal cans with wax?
heymijo 7y ago
I see plastics as our generations asbestos. Analogy isn't perfect, but it's a material we saw as benign that could end up having untold impact on our bodies.
- ThomPete 7y ago
  Plastic is an amazing product and it is responsible for saving much more lives than it takes. It's important to always think about both the positive and the negative impacts of anything we humans use, not just the negative or positive.
  - heymijo 7y ago
    I think this is an excellent comment when taken by itself. As a defensive human however, I think it assumes something about my original comment that is not there.
    - ThomPete 7y ago
      Well I think the analogy is not just not "not perfect" it's very very misleading IMO.
  - oldsklgdfth 7y ago
    I don't think you can use a scale to weigh the outcomes of technology, there WILL be positive and negative impacts. It's also useful to think about how a technology changes our culture, way of life and way of thought. There are many positives that can be said about plastics, but it has shifted us into a "throwaway lifestyle", i.e. packaging, containers. Many plastics are used in a very ephemeral manor, which is great if you want to consumerism. But i suspect this obsolescence is baked into plastics.
    - ThomPete 7y ago
      These throwaway lifestyle items is someone elses business, someone elses jobs, someones elses ability to put food on their childrens table. I totally get the "war on plastic" tendencies when you see how it's hurting our oceans but it's very important to separate that which is something that can be fixed with some underlying idea that plastic in itself is a problem. It's not. It's literally right now saving lives through the ability creating single use masks, gloves, medical instruments, part of ventilators and I could go on. We are getting a taste of what the world would look like without consumerism and the use of fossil fuels etc. I don't know about you but I prefer consumerism to what we have now.
hirundo 7y ago
> As much as I applaud the effort to use cloth bags at the grocery store ... Maybe that's worth a little less applause during a pandemic. E.g. the governor of Massachusetts just reversed the ban on plastic bags ... and banned reusable shopping bans, during the emergency. Fear of pollution is getting pushed back by fear of germs. https://www.wcvb.com/article/gov-baker-grocery-store-pharmacy-public-health-order-bans-reusable-bags-march-25-2020/31931763# https://www.wcvb.com/article/gov-baker-grocery-store-pharmac...
- penneyd 7y ago
  Did Gov. Baker previously support the ban on plastic bags?
Amygaz 7y ago
So, it that motherjones.com article you link, it's clearly BPA they are talking about, an additive to plastic, not plastic itself.
- lukifer 7y ago
  > According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA. I don't know if that means that "BPA-free" is often deceptive advertising, or it's referring to different additive that's technically not BPA but problematic for other reasons, or what. (Bear in mind, as a layman, my mindset on this stuff is that the burden of proof should be on proving safety, not on proving harm.)
colechristensen 7y ago
"biodegradable" plastics are chains of polymerized lactic acid. Proper disposal requires heat and time, but the chains do break down in nature, and lactic acid is everywhere, unlike many other "plastic" materials which are much more exotic. (talking about polylactic acid PLA) It is also true that many plastics are active biologically, mimic hormones, etc. etc. BUT to temper this fear you have to realize that nearly everything is. Many foods, "essential oils", and natural plant and animal exposures have the same sort of hormone mimicry or other biological drug-like interactions which are poorly understood at best. The point I am trying to get across is that your body is not an impenetrable fortress that new and evil synthetic compounds are attacking. Instead, biological interactions with small effects are everywhere, and while concern about some of them isn't unwarranted, it should be tempered by the idea that these influences abound.
- lukifer 7y ago
  Cool, thanks for those details. I'm certainly not succumbing to any sort of naturalistic fallacy, or any illusion that plastic is in an intrinsically unique category compared to other products. I'm more operating from a general Precautionary Principle, where I want the burden of proof to be on demonstrating long-term ecological and health safety, especially for substances that come into contact with food and water.
  - colechristensen 7y ago
    Absolutely reasonable. 21st century medicine (and many other fields), in my prediction, will be the century of small effects. The broad strokes are out of the way, mostly, and it's now time for the less glamorous and more numerous small details and ever more complex interactions.
  - zxcmx 7y ago
    It's difficult because ontologically you can never actually prove something is "safe". It's proving a negative (never any harmful effects). Some harms are subtle or situation dependent, and small effects will only show up under widespread or frequent use. Perhaps deliberately slowed or phased rollout could help. It would also make materials science and the chemical industries "feel" a lot more like medicine. Companies would have to spend billions on studies to get new chemical formulations or materials to market which could have similar effects on innovation (and monopoly) to those we see in the drug market. Not necessarily bad depending on what you value but the effects would be very far reaching.
throwaway2048 7y ago
BPA has just been replaced with almost chemically identical compounds that are technically not BPA that have unknown safety profiles.
- stallmanite 7y ago
  Progress!

