4 ms·
> (Hey HN reader. Get rid of plastic from your life. Doing future you a favor.) - Stop eating fish and other marine animals, since fishing nets are the largest
by AnonHP 5y ago
> (Hey HN reader. Get rid of plastic from your life. Doing future you a favor.)
- Stop eating fish and other marine animals, since fishing nets are the largest (or one of the largest) sources of plastic waste in the oceans.
- Stop buying food items in plastic bags, especially disposable bags.
- Stop buying beverages in plastic bottles and cups.
- Stop using cosmetics and other items packaged in plastic.
- Stop using credit/debit/other cards that are made of plastic.
- Stop using plastic straws.
- Stop buying all appliances, gadgets and electronic devices that have plastic in them and plastic in their batteries.
- Stop using vehicles that have plastic in them.
- Stop using plastic furniture.
We can't do all of these and live in the modern society, but there are people who practice "zero waste" and consider the plastic coming into their hands (directly and indirectly).
- _spduchamp 5y agoI'd add, "advocate for electoral reform" to the list. It's hard to get systemic change under first-past-the-post.
- kzrdude 5y ago> - Stop using credit/debit/other cards that are made of plastic. How can this have a significant impact in any way? Even one new credit card per year is a very small amount of plastic consumption. :) And funnily enough, in some countries, the alternative (cash) is also plastic.
- kyriakos 5y agoThere are huge sources of waste plastic, credit cards are not one of them. Just shopping at a supermarket once I generate more plastic waste than all my credit cards in a year. This would be the last thing I'd consider to lower the plastic waste issue and ironically its one that has already solved itself by NFC based payments.
- totetsu 5y agovisited the sea of Japan for the first time in a while, and went to a beach not usually used, the other day. The whole place above the high tide live was covered in broken up polystyrene. All through the grass. Impossible to clean up. And if you did it would just keep on floating in. I can stop eating fish. I could even try to support a national political movement to get the Japanese fishing industry to clean up their act.. but what about Korea and China and Russia. We can stop this and live in a modern society, but it requires leadership and cooperation. And now we have politics of be self interest and nationalism.
- andrekandre 5y ago> And now we have politics of be self interest and nationalism. our economic systems that encourage competition above cooperation arent helping the situation... but i dont think anyone has a viable idea how to change that... maybe some broad trade agreements such as through tpp? idk, seems bleak...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- hungryforcodes 5y agoSo stop living basically. Why don't we just make plastics that are safe and dissolve in our bodies? Probably not that hard to do.
- Engineering-MD 5y agoProbably is actually quite hard. Plastics have specific mechanical properties to do their job, some of which go directly against breakdown (don’t want that soft drink to leak out or lose all its co2). Then plastics like dissolvable sutures which we do allow to dissolve in the body still produce by products which can impair healing. So even breakdown products can be harmful. Therefore, I suspect such a thing would be quite tricky.
- hungryforcodes 5y agoInteresting. It might be true -- I don't know enough yet to comment on it. If that is the case, it's kind of unfortunate.