21 ms·

Chemicals used in packaging may play role in 100k US deaths a year – study

169 points by Androider 5y ago

boffinism 5y ago
> Phthalates, also found in consumer goods, may contribute to loss of life among older Americans costing US $40-47bn a year Just in case your only concern about deaths is their economic impact...
Robotbeat 5y ago
Wait until you hear how much Benzene (& similar chemicals Toluene and Xylene) are in gasoline. A little off gasing from plastics is tiny compared to exhaust in traffic or fumes while refueling.
_understood_ 5y ago
Relevant John Oliver coverage on the PFAS topic: https://youtu.be/9W74aeuqsiU https://youtu.be/9W74aeuqsiU
sokoloff 5y ago
This makes me wonder how many deaths the widespread use of plastics in packaging has saved over the years from improvements in nutrition (reduced spoilage lowers net food costs and increases food availability) and reductions in food-borne illnesses. The death rate from food-borne illness is pretty low now (with advances in processing, transportation, packaging, phase-change refrigeration, and surveillance of outbreaks). We might be able to have our cake and eat it to with better/different packaging, of course.
- kongolongo 5y ago
  That's a good point! It seems very hard to weigh the cost/benefits of something like this especially when the evidence for the possible health costs are so difficult to collect. Think of all of the possible confounding factors that could result in these health outcomes, the fact that not all plastics are the same (phthalates are not the only compound of concern), and the fact that most probable adverse health outcomes are not acute (we have pretty strong evidence plastic packaging isn't acutely toxic), but would take a long time to develop which further increases the difficulty of forming any type of causal relationship between plastics exposure and health outcomes.
- Nbox9 5y ago
  I wonder to what extend plastic packaging and the ubiquity of low quality food often found inside is contributing to obesity related illness.
- lend000 5y ago
  Similarly: how many deaths can be attributed to pollution from coal plants powering the energy-costly Haber-Bosch process? (Without which the population never could have exceeded 3 billion people.)
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    If it was required to enable billions more to be born, in some sense billions more deaths can eventually be attributed to it.
    - ashtonkem 5y ago
      The actual measure here is “preventable deaths”. Yes, every birth will (so far) result in a death. But there is a big, big difference between dying at 82 because a power plant enabled your birth, and dying at 63 because the emission from the power plant caused you to die from a heart attack or cancer. That 19 years would certainly matter to you and your family! And that’s before we consider what other ill effects you might have suffered because of those emissions.
      - thaumasiotes 5y ago
        You're not measuring "preventable deaths". All deaths are preventable deaths. It's just that it's not worth preventing many deaths. You're talking about life years. (The standard measure is actually QALYs, quality-adjusted life years.)
    - thewakalix 5y ago
      I'd rather be born and die than never exist at all.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        100%; that’s exactly my point (though I admit I sent readers off in the wrong direction on the surface). Billions lived at all and tens of millions died an early death? That’s a pretty great trade if your only choice is to take or pass on that as a sole, binary option.
firethief 5y ago
> The evidence is undeniably clear that limiting exposure to toxic phthalates can help safeguard Americans’ physical and financial wellbeing. It's kind of sad that "this could kill you" is followed by "and think of the hospital bills"
- nerdponx 5y ago
  Meh, even in a socialized/single-payer/public/whatever system, someone at some point has to pay for it. Whether that's you right now, or the taxpayers collectively over time. More sickness means more money spent on trying to heal and care for sick people.
- satellite2 5y ago
  The goal is to onboard the insurance companies as a powerful lobby against the petrochemical one. It's one of the most decried industry (the insurance one) but one of the nicest thing about it is that it almost always have its interests aligned with those of its customers (in group) and thus can act as one of the most powerful stabilizing force in society.
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    I am not sure about that. Widespread ill-health that is managed not cured is funded by raising the rates. They got plenty of actuaries to take a "neutral position" with whatever bad shit is a public health disaster.
    - satellite2 5y ago
      It's easier, cleaner and more profitable to promote risk limiting behaviors and to keep the rate similar, apply partial discounts or delay discounts
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        I think there is a only a few band of middlebrow jobs in the US where employers are cost sensitive. I think most shit jobs won't give you good benefits either way (by various legal mechanism), and most good jobs will buy at at any most price or there will be elite rebellion. Thus, I conclude demand is is mostly (piecewise) inelastic enough that the increased profitability you speak of is thrown into serious doubt.
azinman2 5y ago
