6 ms·

Deep dive into plastic monomers, additives, and processing aids

129 points by sizzle 5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago
we consume a credit card worth
- Choco31415 5y ago
  Per lifetime? Per year? Per kilogram of food? Can you give a bit more context to this comment?
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    The claim is that humans consume the equivalent of a credit card sized amount of plastic a week. See this article from ABC: https://abcnews.go.com/US/humans-consume-equivalent-credit-card-worth-plastic-week/story?id=63687144 https://abcnews.go.com/US/humans-consume-equivalent-credit-c... This "credit card" bit got popularized in news media because it was mentioned in this brochure put out by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on plastic ingestion: https://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/plastic_ingestion_press_singles.pdf https://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/plastic_ingestion_pres... Their claim in turn comes from this study from the University of Newcastle that was prepared specifically for the WWF (which suggests a potential conflict of interest), according to the list of references in the WWF brochure above. However, I'm not able to find the actual full paper anywhere, and this page last noted that it was being reviewed for publication: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured/plastic-ingestion-by-people-could-be-equating-to-a-credit-card-a-week/how-much-microplastics-are-we-ingesting-estimation-of-the-mass-of-microplastics-ingested https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured/plastic-inges...
    - andrekandre 5y ago
      from that abc article Since 2000, more plastic has been produced worldwide that all the preceding years combined, and about a third of the plastic ends up in nature, according to the report. is that accurate...? what changed after 2000 to enable this??
      - Cerium 5y ago
        I think that the sentence is saying that in the period between 2000 and present day more plastic has been produced in the period from 2000 to -inf. A similar statement can be made about most human industrial products - cement production has a curve that appears to have more area post 2000 than pre.
      - maxerickson 5y ago
        The human population is much larger and richer.
      - throwawaysea 5y ago
        My guess is that emergent economies are seeing more disposable income and the adoption of the same consumerist disposable everything habits, supplanting the lifestyle and economies they had previously. It’s especially bad in countries where environmental regulations and enforcement are far behind while consumption has caught up. You’ll often see this in YouTube videos showing garbage trucks just dumping trash (with significant amounts of plastics) straight into rivers, for example.
  - jacobwilliamroy 5y ago
    Per week on average according to a study "K. Senathirajah, T. Palanisami, University of Newcastle, How much microplastics are we ingesting? Estimation of the mass of microplastics ingested.Report for WWF Singapore, May 2019" Obviously it varies person to person but if you drink water, breathe air or use table salt, you are still ingesting plastics on a daily basis.
  - fuzzfactor 5y ago
    >we consume a credit card worth >Per lifetime? Per year? Per kilogram of food? Can you give a bit more context to this comment? Everyone has a different line of credit. It's not only the few grams of microplastic that might be ingested physically. Rather the consumerism of society which drives demand for the kilotonnes of plastic to begin with. Plus without exersicing a line of credit it would not be possible to consume more than you were worth. When the more sustainable move financially, environmentally, and socially is to work toward making consumption an insignificant fraction of what people are worth.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Regulating and managing consumer chemicals after the fact is no longer sufficient, and in some cases counter-productive. For example, bans on long-chain PFASs (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) has meant industry has just switched to short-chain PFASs, which are more difficult to filter out of water: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00004 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00004 We need to establish a whitelist of acceptable compounds and force industry to work within that for anything that will shed into the environment, be exposed to foodstuffs, or be worn by humans.
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  Until that happens, start with your home. How many pollutants do you voluntarily introduce into your own environment-habitat? (And for every pound you buy, several pounds of byproducts are shed during production.)
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    That's the point, its impossible. We cannot force individual consumers to become chemists, and interrogate every material they come across. In many cases the materials are completely unknown. Is the PFAS used on a Big Mac burger wrapper listed in its ingredients?
    - forgotmypw17 5y ago
      It's not about "we", it's about "you", and what you choose to do with your life-- right now, not tomorrow or whenever the "consensus" agrees on it, but what you put in your own environment and body of your own volition.
  - jacobwilliamroy 5y ago
    Hold on. I'll get started on that as soon as I finish my bachelor's degree in chemistry and build a lab where I can test all the substances that I bring into my house. You have such great ideas. No idea why I haven't done this yet.
Syonyk 5y ago
I expect future generations to harbor a unique and refined fire of hatred for our current plastics obsession. In no particular order: - We extract oil from the ground, transport it thousands of miles to a factory, build precursors, transport those thousands of miles to other factories, build plastic containers, transport those to yet other places for use, fill them, use them for 10 minutes, discard them, and then transport them tens or hundreds of miles to a landfill (can't recycle them, they've got food waste... or you use a bunch of water to clean them for recycling, but see below). This is insane in any reasonable world. - Plastic recycling is... a polite lie, at best, and more realistically oil company {marketing, propaganda} at work. Some plastics, some of the time, are recyclable a few times to build a high cost, crap material (and relatively few people want to pay more for worse material to work with). Most plastics, most of the time, are junk and somewhere between "not worth the cost" and "technically not possible" to recycle. We used to (as western nations) stuff plastics in a container, ship it to China, and count it as recycled as soon as it left the port regardless of the result. Now, with China having decided that this was stupid, we ship it to whoever will take it, count it as recycled, and then wonder why we find a ton of plastics in the atmosphere and oceans. - As we learn more about plastics, most of the stuff that makes them work turns out to be some level of "somewhat toxic to some life" and "really violently toxic to all life." Most of the really nasty stuff simply doesn't degrade in a useful span, so will be with everyone else on the planet, for somewhere between "an awfully long time" and "the remaining span of humans on the planet." But, hey, super convenient for a couple decades! Can't blame us for making it, right? I mean, there was profit involved - and, more than just profit, convenience. Such profit! Much convenience. All plastics! I don't mind, quite as much, "durable plastics" that are intended to last for a long while. But the entire disposable, super soft plastic ecosystem? This is going to be very, very hated in centuries to come. If it's not sterilized all humans by then. :/
- kenjackson 5y ago
  What's the preferred alternative to disposable plastic?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
chiefalchemist 5y ago
What freightening is that as oil as an energy sound declines so will the price of oil and therefore the price of plastic. Whether you believe in humans being the driving force behind climate change or not, the fact is oil and its byproducts generate pollution. Pollution that's harmful to living things.
suyash 5y ago
This is why I dislike the current version of 3D printing. All it creates is cheap, poor quality plastic objects more and more. We need organic (recyclable) material that can be manipulated, printed and available just like plastic.
- tfolbrecht 5y ago
  PLA is biodegradable. For the things I print, I usually smooth them with PVA as it's biodegradable. As far as pigments go, I have no clue what's in most commercial stuff I think they're the main caveat for truly biodegradable 3d printing.
  - ainiriand 5y ago
    It is biodegradable, that is correct, it just takes around 80 years to do so. Can you justify it?
    - throwaway3699 5y ago
      80 years is not the issue. It's the stuff that will be around forever, and in the oceans, that's trouble.
EGreg 5y ago
The only way to end industries that profit off externalities is by imposing Pigovian Taxes AND redistributing the proceeds back to the people. That last part is important to avoid Yellow Vest protests, while making the industry non-competitive with the alternatives: Non-Biodegradeable Plastics Factory Farming Fossil Fuels Our cars are all built to be locked into the hydrocarbon monopoly. Why not open up to a free market of energy generation with solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear like all our other appliances? Carbon Tax and Dividend bipartisan proposal, and Alaska’s Permanent Fund, are the two most “successful” examples so far. We need MORE!