goda90 7y ago

Unfortunately, metal cans have a plastic liner too. We use plastic in so much it'll be really hard to get away from it.

xvilka 7y ago
The film is thin, and it will burn away during melting. So it will certainly help to reduce the plastic pollution compared to pure plastic bottles and cans.

kevin_thibedeau 7y ago

Metal cans are lined with plastic. You're basically limited to glass and wax paper.

barney54 7y ago
And while it is possible to recycle glass, in practice it is tough. Glass is heavy and therefore costly to transport. It also generally has to be sorted by color before it is recycled (and this is a problem with U.S. multi stream recycling collection). https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recycling-US-broken/97/i6 https://cen.acs.org/materials/inorganic-chemistry/glass-recy...
- lukifer 7y ago
  The other thing I wonder about is all the extra crap on nearly all bottles: glue and stickers and wrappers and ink. I suspect some/most of what I put into recycling just ends up in a landfill anyway. And what kills me is, if our E2E supply chain was anything resembling sanity, there's no reason the identical bottle couldn't be shipped back to the manufacturer to be washed and reused directly! (...pandemics notwithstanding) Maybe it's unrealistic, but in light of the efficiency and innovation created by standard-sized shipping containers, I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try to push manufacturers to standardize on various glass bottle shapes and sizes, to make them easy to reuse directly across different products and locations.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jbay808 7y ago
    I think package standardization would be a revolutionary benefit to humanity, beyond even what the shipping container has achieved. I remember visiting Japan and being blown away when I walked into a bookstore - almost every book was a standard size. This means bookshelves can be a standard size. This means people can fit books into their small homes efficiently. Boxes are designed to fit the books perfectly. Cloth book-covers fit library books perfectly. Coming back to North America, it felt that bookshelves were a war between publishers to produce the most awkwardly shaped book that would stick out from the shelf more than any others. In an age where Amazon will ship you a toothbrush in a 1' box stuffed with paper, where a lot of consumers don't even see the product on a shelf so the attractiveness of the box doesn't matter, think of the benefits that package standardization could have. Apparently the USSR would wash and reuse glass bottles, and the container shape would be the same whether it contained pickles or whatever. I've only heard this anecdotally though.
nervousvarun 7y ago
Ouch. Even the classic aluminum coke/beer can? Or tuna/sardine can etc? Always just assumed that was the only practical recyclable container. Apparently even those have plastic? Wow.
- hammock 7y ago
  Yes they are all lined with BPA or equivalent, to protect the can from corrosion.
- chrisjc 7y ago
  Perhaps this video will answer your question. I was also shocked to learn this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ
- BostonEnginerd 7y ago
  They use a thin plastic liner to prevent reaction with the Aluminum. These will burn off when the Al is melted for recycling. Great video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQHFQoFoxvQ
- limomium 7y ago
  The funny thing is, aluminum is even more toxic than plastic is, so they fix one mistake with another :)
hammock 7y ago
Wax paper uses synthetic wax (or silicone for parchment paper), which might as well be plastic.
spqr0a1 7y ago
Peaches and pineapple are some of the few foods still distributed in tin-plated cans without a plastic lining.
tachyonbeam 7y ago
Could you line metal cans with wax?

heymijo 7y ago

I see plastics as our generations asbestos. Analogy isn't perfect, but it's a material we saw as benign that could end up having untold impact on our bodies.

