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> to reduce increasing e.g. not to stop it but to make it increase less but still increase? what we need is a total ban on any plastics. I get free plastic ba

> to reduce increasing e.g. not to stop it but to make it increase less but still increase? what we need is a total ban on any plastics. I get free plastic bags doing groceries in Rome, Italy and it's 2021. All of this is going too slow. The whole recycling industry even in Germany, Switzerland and Austria is literal garbage and I hope that instead of talking a big game and making people think we make a difference with 5 different colors of containers we can solve this where it needs to be solved? The price of using plastic needs to be taxed into oblivion so that it is no longer economically feasible to destroy the planet with this shit. edit: unlike most of you I have seen many beaches in South-East Asia when I was really young, ... these places were free of plastics/garbage and full of marine life and animals that thrived along the coastline. These romantic lone islands ... they are garbage dumps now with fresh new garbage floating in every morning. None of you will ever experience them the same way as I had the opportunity to unless you're looking forward to go snorkeling in a garbage dump. My generation is the one that deserves the blame and I hope they get held accountable and has been robbed of the opportunity to see these things that my generation had.

colechristensen 5y ago
This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. The alternatives are often energetically quite a lot worse. Most plastics recycling is nonsense outside of a few developing technologies that actually produce Virgin quality precursors. Plastic should be burned in power plants when it is no longer needed and people shouldn’t litter. When reasonable other polymers should be replaced with PLA which does not have the endocrine disrupting qualities of other things and doesn’t last centuries in the environment (and is just lactic acid which is everywhere in biology). The plastic most people use absolutely does not destroy the environment or end up in the ocean. This is a littering problem mostly in Asian countries, not a materials problem.
- DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
  > This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. my fist job leaving my home country was working as a PADI diving instructor. We set up a small company in Colombo, Sri Lanka called "Adventure Sports Lanka" and hired a local fisherman in Unawatuna just outside Galle. We (dumb Brits) had no idea what we got ourselves into but because a civil war was also raging (another story) this guy who drove our boat supported his whole family with the salary that he made from acting as the "captain" of our diving boat. He took me and my students nearly every day out on his boat and waited patiently for us to get back to the surface and into the boat. Once I took out a student to teach them in an Advanced course about project A.W.A.R.E which is basically about how not to have impact on the environment as a diver, never leave anything behind etc. The student was a German girl who was very keen. When we got back from our dive our captain decided to throw an empty water (plastic) bottle back into the sea. I was incredibly embarrassed because he was on my payroll and I was just finishing a whole day of telling her (who was 100% a supporter of the Green party and much onboard with the whole program in this cursed course) about how well we take care about the environment as PADI divers. Getting back onto the boat I confronted the captain who just shrugged his shoulders and said: "but you know sometimes a bird comes. and they sit on the bottle. they are tired and they sit"- I had no words for him because I realized how far his reality was from mine. In a similar way I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you. peace.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    It’s not going to reach me because you don’t have a point besides a gut feeling and a sense of moral superiority. If you have no words then don’t use any, unlike what you’ve done here. If your opinions were driven by practical reason and concrete goals you could discuss them and even come to an understanding of different opinions based on differing priorities but instead it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position.
    - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
      > it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position I reflected on your comments and it's a shame because the interesting points you made got completely drowned out by you entering the chat with hostility: > This is nonsense, it's impossible for anyone not to immediately become defensive after reading this.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        Too bad, your way of emotion driven arguments about the real problems the world faces is the threat to solving them and I am unapologetic for my hostility towards that attitude. If these problems are going to be solved, they will be by people who can survive and continue to engage with people that think their ideas are stupid. There are a lot of bad ideas out there and if we have to coddle them we’ll end up in exactly the echo chambers we already suffer from. Only willingness to be around people that disagree with you to the point they think you’re crazy and not take your toys and go home because people aren’t nice about your opinions is going to enable actual progress.
        DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
        > your way of emotion driven don't worry I don't feel a thing when being attacked because I assume the person doesn't know any better. Neither am I here to teach grown men something their mother failed at.
  - 5y ago
- acabal 5y ago
  Plastic is necessary? I think civilization survived just fine for millennia without plastic, actually. Plastic may be beneficial for applications like medicine or non-disposable applications like buildings and machinery, and nobody's arguing against that. But to wave away all single-use plastics like sauce packets and drink bottles as necessary is IMHO ignoring very recent (like, just 50 years ago!) history. We can have a bigger imagination than that! Saying plastics are fine, as long as people don't litter, is wishful thinking. People are lazy and they will litter, and even if they don't, people are cheap and irresponsible dumpers will dump trash anywhere to save a buck. Wishful thinking and moral prescriptivism aren't solutions to problems of human behavior. Taxing single-use plastics to oblivion is.
  - parineum 5y ago
    How many people do you suppose the advent and usage of plastic keeps alive today? For reference, in 1950, there were 2.5 billion people alive.
    - acabal 5y ago
      A plastic coke bottle, a plastic burger wrapper, a plastic child's toy, and a plastic shopping bag aren't keeping anyone alive. That's what we're referring to here: single-use junk plastic. In terms of plastic used in the fishing industry, the fishing industry did just fine without plastic nets for again, millennia.
      - colechristensen 5y ago
        And those are all a tiny proportion of the plastics used in the world and banning them would only be an inconvenience, waste of energy, and moral show that would not accomplish the stated goals. People don’t care about what they can’t see, and focusing on that means you do not really care about the problem.
      - parineum 5y ago
        All that plastic is used for economic/efficiency reasons. Those increases in productivity are part of what allows us to support more than triple the population of the world since plastic's inception.
- elihu 5y ago
  Is burning plastic better than just burying it? It seems like burying plastic waste would be a decent way to sequester carbon long-term provided it's done in a way that's not going to cause harmful chemicals to get into the water table. Burning it just turns it back into CO2. You get energy in the process, but is it worth the trouble? Some materials like PVC emit chlorine gas when burned... it seems like that would be a problem, but maybe there's a reasonable solution.
  - colechristensen 5y ago
    Eh, if you think about burning garbage displacing burning fossil fuels, it seems to be more or less a carbon neutral act (in that the decision doesn't increase the amount of carbon burned, just switching from burning fossil fuels to making oil into something useful for a little while before burning it. It has the added benefit of not having the things like radioactive soot that burning coal has. Is burying better than burning? I would bet there's a complex cost-benefit analysis to be done there which might not be all that obvious which one is better.