Plastics are terrible for there planet and for us as humans. However, they’re cheap, made everywhere and easy to make, can be made into whatever shape you want for an endless set of use cases, and weigh little. At least for humans, it’d be great if we could somehow remove all the chemicals or find magic ones that are totally non-toxic, cheap, and easy to produce. Seems unlikely. We’re also not going to a world filled with wood and metal for all the reasons listed in the first paragraph. Seems like an untenable path unless someone invents something that is way better on the points that matter, or it’s regulated out of existence at great pain. I’m pessimistic about the future of plastic.
ProjectArcturis 5y ago
"may play role" is such a vague phrase, it makes the rest of the sentence meaningless.
- yissp 5y ago
  Exactly, all-cause mortality studies always seem so prone to confounding factors. The abstract of the linked paper doesn't mention if they tried to control for anything. Granted they do acknowledge this - "He cautioned that the biological connection between phthalates and early deaths has not been established, so the study does not prove phthalates were the direct cause of these early deaths."
- satellite2 5y ago
  At least they report science in a scientific way. I find it much worse when papers are sold as the "new definitive knowledge" by some newspaper and then you open the actual article and find a tiny sample size and autors thenselves listing dozens of warnings that could make their paper inconclusive.
- refurb 5y ago
  This seems to be a favorite of media these days. I assume in an effort to get more clicks. In the past, if the media said "The President may have have committed perjury", they'd actually lay out the evidence - President testified X, but documents suggest X is untrue. Today it seems like "may have" is just a cop out for generating smoke where there is no fire. And when someone comes back and says "you actually have no evidence that's true" they say "well, that why we said 'may have'".
  - nosianu 5y ago
    They did "lay out the evidence". They even linked to the study. In comparison, your comment went far off course and left the very concrete topic at hand and article far to the side.
- mahkeiro 5y ago
  Just curious, Did they control for the fact that people with elevated level of phtalates may be consuming more ultra processed food that are just extremely bad without any plastic?
robocat 5y ago
Correlation... no causation was mentioned in abstract. From a nature paper: “Individuals are primarily exposed to HMW phthalates via ingestion of food contaminated through processing or packaging [19], as well as via inhalation in buildings containing PVC flooring or other materials [20,21,22].” — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-021-00305-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-021-00305-9 From abstract of paper reference by The Guardian: “Multivariable models identified increased mortality in relation to high-molecular weight (HMW) phthalate metabolites”.
mleonhard 5y ago
Pthalates are added to many lotions, shampoos, and cosmetics. The FDA allows companies to list phthalate additives as 'fragrance'.
- narrator 5y ago
  This is why you should always use fragrance free personal care products.
  - Zigurd 5y ago
    And do not mistake "unscented" for "fragrance free." The latter actually means what it says. "Unscented" just means the fragrances in it are perceived as neutral
    - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
      Agreed. Masking fragrance is fragrance. source: 30 years in fragrance free household
frazbin 5y ago
Let's not fall all over ourselves defending the manufacture of plastics.. it's a self-justifying dinosaur industry. We can go a lot farther with cellulose and chitin and friends, polymers made in factories aren't particularly special from a chemical structure/function standpoint-- unlike PFAS type stuff, their bioincompatibility is just due to our laziness. The big advantage with plastics is that we're good at making/shaping/customizing them quickly and cheaply. It can very much all be done with biocompatible/harmless chemicals. That it isn't, is an accident of history: the early Chemistry research that produced the synthetic polymers used today made no attempt whatsoever to be biocompatible.. everything since has built on that, and not enough collective fuck has been given to dismantle and rebuild that infrastructure. And just to get out ahead of it-- can we also not blame plastic consumers, who after all are just trying to eat, and probably don't want to poison themselves.
- justshowpost 5y ago
  I actually loved the suggestion for "us"[1] to eat bugs. [1] Quite typical rhetorics for such kind of shilling.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  Plastic food packaging is intentionally not biological; that's what keeps the food from rotting.
  - arcticbull 5y ago
    That's really only part of the story, after all, it only has to keep food from rotting over a period of time and in certain conditions. [edit] We're not trying to set the food in epoxy for all eternity - like this hot dog for instance [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/epoxyhotdog https://www.reddit.com/r/epoxyhotdog
  - rawoke083600 5y ago
    What about "banana peels" once the "packing start to rot" it's a good indication the food is gone/off. Why have packaging that last x10 as long as the food inside ?
DoingIsLearning 5y ago
I remember doing some consulting work for a medical device a couple of years back (embedded software) where they were really really struggling to design flexible tubing that would pass a bio-toxicity test. In practice it seems plastic flexible tubing uses a lot of plasticizers (BPA included) to make them flexible. My point being that, even if you avoid the packaging and the relabeled cosmetic 'perfumes', it still seems that the flexible tubing you would find in most coffee vending machines and water filtration systems (and many other consumer applications that do not require medical regulation) is probably choke-full of plasticizers.