ThomPete 7y ago
Plastic is an amazing product and it is responsible for saving much more lives than it takes. It's important to always think about both the positive and the negative impacts of anything we humans use, not just the negative or positive.
- heymijo 7y ago
  I think this is an excellent comment when taken by itself. As a defensive human however, I think it assumes something about my original comment that is not there.
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    Well I think the analogy is not just not "not perfect" it's very very misleading IMO.
- oldsklgdfth 7y ago
  I don't think you can use a scale to weigh the outcomes of technology, there WILL be positive and negative impacts. It's also useful to think about how a technology changes our culture, way of life and way of thought. There are many positives that can be said about plastics, but it has shifted us into a "throwaway lifestyle", i.e. packaging, containers. Many plastics are used in a very ephemeral manor, which is great if you want to consumerism. But i suspect this obsolescence is baked into plastics.
  - ThomPete 7y ago
    These throwaway lifestyle items is someone elses business, someone elses jobs, someones elses ability to put food on their childrens table. I totally get the "war on plastic" tendencies when you see how it's hurting our oceans but it's very important to separate that which is something that can be fixed with some underlying idea that plastic in itself is a problem. It's not. It's literally right now saving lives through the ability creating single use masks, gloves, medical instruments, part of ventilators and I could go on. We are getting a taste of what the world would look like without consumerism and the use of fossil fuels etc. I don't know about you but I prefer consumerism to what we have now.

hirundo 7y ago

> As much as I applaud the effort to use cloth bags at the grocery store ... Maybe that's worth a little less applause during a pandemic. E.g. the governor of Massachusetts just reversed the ban on plastic bags ... and banned reusable shopping bans, during the emergency. Fear of pollution is getting pushed back by fear of germs. https://www.wcvb.com/article/gov-baker-grocery-store-pharmacy-public-health-order-bans-reusable-bags-march-25-2020/31931763# https://www.wcvb.com/article/gov-baker-grocery-store-pharmac...

penneyd 7y ago
Did Gov. Baker previously support the ban on plastic bags?

Amygaz 7y ago

So, it that motherjones.com article you link, it's clearly BPA they are talking about, an additive to plastic, not plastic itself.

lukifer 7y ago
> According to Bittner’s research, some BPA-free products actually released synthetic estrogens that were more potent than BPA. I don't know if that means that "BPA-free" is often deceptive advertising, or it's referring to different additive that's technically not BPA but problematic for other reasons, or what. (Bear in mind, as a layman, my mindset on this stuff is that the burden of proof should be on proving safety, not on proving harm.)

colechristensen 7y ago

"biodegradable" plastics are chains of polymerized lactic acid. Proper disposal requires heat and time, but the chains do break down in nature, and lactic acid is everywhere, unlike many other "plastic" materials which are much more exotic. (talking about polylactic acid PLA) It is also true that many plastics are active biologically, mimic hormones, etc. etc. BUT to temper this fear you have to realize that nearly everything is. Many foods, "essential oils", and natural plant and animal exposures have the same sort of hormone mimicry or other biological drug-like interactions which are poorly understood at best. The point I am trying to get across is that your body is not an impenetrable fortress that new and evil synthetic compounds are attacking. Instead, biological interactions with small effects are everywhere, and while concern about some of them isn't unwarranted, it should be tempered by the idea that these influences abound.

lukifer 7y ago
Cool, thanks for those details. I'm certainly not succumbing to any sort of naturalistic fallacy, or any illusion that plastic is in an intrinsically unique category compared to other products. I'm more operating from a general Precautionary Principle, where I want the burden of proof to be on demonstrating long-term ecological and health safety, especially for substances that come into contact with food and water.
- colechristensen 7y ago
  Absolutely reasonable. 21st century medicine (and many other fields), in my prediction, will be the century of small effects. The broad strokes are out of the way, mostly, and it's now time for the less glamorous and more numerous small details and ever more complex interactions.
- zxcmx 7y ago
  It's difficult because ontologically you can never actually prove something is "safe". It's proving a negative (never any harmful effects). Some harms are subtle or situation dependent, and small effects will only show up under widespread or frequent use. Perhaps deliberately slowed or phased rollout could help. It would also make materials science and the chemical industries "feel" a lot more like medicine. Companies would have to spend billions on studies to get new chemical formulations or materials to market which could have similar effects on innovation (and monopoly) to those we see in the drug market. Not necessarily bad depending on what you value but the effects would be very far reaching.

throwaway2048 7y ago

BPA has just been replaced with almost chemically identical compounds that are technically not BPA that have unknown safety profiles.

stallmanite 7y ago
Progress!