8 ms·

I think the issue with this is that politicians have a tendency to think about problems only long after the fact. For example, in the EU, they've banned some p

I think the issue with this is that politicians have a tendency to think about problems only long after the fact. For example, in the EU, they've banned some plastic single-use food containers, like straws, etc. The other day I was reading an article in a local French paper about how some organization did a study on the replacement products used and found them to be pretty terrible. Both for the environment and for the human body. The kicker was that some of those containers were sold as being "bio-degradable" but it turned out they weren't. Now batteries and similar are a "new" thing, so they probably didn't have enough time to think about this, but selling something as something that it's not, even if we leave aside the whole ecology thing, sounds pretty much like fraud to me. But apparently they're looking into ways of banning these, not taking up the suppliers for fraud.

antocv 5y ago
> so they probably didn't have enough time to think about this How can they not have time to do their job? What are they busy with, getting away with bribes?
- zopa 5y ago
  In the US, members of Congress spend a truly unfathomable amount of time fundraising---as much as six hours a day. There's also just the fact that the issues before Congress are numerous and complicated, and staffing hasn't kept up. In fact research staff were cut significantly back in the 90s. And the real trouble is that once everyone's gotten (understandably!) cynical about the institution, most of the stuff that would help (more staffing, public financing of campaigns) feels like giving more money to crooks. So we go on this way despite everybody knowing the problem and the solutions being not that complicated, or even very expensive in the grand scheme.
rkul 5y ago
Can you share source?
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  I have mainly French sources: 1. The article was in Le Figaro: https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/des-substances-nocives-retrouvees-dans-les-emballages-de-la-restauration-rapide-20210520 https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/des-substances-nocives-r... 2. It talks about a study by Generation Future (not familiar with them). The actual paper is in French, but a bunch of references have English titles and seem to be in English: https://www.generations-futures.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/rapport-pfas-v6.pdf https://www.generations-futures.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/0... 3. In particular, there's a reference to a Danish law enacted last year (in English): https://www.foedevarestyrelsen.dk/english/SiteCollectionDocuments/Kemi%20og%20foedevarekvalitet/UK-Fact-sheet-fluorinated-substances.pdf https://www.foedevarestyrelsen.dk/english/SiteCollectionDocu... 4. UFC Que Choisir (French consummer-watchdog-like organization): https://www.quechoisir.org/action-ufc-que-choisir-test-sur-la-vaisselle-jetable-le-sans-plastique-n-est-pas-si-vert-ni-sans-danger-pour-la-sante-n91398/ https://www.quechoisir.org/action-ufc-que-choisir-test-sur-l...
wongarsu 5y ago
I think there are roughly three types of legislation: legislation that acts on existing things (and thus is by definition "late"), legislation that anticipates things (and thus "restricts the market") and legislation that tries to cause something to exist (and thus fails if it anticipates improvements that don't materialize). I would argue banning plastic single-use food containers is a bit of category one and a bit of category three. Of course the replacements are terrible, if the replacements were great then people would already prefer them and we wouldn't need the law. But banning single-use containers creates demand for better alternatives, which incentivizes innovation and the creation of actually good alternatives. Batteries are very much an old thing. We solved it for walkmans. Non-replaceable batteries are a somewhat new thing that is in need of some legislation to close the gaps.
hn8788 5y ago
Reminds me of the push in the USA to paint anyone who didn't want to use CFL bulbs as someone who hates the environment, even though the bulbs require special disposal because they release toxic fumes when they break. Now a few years later, they're telling everyone to start using LED bulbs since the CFL bulbs are bad for the environment as well.
- cduzz 5y ago
  CFL bulbs are fine; put the dead ones in a box then take the box to the hardware store once every 3 years when it fills up. CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy. LED bulbs are better in every way, but didn't exist 20 years ago and CFL did. Perhaps you like to kvetch and grouse about small inconveniences; the world is not and never was a perfect place. Most of us just take the pebbles out of our shoes and move on rather than whinge on about how shoes back in the day didn't have rocks in them.
  - skynet-9000 5y ago