129 points by sizzle 5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago

we consume a credit card worth

Choco31415 5y ago
Per lifetime? Per year? Per kilogram of food? Can you give a bit more context to this comment?
- throwawaysea 5y ago
  The claim is that humans consume the equivalent of a credit card sized amount of plastic a week. See this article from ABC: https://abcnews.go.com/US/humans-consume-equivalent-credit-card-worth-plastic-week/story?id=63687144 https://abcnews.go.com/US/humans-consume-equivalent-credit-c... This "credit card" bit got popularized in news media because it was mentioned in this brochure put out by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) on plastic ingestion: https://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/plastic_ingestion_press_singles.pdf https://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/plastic_ingestion_pres... Their claim in turn comes from this study from the University of Newcastle that was prepared specifically for the WWF (which suggests a potential conflict of interest), according to the list of references in the WWF brochure above. However, I'm not able to find the actual full paper anywhere, and this page last noted that it was being reviewed for publication: https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured/plastic-ingestion-by-people-could-be-equating-to-a-credit-card-a-week/how-much-microplastics-are-we-ingesting-estimation-of-the-mass-of-microplastics-ingested https://www.newcastle.edu.au/newsroom/featured/plastic-inges...
  - andrekandre 5y ago
    from that abc article Since 2000, more plastic has been produced worldwide that all the preceding years combined, and about a third of the plastic ends up in nature, according to the report. is that accurate...? what changed after 2000 to enable this??
    - Cerium 5y ago
      I think that the sentence is saying that in the period between 2000 and present day more plastic has been produced in the period from 2000 to -inf. A similar statement can be made about most human industrial products - cement production has a curve that appears to have more area post 2000 than pre.
    - maxerickson 5y ago
      The human population is much larger and richer.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      My guess is that emergent economies are seeing more disposable income and the adoption of the same consumerist disposable everything habits, supplanting the lifestyle and economies they had previously. It’s especially bad in countries where environmental regulations and enforcement are far behind while consumption has caught up. You’ll often see this in YouTube videos showing garbage trucks just dumping trash (with significant amounts of plastics) straight into rivers, for example.
- jacobwilliamroy 5y ago
  Per week on average according to a study "K. Senathirajah, T. Palanisami, University of Newcastle, How much microplastics are we ingesting? Estimation of the mass of microplastics ingested.Report for WWF Singapore, May 2019" Obviously it varies person to person but if you drink water, breathe air or use table salt, you are still ingesting plastics on a daily basis.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago
  >we consume a credit card worth >Per lifetime? Per year? Per kilogram of food? Can you give a bit more context to this comment? Everyone has a different line of credit. It's not only the few grams of microplastic that might be ingested physically. Rather the consumerism of society which drives demand for the kilotonnes of plastic to begin with. Plus without exersicing a line of credit it would not be possible to consume more than you were worth. When the more sustainable move financially, environmentally, and socially is to work toward making consumption an insignificant fraction of what people are worth.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Regulating and managing consumer chemicals after the fact is no longer sufficient, and in some cases counter-productive. For example, bans on long-chain PFASs (Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) has meant industry has just switched to short-chain PFASs, which are more difficult to filter out of water: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00004 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.0c00004 We need to establish a whitelist of acceptable compounds and force industry to work within that for anything that will shed into the environment, be exposed to foodstuffs, or be worn by humans.