colechristensen 5y ago

This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. The alternatives are often energetically quite a lot worse. Most plastics recycling is nonsense outside of a few developing technologies that actually produce Virgin quality precursors. Plastic should be burned in power plants when it is no longer needed and people shouldn’t litter. When reasonable other polymers should be replaced with PLA which does not have the endocrine disrupting qualities of other things and doesn’t last centuries in the environment (and is just lactic acid which is everywhere in biology). The plastic most people use absolutely does not destroy the environment or end up in the ocean. This is a littering problem mostly in Asian countries, not a materials problem.

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
> This is nonsense, plastic is necessary and used all over the place mostly hidden from consumer eyes. my fist job leaving my home country was working as a PADI diving instructor. We set up a small company in Colombo, Sri Lanka called "Adventure Sports Lanka" and hired a local fisherman in Unawatuna just outside Galle. We (dumb Brits) had no idea what we got ourselves into but because a civil war was also raging (another story) this guy who drove our boat supported his whole family with the salary that he made from acting as the "captain" of our diving boat. He took me and my students nearly every day out on his boat and waited patiently for us to get back to the surface and into the boat. Once I took out a student to teach them in an Advanced course about project A.W.A.R.E which is basically about how not to have impact on the environment as a diver, never leave anything behind etc. The student was a German girl who was very keen. When we got back from our dive our captain decided to throw an empty water (plastic) bottle back into the sea. I was incredibly embarrassed because he was on my payroll and I was just finishing a whole day of telling her (who was 100% a supporter of the Green party and much onboard with the whole program in this cursed course) about how well we take care about the environment as PADI divers. Getting back onto the boat I confronted the captain who just shrugged his shoulders and said: "but you know sometimes a bird comes. and they sit on the bottle. they are tired and they sit"- I had no words for him because I realized how far his reality was from mine. In a similar way I'm out of ideas because no matter what I say I know it's not going to reach you. peace.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  It’s not going to reach me because you don’t have a point besides a gut feeling and a sense of moral superiority. If you have no words then don’t use any, unlike what you’ve done here. If your opinions were driven by practical reason and concrete goals you could discuss them and even come to an understanding of different opinions based on differing priorities but instead it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position.
  - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
    > it’s like I don’t believe in your god so you can’t fathom how to discuss your position I reflected on your comments and it's a shame because the interesting points you made got completely drowned out by you entering the chat with hostility: > This is nonsense, it's impossible for anyone not to immediately become defensive after reading this.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      Too bad, your way of emotion driven arguments about the real problems the world faces is the threat to solving them and I am unapologetic for my hostility towards that attitude. If these problems are going to be solved, they will be by people who can survive and continue to engage with people that think their ideas are stupid. There are a lot of bad ideas out there and if we have to coddle them we’ll end up in exactly the echo chambers we already suffer from. Only willingness to be around people that disagree with you to the point they think you’re crazy and not take your toys and go home because people aren’t nice about your opinions is going to enable actual progress.
      - DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
        > your way of emotion driven don't worry I don't feel a thing when being attacked because I assume the person doesn't know any better. Neither am I here to teach grown men something their mother failed at.
- 5y ago
acabal 5y ago
Plastic is necessary? I think civilization survived just fine for millennia without plastic, actually. Plastic may be beneficial for applications like medicine or non-disposable applications like buildings and machinery, and nobody's arguing against that. But to wave away all single-use plastics like sauce packets and drink bottles as necessary is IMHO ignoring very recent (like, just 50 years ago!) history. We can have a bigger imagination than that! Saying plastics are fine, as long as people don't litter, is wishful thinking. People are lazy and they will litter, and even if they don't, people are cheap and irresponsible dumpers will dump trash anywhere to save a buck. Wishful thinking and moral prescriptivism aren't solutions to problems of human behavior. Taxing single-use plastics to oblivion is.
- parineum 5y ago
  How many people do you suppose the advent and usage of plastic keeps alive today? For reference, in 1950, there were 2.5 billion people alive.
  - acabal 5y ago
    A plastic coke bottle, a plastic burger wrapper, a plastic child's toy, and a plastic shopping bag aren't keeping anyone alive. That's what we're referring to here: single-use junk plastic. In terms of plastic used in the fishing industry, the fishing industry did just fine without plastic nets for again, millennia.
    - colechristensen 5y ago
      And those are all a tiny proportion of the plastics used in the world and banning them would only be an inconvenience, waste of energy, and moral show that would not accomplish the stated goals. People don’t care about what they can’t see, and focusing on that means you do not really care about the problem.
    - parineum 5y ago
      All that plastic is used for economic/efficiency reasons. Those increases in productivity are part of what allows us to support more than triple the population of the world since plastic's inception.
elihu 5y ago
Is burning plastic better than just burying it? It seems like burying plastic waste would be a decent way to sequester carbon long-term provided it's done in a way that's not going to cause harmful chemicals to get into the water table. Burning it just turns it back into CO2. You get energy in the process, but is it worth the trouble? Some materials like PVC emit chlorine gas when burned... it seems like that would be a problem, but maybe there's a reasonable solution.
- colechristensen 5y ago
  Eh, if you think about burning garbage displacing burning fossil fuels, it seems to be more or less a carbon neutral act (in that the decision doesn't increase the amount of carbon burned, just switching from burning fossil fuels to making oil into something useful for a little while before burning it. It has the added benefit of not having the things like radioactive soot that burning coal has. Is burying better than burning? I would bet there's a complex cost-benefit analysis to be done there which might not be all that obvious which one is better.