    > CFL bulbs are fine; put the dead ones in a box then take the box to the hardware store once every 3 years when it fills up. So you live with a box filled with fragile glass tubes with mercury in them that you keep putting more glass tubes with mercury in for three years? When you take them to the hardware store, do you double bag them to keep the mercury from leaking when the tubes inevitably shatter against all of the other bulbs? Is that mercury ever recovered in "recycling", or does it just poison a land fill for the next thousand years? > CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy. Please tell that to my IKEA and other CFLs that were lucky to last one year. And a properly made incandescent can last many years as well. In fact, when I was a kid, my family restored a 200+ year old home that had a very, very old bulb in it (it was large and looked like an old Edison bulb -- it was bigger than my fist) that still worked great -- it was nice and bright and probably on the order of 150 watts. It was probably from the 1940's, because there were old magazines from the 1940's stacked underneath it. (Great old mags like Popular Mechanics that had ads for "Buy U.S. War Bonds" in them). CFL's used to (and still) cost a lot more than incandescents. Four to ten times as much when the mandate was introduced, and they were almost as unreliable as cheap incandescents, and produced a horribly cold blue light. For incandescent bulbs, yes, the heat issue is an issue, and the fact that they're much, much less efficient, but they didn't contain dangerous metals or present a serious environmental hazard when they were disposed of. LED bulbs did actually exist 20 years ago; in 2000, a friend gave me one (I tried it out and was decidedly not impressed), and I saw them in Fry's for $25+ dollars in 2000 dollars. They were not very bright and had some real issues (and big heat sinks, interestingly enough). But I miss incandescent bulbs, and believe that the market would have moved us over to LED's soon enough. I would have chosen LED's now over most incandescents, but I'd still prefer incandescents for a few types of uses. The irony is that the really inefficient incandescent bulbs -- bright and hot halogens -- were not banned; only the run of the mill $1 bulbs (in fact, literally, you could buy a 4 pack of Sylvanias in the dollar store, because that's how I bought bulbs in college). That's the problem with these mandates: they just harm the poor people, because people who create these mandates are definitely not poor and don't really care -- but these technocrats know better, because of some future energy emergency that never materialized. The CA blackouts wouldn't have been close to mitigated by everyone switching over to CFLs, but it probably helped corporate interests and whoever manufactured all those CFLs clogging up landfills. And now we have at least a century's worth of oil just in shale that wasn't even accessible 25 years ago, and the sea levels never rose in 2014 as Al Gore so confidently predicted. (I wonder if he bought property in Miami after the prices dropped!) Is this push toward electric cars just another greenhouse warming, ozone depleting, nuclear winter, DDT-thins-bird-eggs proto-catastrophe? We don't know, but it seems clear that the science on macro-events is settled only in hind-sight. Personally, I think we should ban volcanic emissions.
lhorie 5y ago
IMHO, the problem is that the incentives are not aligned towards improvements but merely to follow the letter of the law without considering its spirit. For example, there's a ban on plastic straws here in California, and the workaround Starbucks found for cold drinks was to provide a sippy plastic lid. So the plastic is still very much there (and never mind that the cup itself is still made of plastic). Paper containers aren't necessarily much better either if they're plastic coated (for example pringles canisters are basically unrecyclable even though they are "made with recyclable materials"). By targeting specific low hanging fruits, legislation ensures that the industry finds workarounds that continue to be cheap and environment-unfriendly, but in ways that have too complex details for an average joe to understand _why_ something that is labeled environment-friendly isn't quite so in practice. It's the environment equivalent of overprescribing antibiotics (shortsighted legislations) only to find years later you've inadvertently created superbugs (industries that produce things whose unrecyclability is extremely misleading and resilient to the level of understanding legislators have).
- rswail 5y ago
  Straws were banned more for their impact on marine life than because of their plastic use.
  - llampx 5y ago
    Which Seaspiracy told me is basically eyewash.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    Straws aren't truly banned per se in CA. McDonalds still provide the cardboard ones. Only plastic straws specifically are banned, and only at retail establishments; you can still buy them in packs at the dollar store. IMHO, a lot of environmental legislation is mostly out-of-touch theatrics with no real impact. See realities of recent recycling center shutdowns and what sort of stuff gets picked up on beach cleanup days.
  - Isinlor 5y ago
    I think only people who never been to a beach think that plastic straws are in any way a significant part of plastic pollution problem. It's always mostly plastic containers like bottles, plastic bags, fish nets and some random broken pieces of something bigger. Almost never straws. https://i.wpimg.pl/3500x0/d.wpimg.pl/355768210-77880789/zanieczyszczenie-plaza.JPG https://i.wpimg.pl/3500x0/d.wpimg.pl/355768210-77880789/zani... https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img,w_710/https://www.trvst.world/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/plastic-garbage-on-the-beach-1.jpg https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img,w_7... https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/garbage-on-the-sand-beach-in-thailand-dirty-beach-picture-id1138745143 https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/garbage-on-the-sand-bea...
obmelvin 5y ago
The other day at Costco (a big box store) I saw some bio-degradable dog bags - advertised as having no plastic!! But, you could only buy them as a pack that included two plastic dispensers to put the bags in..