forgotmypw17 5y ago
Until that happens, start with your home. How many pollutants do you voluntarily introduce into your own environment-habitat? (And for every pound you buy, several pounds of byproducts are shed during production.)
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  That's the point, its impossible. We cannot force individual consumers to become chemists, and interrogate every material they come across. In many cases the materials are completely unknown. Is the PFAS used on a Big Mac burger wrapper listed in its ingredients?
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    It's not about "we", it's about "you", and what you choose to do with your life-- right now, not tomorrow or whenever the "consensus" agrees on it, but what you put in your own environment and body of your own volition.
- jacobwilliamroy 5y ago
  Hold on. I'll get started on that as soon as I finish my bachelor's degree in chemistry and build a lab where I can test all the substances that I bring into my house. You have such great ideas. No idea why I haven't done this yet.

Syonyk 5y ago

I expect future generations to harbor a unique and refined fire of hatred for our current plastics obsession. In no particular order: - We extract oil from the ground, transport it thousands of miles to a factory, build precursors, transport those thousands of miles to other factories, build plastic containers, transport those to yet other places for use, fill them, use them for 10 minutes, discard them, and then transport them tens or hundreds of miles to a landfill (can't recycle them, they've got food waste... or you use a bunch of water to clean them for recycling, but see below). This is insane in any reasonable world. - Plastic recycling is... a polite lie, at best, and more realistically oil company {marketing, propaganda} at work. Some plastics, some of the time, are recyclable a few times to build a high cost, crap material (and relatively few people want to pay more for worse material to work with). Most plastics, most of the time, are junk and somewhere between "not worth the cost" and "technically not possible" to recycle. We used to (as western nations) stuff plastics in a container, ship it to China, and count it as recycled as soon as it left the port regardless of the result. Now, with China having decided that this was stupid, we ship it to whoever will take it, count it as recycled, and then wonder why we find a ton of plastics in the atmosphere and oceans. - As we learn more about plastics, most of the stuff that makes them work turns out to be some level of "somewhat toxic to some life" and "really violently toxic to all life." Most of the really nasty stuff simply doesn't degrade in a useful span, so will be with everyone else on the planet, for somewhere between "an awfully long time" and "the remaining span of humans on the planet." But, hey, super convenient for a couple decades! Can't blame us for making it, right? I mean, there was profit involved - and, more than just profit, convenience. Such profit! Much convenience. All plastics! I don't mind, quite as much, "durable plastics" that are intended to last for a long while. But the entire disposable, super soft plastic ecosystem? This is going to be very, very hated in centuries to come. If it's not sterilized all humans by then. :/

kenjackson 5y ago
What's the preferred alternative to disposable plastic?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

chiefalchemist 5y ago

What freightening is that as oil as an energy sound declines so will the price of oil and therefore the price of plastic. Whether you believe in humans being the driving force behind climate change or not, the fact is oil and its byproducts generate pollution. Pollution that's harmful to living things.

suyash 5y ago

This is why I dislike the current version of 3D printing. All it creates is cheap, poor quality plastic objects more and more. We need organic (recyclable) material that can be manipulated, printed and available just like plastic.

tfolbrecht 5y ago
PLA is biodegradable. For the things I print, I usually smooth them with PVA as it's biodegradable. As far as pigments go, I have no clue what's in most commercial stuff I think they're the main caveat for truly biodegradable 3d printing.
- ainiriand 5y ago
  It is biodegradable, that is correct, it just takes around 80 years to do so. Can you justify it?
  - throwaway3699 5y ago
    80 years is not the issue. It's the stuff that will be around forever, and in the oceans, that's trouble.

EGreg 5y ago

The only way to end industries that profit off externalities is by imposing Pigovian Taxes AND redistributing the proceeds back to the people. That last part is important to avoid Yellow Vest protests, while making the industry non-competitive with the alternatives: Non-Biodegradeable Plastics Factory Farming Fossil Fuels Our cars are all built to be locked into the hydrocarbon monopoly. Why not open up to a free market of energy generation with solar, wind, geothermal and nuclear like all our other appliances? Carbon Tax and Dividend bipartisan proposal, and Alaska’s Permanent Fund, are the two most “successful” examples so far. We need MORE!