- mikeiz404 5y ago
  Or even some household piping like PVC and PEX though with low exposure: “Phthalate exposure from drinking water via cPVC or PEX is low when compared to other dietary sources. Nonetheless, a shift from cPVC to PEX pipes in households would decrease potential exposure to phthalates.” [1] 1: https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/reference_id/3859182 https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/refere... with the full paper here https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/87425/smith_article.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/87425/smith_art...
  - genewitch 5y ago
    cpvc isn't that common in household pipes, is it? it's for sun exposure, i thought. Heat PEX has the lowest numbers. Are there any pipes that don't leach anything into the water?
    - metiscus 5y ago
      For that to be true you would need chemically inert pipes, I can't really think of a material in common use that meets that specification. Opening the inquiry a bit to the less common materials: Pure Soda Lime Glass Synthetic Quartz Diamond Although these materials are poor choices for many reasons, they would be very unlikely to leach anything into the water more harmful than carbon or silicon atoms.
m0zg 5y ago
US "environmentalism" is utterly baffling when it comes to packaging. Case in point: I can no longer get plastic bags (which, by the way, have been biodegradable for the past 15 years or so), yet much of the stuff one buys in a typical US grocery store is _already_ enclosed in non-biodegradable plastic. Sometimes in 2-3 layers of it. What the fuck is the point of not providing the _biodegradable_ plastic bags? Wouldn't it be better to require from the manufacturers that stuff they supply is not wrapped in three layers of plastic to begin with, instead of inconveniencing the shoppers for no benefit whatsoever?
- f1refly 5y ago
  "biodegradable" just means the plastic is broken down into tiny plastic bits, not that it somehow magically dissolves into harmless liquids. All you get from "biodegradable" is more microplastic.
  - m0zg 5y ago
    Here's an article that summarizes the issue better than I ever could: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/krogers-plastic-bags-ban-environment/ https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/krogers-plasti.... And if that wasn't enough, Kroger also had collection bins for used bags, which I did use routinely. It's performative bullshit. I'm not sure why they're doing it. It certainly doesn't help them sell stuff.
    - f1refly 5y ago
      Sorry for not including this in my original post, but I'm mostly on your side with this one. I despise the EUs ban on small disposable plastic items as well, because all replacements are utter garbage barely able to fulfill their purpose, while not doing anything at all regarding the pure volume of plastics used. Banning the source of 0.001% of all disposed plastic is, in my opinion, completely pointless, when there are much bigger fish to fry. Really, all I wanted to tell you is that biodegradable plastics are a marketing scam you shouldn't fall for, just like plastic "recycling". Besides, I adapted the habit of always carrying two foldable plastic boxes in my car and two folded paper bags in my messenger pouch which I use since +5 years now anyways. The reason they are doing it is fairly obvious and laid out in the article you linked: People don't give a fuck. Its enough to pretend to care about the environment so people can blissfully ignore the real changes and get a fuzzy feeling of having done something. Politically, it's much easier to enforce such a ban on plastic household items than trying to get the industry to change, who will object much more vehemently and with much, much more leverage than the average consumer. Now that I think of it, some months ago I had a discussion about this ban with a women who legitimately thought plastic waste was somehow linked to global warming, as in more plastic waste => more global warming. Anecdotal of course, but it makes me wonder if this misconception (or close ones) are spread in the wider public perception or if this was just an outlier.
justshowpost 5y ago
The guradian was obviously alwayst filled with assholes who were only interessted in scaring the shit out of people.[1][2] [1] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewIceAge_shadow-1.png https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Ne... [2] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2018-09-11053402_shadow.png https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20...
lm28469 5y ago
Most packaging are an abomination, all the junk food you can buy in supermarket (ie 70% of food products) are wrapped in 2, 3 or even more layers of plastic and ink soaked paper, all of it being toxic to some level and environmentally detrimental. Some products don't even need plastic packaging but are wrapped in plastic to avoid ink migration from their outer marketing shell. I'd like to see a globalised effort to standardise packaging, either at national or continental level, imagine a standard set of containers manufactured by state sponsored companies, all of it being 100% recycled or reused, sellers get to chose between a few colors/fonts and a few types of packaging (frozen, liquid, solid, fresh food, &c.).
bob229 5y ago
The guardian is trash. Only a fool reads it