antocv 5y ago

> so they probably didn't have enough time to think about this How can they not have time to do their job? What are they busy with, getting away with bribes?

zopa 5y ago
In the US, members of Congress spend a truly unfathomable amount of time fundraising---as much as six hours a day. There's also just the fact that the issues before Congress are numerous and complicated, and staffing hasn't kept up. In fact research staff were cut significantly back in the 90s. And the real trouble is that once everyone's gotten (understandably!) cynical about the institution, most of the stuff that would help (more staffing, public financing of campaigns) feels like giving more money to crooks. So we go on this way despite everybody knowing the problem and the solutions being not that complicated, or even very expensive in the grand scheme.

rkul 5y ago

Can you share source?

vladvasiliu 5y ago
I have mainly French sources: 1. The article was in Le Figaro: https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/des-substances-nocives-retrouvees-dans-les-emballages-de-la-restauration-rapide-20210520 https://www.lefigaro.fr/conjoncture/des-substances-nocives-r... 2. It talks about a study by Generation Future (not familiar with them). The actual paper is in French, but a bunch of references have English titles and seem to be in English: https://www.generations-futures.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/rapport-pfas-v6.pdf https://www.generations-futures.fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/0... 3. In particular, there's a reference to a Danish law enacted last year (in English): https://www.foedevarestyrelsen.dk/english/SiteCollectionDocuments/Kemi%20og%20foedevarekvalitet/UK-Fact-sheet-fluorinated-substances.pdf https://www.foedevarestyrelsen.dk/english/SiteCollectionDocu... 4. UFC Que Choisir (French consummer-watchdog-like organization): https://www.quechoisir.org/action-ufc-que-choisir-test-sur-la-vaisselle-jetable-le-sans-plastique-n-est-pas-si-vert-ni-sans-danger-pour-la-sante-n91398/ https://www.quechoisir.org/action-ufc-que-choisir-test-sur-l...

wongarsu 5y ago

I think there are roughly three types of legislation: legislation that acts on existing things (and thus is by definition "late"), legislation that anticipates things (and thus "restricts the market") and legislation that tries to cause something to exist (and thus fails if it anticipates improvements that don't materialize). I would argue banning plastic single-use food containers is a bit of category one and a bit of category three. Of course the replacements are terrible, if the replacements were great then people would already prefer them and we wouldn't need the law. But banning single-use containers creates demand for better alternatives, which incentivizes innovation and the creation of actually good alternatives. Batteries are very much an old thing. We solved it for walkmans. Non-replaceable batteries are a somewhat new thing that is in need of some legislation to close the gaps.

hn8788 5y ago

Reminds me of the push in the USA to paint anyone who didn't want to use CFL bulbs as someone who hates the environment, even though the bulbs require special disposal because they release toxic fumes when they break. Now a few years later, they're telling everyone to start using LED bulbs since the CFL bulbs are bad for the environment as well.