169 points by Androider 5y ago

> Phthalates, also found in consumer goods, may contribute to loss of life among older Americans costing US $40-47bn a year Just in case your only concern about deaths is their economic impact...

Robotbeat 5y ago

Wait until you hear how much Benzene (& similar chemicals Toluene and Xylene) are in gasoline. A little off gasing from plastics is tiny compared to exhaust in traffic or fumes while refueling.

_understood_ 5y ago

Relevant John Oliver coverage on the PFAS topic: https://youtu.be/9W74aeuqsiU https://youtu.be/9W74aeuqsiU

sokoloff 5y ago

This makes me wonder how many deaths the widespread use of plastics in packaging has saved over the years from improvements in nutrition (reduced spoilage lowers net food costs and increases food availability) and reductions in food-borne illnesses. The death rate from food-borne illness is pretty low now (with advances in processing, transportation, packaging, phase-change refrigeration, and surveillance of outbreaks). We might be able to have our cake and eat it to with better/different packaging, of course.

kongolongo 5y ago
That's a good point! It seems very hard to weigh the cost/benefits of something like this especially when the evidence for the possible health costs are so difficult to collect. Think of all of the possible confounding factors that could result in these health outcomes, the fact that not all plastics are the same (phthalates are not the only compound of concern), and the fact that most probable adverse health outcomes are not acute (we have pretty strong evidence plastic packaging isn't acutely toxic), but would take a long time to develop which further increases the difficulty of forming any type of causal relationship between plastics exposure and health outcomes.
Nbox9 5y ago
I wonder to what extend plastic packaging and the ubiquity of low quality food often found inside is contributing to obesity related illness.
lend000 5y ago
Similarly: how many deaths can be attributed to pollution from coal plants powering the energy-costly Haber-Bosch process? (Without which the population never could have exceeded 3 billion people.)
- sokoloff 5y ago
  If it was required to enable billions more to be born, in some sense billions more deaths can eventually be attributed to it.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    The actual measure here is “preventable deaths”. Yes, every birth will (so far) result in a death. But there is a big, big difference between dying at 82 because a power plant enabled your birth, and dying at 63 because the emission from the power plant caused you to die from a heart attack or cancer. That 19 years would certainly matter to you and your family! And that’s before we consider what other ill effects you might have suffered because of those emissions.
    - thaumasiotes 5y ago
      You're not measuring "preventable deaths". All deaths are preventable deaths. It's just that it's not worth preventing many deaths. You're talking about life years. (The standard measure is actually QALYs, quality-adjusted life years.)
  - thewakalix 5y ago
    I'd rather be born and die than never exist at all.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      100%; that’s exactly my point (though I admit I sent readers off in the wrong direction on the surface). Billions lived at all and tens of millions died an early death? That’s a pretty great trade if your only choice is to take or pass on that as a sole, binary option.