cduzz 5y ago
CFL bulbs are fine; put the dead ones in a box then take the box to the hardware store once every 3 years when it fills up. CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy. LED bulbs are better in every way, but didn't exist 20 years ago and CFL did. Perhaps you like to kvetch and grouse about small inconveniences; the world is not and never was a perfect place. Most of us just take the pebbles out of our shoes and move on rather than whinge on about how shoes back in the day didn't have rocks in them.
- skynet-9000 5y ago
  > CFL bulbs are fine; put the dead ones in a box then take the box to the hardware store once every 3 years when it fills up. So you live with a box filled with fragile glass tubes with mercury in them that you keep putting more glass tubes with mercury in for three years? When you take them to the hardware store, do you double bag them to keep the mercury from leaking when the tubes inevitably shatter against all of the other bulbs? Is that mercury ever recovered in "recycling", or does it just poison a land fill for the next thousand years? > CFL bulbs are fine; they last years and they don't heat up your house like crazy. Please tell that to my IKEA and other CFLs that were lucky to last one year. And a properly made incandescent can last many years as well. In fact, when I was a kid, my family restored a 200+ year old home that had a very, very old bulb in it (it was large and looked like an old Edison bulb -- it was bigger than my fist) that still worked great -- it was nice and bright and probably on the order of 150 watts. It was probably from the 1940's, because there were old magazines from the 1940's stacked underneath it. (Great old mags like Popular Mechanics that had ads for "Buy U.S. War Bonds" in them). CFL's used to (and still) cost a lot more than incandescents. Four to ten times as much when the mandate was introduced, and they were almost as unreliable as cheap incandescents, and produced a horribly cold blue light. For incandescent bulbs, yes, the heat issue is an issue, and the fact that they're much, much less efficient, but they didn't contain dangerous metals or present a serious environmental hazard when they were disposed of. LED bulbs did actually exist 20 years ago; in 2000, a friend gave me one (I tried it out and was decidedly not impressed), and I saw them in Fry's for $25+ dollars in 2000 dollars. They were not very bright and had some real issues (and big heat sinks, interestingly enough). But I miss incandescent bulbs, and believe that the market would have moved us over to LED's soon enough. I would have chosen LED's now over most incandescents, but I'd still prefer incandescents for a few types of uses. The irony is that the really inefficient incandescent bulbs -- bright and hot halogens -- were not banned; only the run of the mill $1 bulbs (in fact, literally, you could buy a 4 pack of Sylvanias in the dollar store, because that's how I bought bulbs in college). That's the problem with these mandates: they just harm the poor people, because people who create these mandates are definitely not poor and don't really care -- but these technocrats know better, because of some future energy emergency that never materialized. The CA blackouts wouldn't have been close to mitigated by everyone switching over to CFLs, but it probably helped corporate interests and whoever manufactured all those CFLs clogging up landfills. And now we have at least a century's worth of oil just in shale that wasn't even accessible 25 years ago, and the sea levels never rose in 2014 as Al Gore so confidently predicted. (I wonder if he bought property in Miami after the prices dropped!) Is this push toward electric cars just another greenhouse warming, ozone depleting, nuclear winter, DDT-thins-bird-eggs proto-catastrophe? We don't know, but it seems clear that the science on macro-events is settled only in hind-sight. Personally, I think we should ban volcanic emissions.

lhorie 5y ago

IMHO, the problem is that the incentives are not aligned towards improvements but merely to follow the letter of the law without considering its spirit. For example, there's a ban on plastic straws here in California, and the workaround Starbucks found for cold drinks was to provide a sippy plastic lid. So the plastic is still very much there (and never mind that the cup itself is still made of plastic). Paper containers aren't necessarily much better either if they're plastic coated (for example pringles canisters are basically unrecyclable even though they are "made with recyclable materials"). By targeting specific low hanging fruits, legislation ensures that the industry finds workarounds that continue to be cheap and environment-unfriendly, but in ways that have too complex details for an average joe to understand _why_ something that is labeled environment-friendly isn't quite so in practice. It's the environment equivalent of overprescribing antibiotics (shortsighted legislations) only to find years later you've inadvertently created superbugs (industries that produce things whose unrecyclability is extremely misleading and resilient to the level of understanding legislators have).

rswail 5y ago
Straws were banned more for their impact on marine life than because of their plastic use.
- llampx 5y ago
  Which Seaspiracy told me is basically eyewash.
- lhorie 5y ago
  Straws aren't truly banned per se in CA. McDonalds still provide the cardboard ones. Only plastic straws specifically are banned, and only at retail establishments; you can still buy them in packs at the dollar store. IMHO, a lot of environmental legislation is mostly out-of-touch theatrics with no real impact. See realities of recent recycling center shutdowns and what sort of stuff gets picked up on beach cleanup days.
- Isinlor 5y ago
  I think only people who never been to a beach think that plastic straws are in any way a significant part of plastic pollution problem. It's always mostly plastic containers like bottles, plastic bags, fish nets and some random broken pieces of something bigger. Almost never straws. https://i.wpimg.pl/3500x0/d.wpimg.pl/355768210-77880789/zanieczyszczenie-plaza.JPG https://i.wpimg.pl/3500x0/d.wpimg.pl/355768210-77880789/zani... https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img,w_710/https://www.trvst.world/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/plastic-garbage-on-the-beach-1.jpg https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img,w_7... https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/garbage-on-the-sand-beach-in-thailand-dirty-beach-picture-id1138745143 https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/garbage-on-the-sand-bea...

obmelvin 5y ago

The other day at Costco (a big box store) I saw some bio-degradable dog bags - advertised as having no plastic!! But, you could only buy them as a pack that included two plastic dispensers to put the bags in..