firethief 5y ago

> The evidence is undeniably clear that limiting exposure to toxic phthalates can help safeguard Americans’ physical and financial wellbeing. It's kind of sad that "this could kill you" is followed by "and think of the hospital bills"

nerdponx 5y ago
Meh, even in a socialized/single-payer/public/whatever system, someone at some point has to pay for it. Whether that's you right now, or the taxpayers collectively over time. More sickness means more money spent on trying to heal and care for sick people.
satellite2 5y ago
The goal is to onboard the insurance companies as a powerful lobby against the petrochemical one. It's one of the most decried industry (the insurance one) but one of the nicest thing about it is that it almost always have its interests aligned with those of its customers (in group) and thus can act as one of the most powerful stabilizing force in society.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  I am not sure about that. Widespread ill-health that is managed not cured is funded by raising the rates. They got plenty of actuaries to take a "neutral position" with whatever bad shit is a public health disaster.
  - satellite2 5y ago
    It's easier, cleaner and more profitable to promote risk limiting behaviors and to keep the rate similar, apply partial discounts or delay discounts
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      I think there is a only a few band of middlebrow jobs in the US where employers are cost sensitive. I think most shit jobs won't give you good benefits either way (by various legal mechanism), and most good jobs will buy at at any most price or there will be elite rebellion. Thus, I conclude demand is is mostly (piecewise) inelastic enough that the increased profitability you speak of is thrown into serious doubt.

azinman2 5y ago

Plastics are terrible for there planet and for us as humans. However, they’re cheap, made everywhere and easy to make, can be made into whatever shape you want for an endless set of use cases, and weigh little. At least for humans, it’d be great if we could somehow remove all the chemicals or find magic ones that are totally non-toxic, cheap, and easy to produce. Seems unlikely. We’re also not going to a world filled with wood and metal for all the reasons listed in the first paragraph. Seems like an untenable path unless someone invents something that is way better on the points that matter, or it’s regulated out of existence at great pain. I’m pessimistic about the future of plastic.

ProjectArcturis 5y ago

"may play role" is such a vague phrase, it makes the rest of the sentence meaningless.

yissp 5y ago
Exactly, all-cause mortality studies always seem so prone to confounding factors. The abstract of the linked paper doesn't mention if they tried to control for anything. Granted they do acknowledge this - "He cautioned that the biological connection between phthalates and early deaths has not been established, so the study does not prove phthalates were the direct cause of these early deaths."
satellite2 5y ago
At least they report science in a scientific way. I find it much worse when papers are sold as the "new definitive knowledge" by some newspaper and then you open the actual article and find a tiny sample size and autors thenselves listing dozens of warnings that could make their paper inconclusive.
refurb 5y ago
This seems to be a favorite of media these days. I assume in an effort to get more clicks. In the past, if the media said "The President may have have committed perjury", they'd actually lay out the evidence - President testified X, but documents suggest X is untrue. Today it seems like "may have" is just a cop out for generating smoke where there is no fire. And when someone comes back and says "you actually have no evidence that's true" they say "well, that why we said 'may have'".
- nosianu 5y ago
  They did "lay out the evidence". They even linked to the study. In comparison, your comment went far off course and left the very concrete topic at hand and article far to the side.
mahkeiro 5y ago
Just curious, Did they control for the fact that people with elevated level of phtalates may be consuming more ultra processed food that are just extremely bad without any plastic?

robocat 5y ago

Correlation... no causation was mentioned in abstract. From a nature paper: “Individuals are primarily exposed to HMW phthalates via ingestion of food contaminated through processing or packaging [19], as well as via inhalation in buildings containing PVC flooring or other materials [20,21,22].” — https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-021-00305-9 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-021-00305-9 From abstract of paper reference by The Guardian: “Multivariable models identified increased mortality in relation to high-molecular weight (HMW) phthalate metabolites”.

mleonhard 5y ago

Pthalates are added to many lotions, shampoos, and cosmetics. The FDA allows companies to list phthalate additives as 'fragrance'.

narrator 5y ago
This is why you should always use fragrance free personal care products.
- Zigurd 5y ago
  And do not mistake "unscented" for "fragrance free." The latter actually means what it says. "Unscented" just means the fragrances in it are perceived as neutral
  - WarOnPrivacy 5y ago
    Agreed. Masking fragrance is fragrance. source: 30 years in fragrance free household

frazbin 5y ago

Let's not fall all over ourselves defending the manufacture of plastics.. it's a self-justifying dinosaur industry. We can go a lot farther with cellulose and chitin and friends, polymers made in factories aren't particularly special from a chemical structure/function standpoint-- unlike PFAS type stuff, their bioincompatibility is just due to our laziness. The big advantage with plastics is that we're good at making/shaping/customizing them quickly and cheaply. It can very much all be done with biocompatible/harmless chemicals. That it isn't, is an accident of history: the early Chemistry research that produced the synthetic polymers used today made no attempt whatsoever to be biocompatible.. everything since has built on that, and not enough collective fuck has been given to dismantle and rebuild that infrastructure. And just to get out ahead of it-- can we also not blame plastic consumers, who after all are just trying to eat, and probably don't want to poison themselves.

justshowpost 5y ago
I actually loved the suggestion for "us"[1] to eat bugs. [1] Quite typical rhetorics for such kind of shilling.
thaumasiotes 5y ago
Plastic food packaging is intentionally not biological; that's what keeps the food from rotting.
- arcticbull 5y ago
  That's really only part of the story, after all, it only has to keep food from rotting over a period of time and in certain conditions. [edit] We're not trying to set the food in epoxy for all eternity - like this hot dog for instance [1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/epoxyhotdog https://www.reddit.com/r/epoxyhotdog
- rawoke083600 5y ago
  What about "banana peels" once the "packing start to rot" it's a good indication the food is gone/off. Why have packaging that last x10 as long as the food inside ?

DoingIsLearning 5y ago

I remember doing some consulting work for a medical device a couple of years back (embedded software) where they were really really struggling to design flexible tubing that would pass a bio-toxicity test. In practice it seems plastic flexible tubing uses a lot of plasticizers (BPA included) to make them flexible. My point being that, even if you avoid the packaging and the relabeled cosmetic 'perfumes', it still seems that the flexible tubing you would find in most coffee vending machines and water filtration systems (and many other consumer applications that do not require medical regulation) is probably choke-full of plasticizers.

mikeiz404 5y ago
Or even some household piping like PVC and PEX though with low exposure: “Phthalate exposure from drinking water via cPVC or PEX is low when compared to other dietary sources. Nonetheless, a shift from cPVC to PEX pipes in households would decrease potential exposure to phthalates.” [1] 1: https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/reference_id/3859182 https://hero.epa.gov/hero/index.cfm/reference/details/refere... with the full paper here https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/87425/smith_article.pdf?sequence=3&isAllowed=y https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/bitstream/handle/2346/87425/smith_art...
- genewitch 5y ago
  cpvc isn't that common in household pipes, is it? it's for sun exposure, i thought. Heat PEX has the lowest numbers. Are there any pipes that don't leach anything into the water?
  - metiscus 5y ago
    For that to be true you would need chemically inert pipes, I can't really think of a material in common use that meets that specification. Opening the inquiry a bit to the less common materials: Pure Soda Lime Glass Synthetic Quartz Diamond Although these materials are poor choices for many reasons, they would be very unlikely to leach anything into the water more harmful than carbon or silicon atoms.

m0zg 5y ago

US "environmentalism" is utterly baffling when it comes to packaging. Case in point: I can no longer get plastic bags (which, by the way, have been biodegradable for the past 15 years or so), yet much of the stuff one buys in a typical US grocery store is _already_ enclosed in non-biodegradable plastic. Sometimes in 2-3 layers of it. What the fuck is the point of not providing the _biodegradable_ plastic bags? Wouldn't it be better to require from the manufacturers that stuff they supply is not wrapped in three layers of plastic to begin with, instead of inconveniencing the shoppers for no benefit whatsoever?

f1refly 5y ago
"biodegradable" just means the plastic is broken down into tiny plastic bits, not that it somehow magically dissolves into harmless liquids. All you get from "biodegradable" is more microplastic.
- m0zg 5y ago
  Here's an article that summarizes the issue better than I ever could: https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/krogers-plastic-bags-ban-environment/ https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/krogers-plasti.... And if that wasn't enough, Kroger also had collection bins for used bags, which I did use routinely. It's performative bullshit. I'm not sure why they're doing it. It certainly doesn't help them sell stuff.
  - f1refly 5y ago
    Sorry for not including this in my original post, but I'm mostly on your side with this one. I despise the EUs ban on small disposable plastic items as well, because all replacements are utter garbage barely able to fulfill their purpose, while not doing anything at all regarding the pure volume of plastics used. Banning the source of 0.001% of all disposed plastic is, in my opinion, completely pointless, when there are much bigger fish to fry. Really, all I wanted to tell you is that biodegradable plastics are a marketing scam you shouldn't fall for, just like plastic "recycling". Besides, I adapted the habit of always carrying two foldable plastic boxes in my car and two folded paper bags in my messenger pouch which I use since +5 years now anyways. The reason they are doing it is fairly obvious and laid out in the article you linked: People don't give a fuck. Its enough to pretend to care about the environment so people can blissfully ignore the real changes and get a fuzzy feeling of having done something. Politically, it's much easier to enforce such a ban on plastic household items than trying to get the industry to change, who will object much more vehemently and with much, much more leverage than the average consumer. Now that I think of it, some months ago I had a discussion about this ban with a women who legitimately thought plastic waste was somehow linked to global warming, as in more plastic waste => more global warming. Anecdotal of course, but it makes me wonder if this misconception (or close ones) are spread in the wider public perception or if this was just an outlier.

justshowpost 5y ago

The guradian was obviously alwayst filled with assholes who were only interessted in scaring the shit out of people.[1][2] [1] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/NewIceAge_shadow-1.png https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Ne... [2] https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/2018-09-11053402_shadow.png https://realclimatescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/20...

lm28469 5y ago

Most packaging are an abomination, all the junk food you can buy in supermarket (ie 70% of food products) are wrapped in 2, 3 or even more layers of plastic and ink soaked paper, all of it being toxic to some level and environmentally detrimental. Some products don't even need plastic packaging but are wrapped in plastic to avoid ink migration from their outer marketing shell. I'd like to see a globalised effort to standardise packaging, either at national or continental level, imagine a standard set of containers manufactured by state sponsored companies, all of it being 100% recycled or reused, sellers get to chose between a few colors/fonts and a few types of packaging (frozen, liquid, solid, fresh food, &c.).

bob229 5y ago

The guardian is trash. Only a fool reads it